I don’t feel that I have it in me to write today. Or, that is, to write anything artistic or meaningful. Some days you got it and other days you don’t. Most days I can get to a place where I do “have it.” It helps if I don’t start so late. I missed writing yesterday. Quite a hard day yesterday, with the shooting at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. A day — a weekend really — of devastation and heartbreak.
My friend Glenn Bell and his wife Stacia are in town from Seattle. I’ve know Glenn since freshman year of college, 1990. He was on my freshman High Road group. High Road is like Christian outward bound. Our group of eight (I think) students hiked, canoed, and camped all around Northern Wisconsin the summer before our freshman year. Glenn is very outdoorsy, the kind of guy high road is made for. I’m a lot less outdoorsy and yet I have really good memories of that trip. The culmination of the trip was a solo camp by the shores of lake Superior during which we fasted. I didn’t eat for 2.5 days — just drank water. I remember they told us to drink directly from the Lake. They said it was so big it was “self-cleaning.” So that’s what I did. I remember feeling really hungry, then the hunger faded. At the end of the fast they made us this amazing oatmeal with berries in it. Ours was the first, and I think maybe the last, co-ed group that High Road sent out. I was in love with a couple of the girls in our group.
Glenn is from near Philadelphia. He was in the army for four years and is now a fireman in Seattle. Stacia is a school librarian. I used to make a yearly trip to Seattle each summer, and I’d usually stay with them. We had some really good times. But it’s been a while since I’ve out there.
Glenn and I got together yesterday for Ramen in Brooklyn, then walked to the Brooklyn Public Library and had pie. It was one of those days where it spit rain all day, so we didn’t walk long. The pie was from this popular place called Four and Twenty Blackbirds. I had something called “Black Bottom Oat.” I found a recipe for it. I thought it had molasses in it, but it turns out it was black corn syrup. It was quite good. Got to love a Library that serves pie.