I woke at 3 PM after having a long night and longer morning with my only To Do items being “pick up bulk rares from Nick Coss” and “meet with Mike”. There were a litany of lessor things to do but these were the ones that crossed over to “need”, the former task being necessary for camp and the latter for my probable sanity.
The drive to Nick’s was uneventful once I departed Feasterville as parades had inverted the standards of traffic with a thousand cars on every side street but with the Interstates and major road ways being largely clear. I got to Nick’s a little after 4, we talked about cards, and birthdays, and Scouting and he agreed that he sometimes felt non-Scouts were morally handicapped. I suppose this is arrogance but a less damning way of putting it is that Scouts seem to have a head start in terms of personal moral growth. I talked about the difficulty of finding people willing to do work for something they claim to love and he talked about the quotidian squabbles over pseudo-justice in terms of things like splitting checks, getting people birthday gifts, knowing when to make a loan you’ll never get back, and the logistics of a backyard barbeque.
Mike said he’d be over around 6:30 and I met him at my house then. I was in the kitchen making a raspberry ganache for truffles and we talked punctuated by bouts of silence as he thought and I stirred. I felt the stirring added a kinetic quality to the silence but eventually my arm gave way and we moved outside to stare at a copse of pine trees as the sun set. Again, we exchanged insecurities, semi-thoughts, and shoulder shrugs as islands within the quietude. Later, I was still a spot peckish after eating a sandwich and we sat on my porch and ate strawberries. It was now fully dark when the 4th of July fireworks started at the Dolphin Swim Club. The show seemed nice but only a few crested the trees so there was little to actually look at. Our chat had wound down, so, Mike and I sat there, listening to fireworks.
I wish all days were as productive.