This Armistice Day weekend (in needlessly curmudgeonly fashion, I refuse to call it anything else) was a thing of great splendor, starting with my blissful recusance from reading even a single teenager's response to Marcus Aurelius.
M and I drove over the Sierra on a beautifully sun-soaked day to spend a weekend with my Slightly Well-known Colleague whose wife is a Pharmaceutical Robber Baroness and who therefore can Afford to Live in Orinda, CA. He's also got two wonderful kids, an albino ferret, a hot tub, and a culinary education, so this promised to be a good thing.
We flew huge kites by the (suddenly petroleum flavored) bay, watched Lucifer try to flush the ferret out from behind furniture, shopped for 17th-century books in Berkeley, and ate one of the best meals I've ever had. SWKC is a fan of a chef called
Thomas Keller, who's apparently a big deal if you know about such things, which I don't. What I do know is that even an imitation of one of the man's dishes is enough to make me weep. Main course: a port-infused fig compote underneath baked lobster tail, underneath
foie gras topped with gray salt. Holy crap.
The only thing that possibly marred the day was the inclusion of a Very Well-known Professor who is, in the way of some successful, confident, gay septuagenarians, narcissistic to the point of comedy. This (due to my lack of empathy and to my shame) didn't bother me at all, but it abashed our hosts, drove the Pharmaceutical Robber Baroness to bed at 8:30 and impelled my wife--who had hopes early on of bonding with the man over their mutual admiration of the early '80s oeuvre of Mark Singer, a.k.a.
Beastmaster--into the hot tub, where she drank champagne nakedly by candlelight and occasionally made the lawn into a slip-n-slide. Eventually I clued in that naked hot tubbery with the wife was preferable to snarky academic infighting and long-remembered sodomy stories, so I joined M in the tub and listened to her rhapsodize about the feeling of grass and slugs under one's bottom.
All in all, though, it was a fantastic weekend, and assures me that, for now, at least, I'm in the right place.
