Tag: phish

Summer Days and Summer Nights

I won’t lie. I miss the hell out of Mrs P.

Luckily I have a lot of good friends, ones that I can hang with in New York, and ones I can reach by phone around the world – and my family makes for pretty good company, too. So it hasn’t been terrible. But without my girl, things aren’t complete. We’re supposed to be together – we’ve got a plan!

Relax, I tell myself. The plan is still in place. It just feels like a giant interruption.

Meanwhile, I have been having quite a lot of fun.

There was the giant Phish festival – SuperBall IX – in Watkins Glen, NY, which is practically a home town for me, with Seneca Lake and Geneva – the birthplace of my grandfather – right there. I’ve been going to Seneca Lake since I was three months old, but I never went to a three-day rock festival at the race track and camped out on the grounds – over Fourth of July weekend. That was awesome.

superball stage
The stage at SuperBall IX
superball art
Installation art at the festival
superball grounds
View of the SuperBall grounds from atop the Ferris Wheel

I even managed to get up to the old lake house and have a swim!

superball at the lake
On the dock! (Fingerprinted…)

My campgrounds for the weekend were comfortable and pleasant:

superball campground
Roughing it (not)

***

Also, I went to Nantucket with the GRP – my old reggae band from college. What a fantastic weekend that was!

My friends took a great shot of me walking on a beautiful beach:

Rindy on a Nantucket beach
I like long walks on the beach … lol

With friends in Maryland

I spent last weekend down in Bethesda with longtime friends who have just had a baby. I’m not in the business of posting pictures of other people’s kids online, so suffice to say that is one cute baby girl. Her name is Genevieve, a wonderfully classic name, and she has a perfect disposition: calm, thoughtful, inquisitive, friendly. Holding her was enough to make me want to have my own kids… someday. Without getting too personal here, after six years of blissful young marriage between Mrs P and I, the elders are starting to get restless, and ask questions…

But another day for that. For now, the main purpose of my visit was to see Phish at Merriweather:

At the Phish show
Behold, the Kingdom

Chance Encounters

The week before, a strange thing happened to me on the New York sidewalks. I saw a guy I knew at Georgetown who I had not seen in nearly 10 years, since we shared one class together: early 20th-century Russian literature. It was one of my favorite classes, one of the few I can even remember (I elected many poor classes); we read short stories by Chekhov and Babel, among others.

This guy, whose name escapes me, was in the class. There were only six or seven of us, though I don’t remember the others. The teacher was an older Ukrainian woman who had immigrated in the 1980s. So I remember we used to have good discussions there, and this guy was a great contributor, but we ran in different circles. Like I said, I don’t even remember his name.

I’m walking to work one morning and look up and this guy is about to jog right by me. He’s jogging along Fifth Avenue while the rest of the crowd is dressed for work and hustling by. I recognized him instantly, then looked away – then looked back. He saw me and knew me as well. We each said something like, “Hey man…”, “Hey buddy…” and hesitating only slightly, we both decided to keep on moving. We smiled and waved in the passing streams of traffic.

A few seconds later I looked back. He turned around. We both waved again, then turned, and it was over.

Good to see you, old friend.