Last Saturday night was one of the most magical nights ever at the Cottage. Six friends from the train community came over for dinner and it entirely worked. The food was good, the menu seemed to please everyone, the wine pairings were appreciated, the dinner setting seemed to please, the conversation flowed. People arrived around 7 PM and left around 1:15 AM and it felt as if no time had passed.
We worked our way from cheese and crackers, to radishes with butter and kosher salt to a potato and leek soup, followed by a salad with beets and candied pecans, salmon filets with a mustard mayonnaise sauce, finished by a chocolate ganache meringue cake. We laughed and rejoiced in each other’s company.
Early on, it was determined we would avoid politics which is a choice that only limits and does not eliminate the conversation. How could it be otherwise? So much is going on that the tumult cannot be completely ignored but it can be limited.
One person reminded us that Franklin D. Roosevelt, during the war years, had a weekly cocktail party for Cabinet members and aides and the one thing they could NOT talk about was the war. Anything but the war. Their children, their gardens, their hobbies, fly-fishing but not the war. The President said something like: we need to have lives.
Saturday night, for the most part, we chose to have lives. We talked of upcoming plans, recent vacations, upcoming things that would bring us joy. But not politics. Much. Just a little.
The week just past had been tumultuous. Healthcare is in shambles and Trump’s order to stop paying subsidies will be challenged in courts by some states, including New York. Some New York congressmen, Republicans, are suddenly calling for bi-partisan action to fix the ACA.
The president is not going to certify the Iran agreement and is throwing it to Congress to fix it while the Secretary of State seems to contradict the president on the Sunday morning talk shows. Our allies in Europe are scratching their heads about us and how to absorb that a far-right party seems to be coming to power in Austria.
Reading the papers today, everyone seemed to have advice on how to mentally escape the chaos. Watch and read Harry Potter again. Rom-coms are just the thing. Murder mysteries are quite a diversion.
And we do need diversion. My mind hurts more than it doesn’t. Every morning I get up, read the NY Times, the Washington Post and WSJ and find myself going what the…
Sometimes I avoid the headlines until later in the day, particularly if I have things to do.
If I don’t, I fear a kind of madness.
This epistle was started last Sunday evening. Monday morning found me wretchedly ill; the vague sense I wasn’t well the week before suddenly became the reality. Monday and Tuesday were devoted to sleep and recuperation, Wednesday my radio show. It had been my intention to go to the city on Wednesday for dinner with a friend and I could not quite muster the energy, fearful of pushing too far, too fast.
And now I am home from a meeting, curled up in the cottage, finishing a letter started nearly a week ago.
The madness goes on and I do my best to maintain my balance. My friend Lynn speaks frequently to me of her difficulty of maintaining balance these days; she feels assaulted on a daily basis.
Some Facebook friends post things that cause me to wonder why they are my Facebook friends as we are so politically divergent? One California friend posted something and asked for comments. All I could say was: ah, I don’t know what to say.
Harvey Weinstein, producer extraordinaire and, allegedly, serial sexual predator, has fallen from grace as woman after woman after woman has come forward to accuse him of sexual misconduct. He has been ejected from The Academy of Motion Pictures Sciences; the Producer’s Guild is working on doing the same. The TV Academy is considering it. Organizations are making moves to strip him of honors.
Is this a turning point for Hollywood? Perhaps. Certainly, it is putting out notice that the game is changing.
Mr. Trump is involved in another brou ha ha with Gold Star families. John Kelly has Trump’s back, which I find interesting.
The common wisdom seems to be that our president can’t help himself from wounding himself and, from my vantage point, it seems plausible.
Without invoking his name, both George W. and Obama have delivered rebukes to the president. Wowza! W and Clinton have found themselves friendly. Will the same happen with W and Obama? Time will tell.
Time to say good-bye for this missive but not before circling back to last Saturday’s dinner which may well have been the best the cottage has ever seen.
Thank you, Robert and Tanya, James and Susan, Maria and Dairo. You have made your mark on the history of a special place.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From Claverack 10 26 2017 Disgusted by them all…
October 26, 2017As I begin writing this letter, I am in New York City, at Birch, a coffee house just east of 5th Avenue on 27th, waiting for a friend and a colleague. There are some things he wants to chat over with me and then I will go to dinner with my great good friend, Nick Stuart and his friend, Jodd. Post dinner, I will head back to the cottage for a bunch of meetings and things to do tomorrow.
Walking from Penn Station to Birch, I realized how my relationship with New York City has changed over the last eighteen years. I’ve gone from “bright lights, big city” to being delighted not to be here that often; I have grown accustomed to the quiet of the country. Penn Station is an assault on the system after the tiny, bucolic station in Hudson and walking through the streets of the city, I feel more a sense of pressure, for want of another word, since I came here in 1999 to begin to live, then splitting my time between Los Angeles and New York.
For the last two and a half years, I have been mostly at the cottage and have slipped into the role and attitude of someone who lives in the country. On weekends, when the county fills with out of towners, I cringe when horns are blasted if someone doesn’t move quickly enough.
I relish waking in the morning to look out over the creek and to look out at my land and see no one.
One needs that kind of quiet and solitude these days to absorb the world news:
o A California judge won’t force Obamacare payments from the Federal government.
o Hillary and the Democrats paid for the dossier on Trump.
o The NAACP is warning people of color not to fly American Airlines.
o Whatever is going on with tax reform remains incomprehensible to me.
o The brother of the Las Vegas shooter was picked up on child porn charges.
o The president and a Gold Star widow can’t quit feuding.
o China’s Xi Jinping probably is with us indefinitely and we’ll see if that’s a good thing or a bad thing AND he’s now as important as Mao and Deng!!!!
o The ease of travel with a US passport has plummeted since Trump has become president.
o The US and North Korea are continuing saber rattling. North Korea is talking hydrogen bomb and the US military action.
o Amazon is going to start delivering packages into our homes. [Ah, not mine. Yet.]
o President George H.W. Bush has been accused by an actress of groping her in 2014. And has apologized.
o A Houston resident, originally from Mexico, died of flesh eating bacteria after working on homes damaged in Harvey. He was the third Houston case; the others were non-fatal.
o The Trump campaign, via a data analytics firm, contacted Wikileaks to access emails from Clinton’s server to make them into a searchable database for the campaign.
Is it any wonder that yesterday when I walked along the wooded lane that is Patroon Street, I thought about none of these things?
I thought of other things, the changing of the leaves, friends, personal things, upcoming trips, hopeful things.
My amazement at the world is unbridled. Today, I commented to a friend: I think we are living in the second Gilded Age and my comfort comes from remembering that did not last and was reined in, eventually.
Each day, I get up and read the papers and find my eyes go wide while I say: lions and tigers and bears! Oh, my…
The Toronto Star blazoned out that Trump broke his own record this week – of lies. They counted 57 whoppers.
Call me disgusted by them all.
Tags:Birch Coffee, Claverack, Donald Trump, George H W Bush, Gilded Age, Gold Star Widow, NAACP, Obamacare, Penn Station
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