Depending on how you're approaching the sign for New Skete will determine your initial success. After a second pass along the road, going in the opposite direction, the sign was quite visible, and the dirt road it pointed to was taken.
As described in a prior posting we followed signs to the gift shop. The gravel crunched under the tires, and it was a decent distance before we saw a small building. The gift shop. All visits to anywhere should take you to a gift shop. The reason for the stop-over was of course cheese cake.
As befitting a monastery setting, the place is isolated. We went into the gift shop and encountered Sister Sharon, who helped us. The place was somewhat dark, and I'm not sure the lights were on. There was enough sunlight coming through the windows to see, however.
Not long after we entered, another couple pulled up and came in, with the same slow, careful pace anyone does when they're coming somewhere for the first time, and the lighting is dim. Now there are four of in this fairly small space that serves as the gift shop. Some Trappist jams and jellies are on the shelf, along with religious greeting cards in a rack. A small counter with a computer register guards the way to the back where there is a large freezer with the cheese cakes.
My friend John hovered near some lemon marmalade, and thinking of his sister's liking of lemon tasting things, selected one. At this point we became aware of the fifth person who has now entered the gift shop, a tall, 40-ish woman, on her own, who started talking to my friend about the marmalade.
There was a TV show a few years ago called 'Ink,' starring Ted Danson as a skirt-chasing newspaper reporter, and Mary Steenburgen, his editor, and real-life wife at the time. The show has the Danson character being once married to the Steenburgen character. Of course she teases him and asks if he's still trying to pick women up by cruising the Self-Help section of book stores. I wondered what marmalade was going to do.
The tall woman was something of a regular in some fashion, because she gave Sister Sharon $10 to give to another Sister, for a reason we didn't overhear.
The lemon marmalade lead to conversation about the nearby Washington County Fair, Saratoga, and "have you been to the new book store in Saratoga Springs yet?"
Turns out we had, the night before, and knew all about it because he had heard that the Northshire bookstore from Manchester, VT (where we've also been) had taken space in a new building on Broadway and was now going to fill the gap left by the departed Borders bookstore that closed a few years ago.
The marmalade woman asked if we had seen the train layout on the second floor of the bookstore. Turns out I had, since I had to go to the bathroom on the second floor, an area basically devoted to children's books.
The train layout was impressive, in the open, with signs that asked that you look with your eyes, and not your hands, The trains weren't running, but they were H-O gauge, like the trains I had as a kid. I had also tried to build layouts, but nothing that matched what I was looking at.
The woman explained that her husband had built the layout. I told her I was impressed, and that I only came to know very late in life that H-O stood for "half of O," another model railroad gauge that was scaled larger than H-O's 1" to 8'.
Years and years of working with model trains had never revealed to me, or my father, that H-O stood for "half-of-O". No one ever mentioned it. It was like the 'PQ' on the lawn mower handle. I only learned about H-O when I had lunch with an IBM'er at a restaurant near work that displayed large gauge model trains along the ledges of the restaurant. The trains caught our mutual interest and we discussed model trains. Steve Miller knew more than I did about what H-O stood for.
The marmalade lady told me she had never heard that H-O stood for "half-of-O." I told her husband might not even know and that I was now telling her in the hope of spreading the knowledge. She thanked me, and carefully backed out of the gift shop, since I had already told be about the fair and the commands that are shouted at teamed oxen to get them to turn left and right. "Gee" means to turn right. After H-O, she was trying to get out of there gracefully.
So, on a Tuesday afternoon, five people descend at the same time on a gift shop in a rural town in upstate New York. If any more people had come in it would have resembled rush hour on the 6 Train.
So, what caused this? The curvature of the earth? A solar black hole? The answer of course is cheese cake.
Bake a great one, and they will come.
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment