weekend update

Went to Hanover briefly for a mini-reunion with four friends: one is starting med school classes in June and won't be able to make it up for the full version.

I was surprised by how little anything changes up there. The restaurants lining Main Street are all pretty much the same. My standard breakfast at Dirt Cowboy -- med. iced latte, large orange juice and everything bagel with cream cheese -- was still exactly the same. That is, the bagel was too thin and crispy and didn't have enough cream cheese. Somehow, I found that reassuring; if it had been more appropriately fluffy and had more cream cheese, I would have been almost sad. Their orange juice is also foamy as no other orange juice is. The price went up to $9.99 from $7.58 when I was an undergrad, though: boo inflation!

We went to Sig Nu briefly for '80s. They'd wrapped up 'tails, and none of us wanted to stand around the smoky basement drinking cheap Keystone Light for long. But we did meet a young lady who inherited the little shirt through Theta bequests. She confessed that she'd wondered how anyone was ever little enough to fit into it. Honestly, so am I.

We also went to see my friend Clarissa Dalloway's* father. Mr. Dalloway and his girlfriend are fixing up a little house deep in rural New Hampshire. Clarissa's Jeep bumped up and down the roads quite a bit on the way. We sat outside and ate mixed berry pie from Lou's, which was lovely. Dalloway pere also told us that he's excited about Justice Souter moving nearby. Perhaps they can bond together. We even stopped by the neighborhood dump briefly, as it's apparently the big gathering place for the community. So maybe Justice Souter will show up eventually, and I can stay that I was there first. The group of us also found the abandoned books quickly and clustered around them. Given our tendencies, I wouldn't say that was surprising.

Notably, we found a book called "Basic Microwaving," an authentic vintage 1970s cookbook. Maybe microwaves were harder to operate in those days; I wouldn't know.

Still, our trip to the dump did feel a little bit like we'd landed in a David Brooks column. Or possibly a chapter of Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons. But I like thrusting myself into situations that seem ripe for class conflict, yet are not.

Then we stopped by Canoe Club. Their apple martinis are delicious.




*For purposes of preserving anonymity, I'll call her Clarissa Dalloway. In case you're wondering, she's named for the heroine of a Virginia Woolf novel. While I see some resemblances between the two, this reflects all of five minutes of me drumming my fingers against the keyboard trying to come up with something that fit. She is also very different from Clarissa in plenty of ways, so the name should not be taken too seriously.