Wedding Weekend: 48 Frenzied Hours in the Berkshires

Last weekend my yin and yin-in-law picked me up at work, 4pm sharp, so we could swoop away for a wedding in the Berkshires. Isn't amazing how just saying the word 'Berkshires' makes you feel like a Carnegie or Mellon?  Almost as if the ghosts of the great industrialists are never far away, just waiting to reclaim their estates from the hands of Kripalu and vacationers and newlyweds.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that we connected through Detroit, which I had never been to and, for that matter, have still never been to.  However, I can attest to the fact that they have one hell of a festive people-mover connecting Terminals A and B:

And a tram that provides one with exceptionally picturesque views of the mile-long main terminal:

It was a long walk through the airport, followed by a short flight to Albany, followed by a long drive to Stockbridge, Massachusetts.  By the time we got to the Red Lion Inn, it was well past midnight, and we walked into the lobby only to find this terrifying hobby horse:

Luckily, it didn't look so scary in the morning:

Check out the date. This Inn was established under British rule!

And got breakfast with my yin's cousins in the dining room:

 

I ate malted buttermilk pancakes, which were not only delicious, but also gave me the energy to keep up with Baby Elijah:

 

  Who I hadn't seen since my yin and I visited Boulder in May:

Anyway, after visiting with our Boulder cousins, we went to peruse a gallery with our Atlanta cousins.  There was all kinds of funky glass:

Including Humpty Dumpty sitting on a giant phallus:

And a crystal ball:

That detached one's head from her body:

It was cosmic:

 

So, to keep from getting overly mind-blown, we decided to balance it out with a dose of Norman Rockwell's realism:

But, not wanting to waste the opportunity to enjoy the cool weather, we decided to walk around outside rather than wandering around the museum with the Governor of Massachusetts, who crossed our path in the lobby.

Plus, my yin couldn't wait to blow her own horn:

Anyway, this is Rockwell's studio, which sat in downtown Stockbridge up until the Museum was constructed 30 years ago:

Inside, they have it set up to look like it did in 1960:

 

After speaking to the docent for a while, it was time to go.  We had a bus to catch:

 

On the hour-long ride to Arcamdale, I noticed that my knees were hitting the seats.  (My yin's knees, too, but this isn't that unusual considering the fact that she has giant knees.) Big knees aside, I started to wonder if school buses had gotten smaller since grade school.  Then it occurred to me that the seats had probably been just as narrowly construed even back in elementary.  Me = supergenius.

Luckily, my yin and I sat with our Homestead cousins, which gave me a chance to catch up with my favorite ranting madman, whom I hadn't seen in far too long:

the ranting madman and his cousin, my yin-in-law

Fortunately, the ranting madman's wife was there to balance him out, and she told us before the night was through that we were having Thanksgiving at her house, for which I had been secretly hoping for months now.  Why?  

Remember this amazing cake from this amazing day? That's why.

Anyway, this wedding was at a gigantic barn from 1799:

my yin and yin-in-law

And everyone was looking pretty sharp:

us and the Atlanta cousins

Especially Morris, who jammed out to Florence and the Machine with me:

"The dog days are over..."

My yin and I ended up seated with a bunch of Australians, who had met the bride and groom during their time abroad.  It was quite a boisterous table, and our spirits weren't dampened in the least when the skies let loose with a tremendous cloud burst.  Water was pouring down the grass embankment between the barn and the dining tent so we all counted to "1... 2... 3..." and lifted the 20-foot long four feet to the west. The festivities resumed, speeches were given, and we caught the 9:15 bus back to Sotckbridge, where we closed down the downstairs tavern with the rest of the wedding party.

The next morning my yin and I were up early and took a walk to the edge of town so I could get a better look at this skinny church I had seen on the way in.  According to the plaque, this is the spot where some minister started preaching to the town's citizens way back in 1733:

After our morning constitutional, we headed back to the father of the groom's house, where we were all gathering for a delicious brunch consisting of lox and bagels and babies:

Elijah and Casey

Apparently one of the key parts of child-rearing nowadays is called "floor time," which, as far as I can tell, mainly consists of laying an infant on the floor and staring at it until, inspired by nothing more than the expectant spectacle of adults gawking like turnip-truck yokels, the baby manages to flip itself from back to belly.

What do they have to look forward to once they accomplish this inane task?

Wild-eyed men in pink shirts playing patty-cake.

And impromptu photo shoots with their great grandmother:

Eventually we had to say our goodbyes, stopping on the way out of town to stroll the main street of Great Barrington, birthplace of W.E.B. DuBois and home to disco mirror Buddhas:

 

By the time we made it back to Albany airport, we were starting wind down from such an amazing weekend.  We had a few minutes, and I was delighted to discover the Albany Airport has a meditation room for weary travelers:

 

By the time we passed through Detroit again, retrieved our car from economy parking, and dropped of my yin-in-law, it was well after midnight.  We got home and went to bed, thankful for all we had seen in the previous 48 hours.

