Rosendale Ramblings By Sari Botton

Last night I bumped into my physical therapist at the Red Brick Tavern. He was there with his wife, kids and some friends. As the hostess was seating me at a table near theirs, a concerned expression came over his face.

“Is…Brian meeting you?” he asked. “No,” I said, “I’m here by myself.” His concern grew. “Oh…” Just as it seemed he was about to invite me to join them, I interruped. “It’s okay – I’ve got a book.” He looked really uncomfortable. “No, really,” I assured him. “This is fine. I do this all the time.”

My physical therapist is a really nice guy. He is a born and bred Rosendalian, and clearly not familiar with the New Yorker phenomenon – celebrated tradition, really – of dining alone. Like many who’ve never lived in the city, he still equates a table for one with loneliness. For people like me, it’s nothing like that.

Social as I may seem, I am also part New Yorker, which means part loner. I lived alone in Manhattan for more than a dozen years, much of that time also working alone, and, quite frequently, dining alone. Although I enjoy eating with family and friends – and my husband, of course – I also love going out by myself for a meal or a coffee or a glass of wine.

I can often be found at Market Market by myself at lunch time. Nobody bats an eyelash, but, really, that place is more of an outpost of Brooklyn. Half the other people there are eating by themselves too, while reading a book or the Bluestone Press or the Brooklyn Rail, or writing on their laptops. We all nod to each other, and maybe schmooze a little, but, transplanted New Yorkers all, we know not to take the schmoozing too far. Each of us knows the other is enjoying that unique city phenomenon of being alone among other people. It’s nice to be able to get a dose of that up here. (We all also seem versant in certain urban body-language clues that indicate those occasions when it’s appropriate to ask, “May I join you?”)

There was a time when I was uninitiated in this. I remember going out to dinner with my Manhattanite grandparents as a teenager. The first time I noticed a woman eating by herself, with only a notebook and pen for company, I felt sorry for her. “That poor woman,” I said. “Some people like that,” my grandfather corrected me. “People do that in the city.” The next time I witnessed it, my attitude was different. I specifically recall being in some fish restaurant on Third Avenue in the 60s. A casually chic forty-ish woman pored over The New York Times between bites of trout and sips of Chardonnay. To me, she epitomized the cosmopolitan, independent kind of woman I wanted to be when I grew up.

A word of advice to those who are new to this: Reading material is crucial. It doesn’t really matter what it is. While interesting books and such obviously make better dining companions, printed matter also simply serves as a prop. Even the local pennysaver will do. It helps you politely say, “I’m here by myself because I choose to be. I’m not lonely; I’m busy – busy enjoying my own company.”

Snake! from Sari Botton on Vimeo.

Compared to everyone else in my family – and I don’t think any of my relatives will disagree with this or take offense – I tend to think of myself as a slightly daring nature girl. I hike! I camp! I eat cherry tomatoes out of the garden without washing them first!

But every now and then here in my little pastoral realm I encounter something that exposes my urban/suburban underpinnings – my inner Zsa-Zsa-on-Green-Acres, if you will – in a harsh light. Yesterday, it was this snake. I was headed out for a walk, and there it was, approaching the back stoop. It seemed to be angling for a little puddle just ahead of it.

I stopped dead in my tracks and proceeded to hyperventilate. I didn’t yet know it was a harmless garter snake; people on Facebook apprised me of that after I posted a picture of it. But knowing it wasn’t inclined to bite me wouldn’t have allayed my fears completely, anyway. There’s something about that reptilian skin and snakes’ slithering nature that just freaks me out, undoes me completely. This was my Fear Factor moment.

I called Brian and frantically asked him what to do. He said to scare it away by making some noise with a rake, or some rocks. I didn’t have to do that, though. By the time we hung up, the thing started turning around and moving in the other direction. It was pretty cool to watch. I caught most of it on the video above.

I guess it was afraid of me, too.

Strangest thing the other morning: as I as headed out for a walk, I noticed this very cute Honda Insight parked near the Bywater Bistro. On my return from the walk, the first thing I saw was a state trouper’s car in the middle of the road with its lights flashing. Then, I caught sight of that very same Honda all smashed up, turned out at an angle, and accordioned into a telephone pole. Just up ahead was a Mustang with a busted up fender and other parts, and fluids leaking everywhere.

A bunch of people were gathered around, wondering aloud how one hits a parked car like that, a small one, no less. The owner looked shell-shocked. He explained that it was from the original line of Insights, and that there were only 500 made in that color. He’d put 200,000 miles on it, and got 60 miles to the gallon. So, he was pretty bummed. Not to mention that, you know, now he was stranded.

Incidentally, the staff of the rt. 32 bridge rehab project was out there gawking, too. I asked them, “So, when’s the bridge going to be done?” Answer: by the end of October. I thought it would be sooner, considering how close they seem to completion. I’m re-calibrating my Internal Patience Generator.

I feared it was an anesthesia flash back. I wandered into Willow Kiln Park – behind the Rosendale Theater and the Big Cheese and Soiled Doves – and, I swear, a log on the ground started talking to me. It welcomed me, and then it started relating the history of Rosendale, and I kept looking around to see if the voice was coming from somewhere else. A few minutes in, I am pretty sure it asked me, “Are you still there?”

Okay, I made that up – the part about it being an anesthesia flash-back. Not the part about the talking log, though. That really happened. I had actually gone there to hear the log talk. I knew that Mark Bernard had put it there – it’s his cool “The Tree Whispers Rosendale” interactive art installation. I knew because he came to borrow a shovel the other day to move some greenery around log.

Ah, the magic of modern technology. It’s got a whole audio system inside that works on motion sensor technology, so it starts talking when it senses you’re near. Every few mintutes it (in Mark’s voice) asks you to move around so it can keep going. No, it’s not being needy.

So, if you find yourself in Willow Kiln Park, and a tree starts going on about the Lenape Indians who lived here, and the canals and the cement business, no need to assume you’re losing it.

I went for a little constitutional on the rail trail the other day and came across some people in a golf cart. I was all ready to wag my finger and say, “Hey! No motorized vehicles here!” But it was these folks, who are actually working on repairing and restoring the rail trail: Carl Hornbeck, Town of Rosendale Highway Superintendent; Allan Bowdery, Chair of Conservation, Wallkill Valley Land Trust; and Amy R. Poux, Director of Development, Wallkill Valley Land Trust.

They were surveying the path to see what parts need work. In concert with the Open Space Institute, they’re getting started on that plan I mentioned to rehab the trail and fix the trestle so it goes all the way across route 213 to the Kingston side. So, this is really happening. Very exciting.

Well, two of Mark Brandhofer’s hand-crafted tiki creations are posted in front of the Bywater Bistro right now – I spotted them on my daily anti blood-clot walk – and that can only mean one thing: that possible luau he mentioned to me is a go.

I checked it out on the Bywater site, and yes, it’s so. From 5 pm on, there will be Hawaiian food, maitais and hula hooping. Sounds like a fun end-of-summer party. If I hadn’t just had a few major organs removed by a robot, I’d go…