lickhaven

… and month, and year, and century…

On the way back from one of our numerous visits to one of our multifarious medical specialists, Linda and I stopped in Towanda, 20 miles north of us, to visit on odd little café we’d been to once before. I remembered it to be, yes, odd – interesting and, in some ways a bit unsettling – but I couldn’t remember exactly why.

We recalled as soon as we walked in the door.

The menu.

It hangs, a good 4 feet high, and runs the full length of the serving counter, which must be at least 25 feet long, posted on a collection of separate blackboards, listing every imaginable edible or drinkable, in no, to me, obvious order, hand-written in semi-cursive with white chalk.

Since this is a modern-era coffee shop, a least a couple of those blackboards catalog all the various insidious combinations of ingredients that can be injected into a serving of coffee.

I hate coffee – the smell, the sight, the thought of its taste. My father drank coffee incessantly, until it gave him a headache, then a bit later he’d take  more coffee to cure the headache. Beside it’s general repugnance, this impressed on me that there is no rhyme or reason to coffee’s use.

So, to start off, Linda and I both ordered hot black tea.

“Would you like that in a cup or a disposable mug?”

I assumed by “cup” he meant something non-disposable, therefore, “A cup, please.”

The sandwiches seemed to be relatively contained on a single blackboard. Linda ordered some form of quesadilla. I ordered whatever was the last line of the menu because it was the most clearly legible. What was it? Ummm… can’t say I remember, but it turned out to be pretty good. 

Once we had wrapped up the order, the counter dude asked, “Will that be for here or to go?”

Think about that a moment: a couple minutes before, he’d asked if we wanted our drinks in porcelain cups, before knowing if we planned to plop our order in a bag. Would he have let us out the door with two of their cups sloshing around in a paper bag?

We were handed a black plastic block with the number 2 on it, to take to a table of our choice. We supposed the order would be delivered thereto. Just as we sat down, two cups of tea were placed on the serving counter and left there. Were they ours? Had anyone else ordered tea? Should we pick them up?

We did, and they were the proper temperature for tea – near boiling. Good. So we began studying the massive paintings on the side wall. They were three framed landscape snow scenes, maybe 5 x 6 feet, sear and overwhelming – tortured bare tree limbs in all three, and an orange fuzzy globe slightly above the middle of the central one, which could be the sun rising, or setting… or it could be Mount Doom.

I immediately christened the whole “Mordor in Winter.” Then I noticed that the three pieces were continuous, possible (probably?) a mural cut into sections and framed. Ummm… why?

The sandwiches, delivered to the table, were both quite good, satisfying. But the real treat of the day was sporadic. A tall, enticing young woman in an almost floor-length dress of possibly Mideastern design floated past from somewhere up front, passing us to the back, then from the back to the front, then back again to the back. She seemed to carry a magic inner light with her, sexual, certainly, but a whole lot more, an outpouring of essence. As far as we could figure, she was a patron visiting the rest room in the rear. But if so, what a lovely journey for such a basic purpose!

You don’t generally get such an array of impressions in a somewhat overpriced coffee shop. The memories we brought back will linger more clearly than they did from our first time. But I think we’ll pass on a third visit.

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The sadness of the gone cows.

Sometime back I wrote an appreciation of the abandoned cattle farm down the road from us that reopened maybe 10 years ago. At the time, I gave something of its former horrific history:

In the 1950s, the then owner was grinding feed for his herd on one of those immense upright machines for chopping corn and grain. You stand near the top and hurl in the raw feed. Somehow, the owner managed to drop himself in. Please, don’t think about it. You’ll have  a much pleasanter night.

The farm was abandoned for the next 60 years, owned by a woman in Florida, presumably his widow, who made no ongoing attempt to sell it. Perhaps she died, perhaps she needed the late income, but she at last sold the place to someone (we’ve heard that it was two partners) who decided to raise cattle, mostly Black Angus, for market. 

First, the barn, in a state of near collapse, was fixed up. Gradually, over the next half decade, trees in the swampy area by the road were cut down, the swamp itself drained and filled, and peculiarly expensive fencing was put up in places that didn’t obviously relate to how the land was being used.

A new small herd of cows would arrive every year –  new mothers and calves (we call all the bovine inhabitants “cows” out of probably misplaced fondness) – be fattened up, then sold along to the next stop on on the road to slaughter.

Huge bales of hay arrived, loads of gravel were moved from one area by the barn to another, a couple horses spent time in a secondary barn for several months, then were replaced by a smaller herd of cows. A path was cut through a small wooded area but never used. Things we constantly being done, but it seemed like the disordered motion of our national government, a massive wind of whim.

Then, a few months ago, the fattening cows were picked up and… no replacements arrived. There’s now a sign that says “acreage for sale.”

All of the farm, some of it?

Meanwhile, where the hell are our cows!? They were our friends.

*   *   *   *

Suggested update of the song  “Simple Gifts,” in honor of our current national administration:

When true complicity is gained,

To bow and to scrape we shall not be ashamed,

To squirm, to squirm shall be our delight,

Till by squirming, squirming we prove our might.