Re-membered: 25 September 2010

fragment #1

Wake and make coffee, journal, probably read some – what happens on these forgettable mornings doomed to anonymity? One task flowing into the next without even the structure of routinization to etch its meaning into memory. Maybe this lack of memory is the meaning. Perhaps I've been reading too much of alienation in Shibuya, Shinjuku and Japan. Tiny unpronounceable fragments signifying an immense landscape - as much psychic as geographic - of which I've never known.

A former lover, a girl with a grandmother in Kyoto, may have told me of these places, but if so I've long since forgotten.

What I do remember is calling there one December. She had left index cards with phonemes written on them (black or blue, I do not know which) so I could call grandmother's home and ask to speak with her. I do not remember the conversation, but one year later it no longer mattered.

There is no greater distance than the width of a bed between lovers, one of whom is already gone.

This is not the girl with a grandmother in Kyoto.

fragment #2

We left at 8pm, dropped leftovers at home, and went to the inlet in search of a drum circle. I didn't want to be there, but went anyway, remembering how my earlier agoraphobia had proven fatuous and empty. We found no one that night but fishermen and geriatrics, burnouts and immigrants, a strong breeze and the outgoing current rushing under the bridge. There was a deceitful full moon behind the clouds, promising to reveal itself.

We drove home moonless and silent.

This is not the drum circle in question.

fragment #3

The final thing about that night in September, just shy of two years ago, was the strange tongue-tied sensation while talking to J___ and G_____. I couldn't quite express myself, or perhaps the words got bruised as they traveled through the air, contaminated by all the things that went unsaid before. I envy, sometimes, the (apparent) ability of others to say what they mean, or at least not notice or care how their words are destined to fall short of true communion.

I got a flash of this in bed yesterday morning, when I looked at her face after making love.

In that moment I gained an understanding into the nature of images. Her face, only inches away, was nonetheless separated by an unbridgeable chasm. The eye is forever flawed, forever searching for what is outside of itself. It relies upon the hands, upon the lips, upon the touch to bring it closer to the things it holds most dear – but it can never be one with them.

So long as we are dependent upon images, we are locked in a world of infinite superficiality, a world without depth, where every passing gaze promises to bring us close, but only pushes us further apart.

This is not the image in question.

All fragments originally written on 25 September 2010 and taken from:

The journal that spanned from summer to fall.

repost: poem recovered from Big Sur - 1 year, 10 weeks and counting...

big

Sur

highway 

One

cassette tape

Nostalgia

sunny day Melancholy

fog bank Bankruptcy:

The priest dances for Rain.

A beauty so perfect

it saddens him to know

it will remain when He is gone.

Once in a blue moon...

Two nights ago my yin and I, accompanied by a close friend, went to the beach at sundown to see the full moon come up over the ocean.  This is something we try to do as often as possible, but it generally works best when the full moon coincides with the weekend, one of those pesky compromises of the current life we're living. I remember years past when weekdays were differentiated from weekends by nothing more or less significant than an "s," and the idea of staying up an extra hour or two on a Tuesday night simply meant sleeping a little later, or lingering in bed a little longer while the coffee gurgled its way into the pot.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that this past Friday also happened to be a blue moon. According to librarians familiar with the Farmer's Almanac, a "blue moon" occurs when a season contains four full lunar cycles instead of the usual three. Popular wisdom, however, has conflated this original designation with a new, less infrequent event - two full moons in a single month.

 As an aside, I find it interesting that the blue moon has managed to sneak its way out of the Farmer's Almanac and into our broader society. This has been a great boon to brewers:

and country music starts alike:

But this is also beside the point.

The point is that something has always slightly bothered me about the establishment of the blue moon as a sort of post-industrial, new age, consumer brand. I've always found this concern difficult to articulate, but it is easily illustrated by what happened this past Friday.

My yin, our friend, and I were sitting on a bench, chatting, watching, waiting for the moon to break its way through the hauntingly beautiful haze of dusk.  It happened slowly, not at the point where sky meets water, but about 18° above the horizon. Not long after it emerged, a woman came running up the boardwalk that leads to the beach  with a cell phone in hand.  She stopped, snapped a picture, and then retreated back to her vehicle, which she had left running by the roadside. She was there, perhaps, 15 seconds.

[lapse]

My yin and I returned to the beach yesterday, taking advantage of the clear weather, long weekend, and free early morning parking. As I sat journaling, it finally occurred to me how to articulate what I witnessed the night before:

"... It was odd because there were other people there as well, and I think to myself how curious it is that people make such a to-do out of two full moons in a Julian month, almost as it celebrating the capture of the cyclical, atemporal, natural cycle of the moon by the regimented, prescribed, artificial confines of our modern calendar, which is itself a futile, almost obscene, attempt to circumscribe time and nature into something we can control and measure...

Where did this come from, this victory of man's time of nature's? Is it rooted in obedience to the masculine sun over the ecstatic worship of the feminine moon? If so, what does this yearning for people to go to the beach, capture an image, then leave represent?  A repressed urge to return to the feminine? A subconscious urge for a time of ebb and flow that mirrors the menstrual and eschews the rigid, phallic time of Caesar?"

My yin, the beach and moonrise...

rabbit rabbit