Hell-bent from Paradise: Near Watertown

Fourth in a series, that begins here.

 Hell-bent from Paradise: Near Watertown 

After lunch with Bart, Dominga, and Pocket JD, we - Roz, Uncle Albert, and I - went off Manhattan Island the same way we’d come on it via the George Washington Bridge. From there we took the Thruway around Albany and around Syracuse, then north to Watertown. We spent the night in a B&B on the water in Dexter.

Uncle Albert reclined and slept. And Roz and I listened to track after perfect track of Miles and Monk. We stopped only once at the Oneida Travel Plaza, where with the help of his whirring seat, we folded Uncle Albert at the hips, knees, and ankles and unfolded him again on the pavement, where he stood for a moment as if uncertain he wanted to move. Then, we all limped off to the bathroom and, that taken care of, to sit for a while in different kinds of chairs in a different place. Starbucks, where we drank short squat decaf coffees and ate long, slender crullers.

     Uncle Albert wanted to know what he had missed, and I told him about the music, the Miles and the Monk, how in “Blue in Green” from Kind of Blue, the muted trumpet slips out of the piano thin as a wire, how in “Body and Soul” from Monk’s Dream, every connected note disconnects and every disconnected note connects. Roz, who had been driving, had seen a red-tailed hawk in a dead tree, its gold eye glaring, “the color of Miles’ trumpet,” she said.

     “How could you see its eye?” Uncle Albert asked.

     “With the eye of my imagination,” Roz said. “What else you missed,” she said, “was a pair of bottle-blue Corvettes, “sliding around us nose to tail as if each were in the wake of the other.

     “What did we miss?” she asked then.

Uncle Albert looked at her. He looked at me and shook his head. Then: “I saw in my dream Aesop’s fable of the one-eyed deer that protected itself from hunters by grazing along the edge of the sea with its good eye toward the land: It was killed by a sailor.

          “At least that’s what I imagine I dreamed.”

The B&B in Dexter was very nice, did I say that? It was on the water.

08.11.17