Delay, gratification

7-8 days shipping time. An hour's drive away. Three weeks before the schedules line up. Two hours 'till dark.

These are the delays: lengths of empty time separating me from a self-indulgent Lush purchase, from the nearest drive-in movie theater, from a weekend trip or a starry night.

And then, the gratification: Better than the shelves of right-here-right-now at CVS, better than the movies downloading on a tiny laptop screen, better than a half-enjoyed single nights' trip, better than - well, there's no hurrying sunset. Better than no sight of the stars at all.

It's a virtue, the perserving through the wait; it's a sign of good socialization if you have the self-control to hold off for the bigger payoff. And fundamentally, it's a trade-off. Something better than the best thing you could grab right now, but in exchange, the waiting, the doing-without, the inconvenience, the enduring, the unpleasantness.

It's not just a virtue; it's a sacrifice. Temporary abstention. It's something to teach children like sitting still when your muscles scream to move, eating things that taste bitter, working when you want to stop. You pay for your pleasure with a length of dissatisfaction, you earn your joy with your grim stolidity.

That, at least, is the way I've always understood delayed gratification: an unpleasant wait and eventually a satisfaction just profound enough to make up for all your inconvenience.

But here - where everything feels so far away, where buying or seeing or eating anything takes so long, where there's no such thing as ordering delivery or running to the grocery store - I'm starting to think I had it all backwards.

The delay is the reward. The wait is the gratification. The payoff? Eh. It's not so great. All the fanciest soaps in the world would provide not a whit of existential satisfaction. The movies always disappoint in the end. Vacations are exhausting, the starry nights are cold. There's pleasure in them, but it wouldn't be worth any grim endurance.

But it's more than worth the wait it takes, because the wait is wonderful. I live in an odd world here, its true, as beautiful as it is sparse. Waiting here is as luxurious as it is necessary. In some places, an hour's drive might really be a sacrifice, and an optional one, and my understanding of the value of delay would be unchanged. But here, an hour through Amish countryside, sun shining over uninterrupted hills of green, gray and red barns, peaceful cows, a playlist on shuffle and a van loaded with carless friends - that's the only way to get to a theater, and it's a pleasure, one that would be notably absent from a five-minute drive to a theater in town. And shopping in stores on your way home - a single purchase, immediately in hand? Oh, why bother? There's no frisson of anticipation, no checking of tracking numbers and imagining unsmelled-scents. I'll pay extra for a longer shipping time, thanks; send it to me via Scotland and Nepal, give my box customs stickers from foreign locales, let my package have adventures and tell me how it goes, I'll wait.

A spontaneous vacation would probably be delightful; but right now, when that's impossible, I have endless possibilities and no need to winnow them down. Miles on miles of urban bike trails in Montreal, dozens of bed and breakfasts along the way, right now I can stay at them all; or an Amtrak to the City, a night blowing our unspent change on a show? Why not? Which show? They're all on my list, no possibility excluded.

And then the slightly shifting colors of the sun's slow decline.

I'm rethinking what it means to be patient. Psychologists talk of delayed gratification in the mathematical terms of an economist, the future benefits delayed, but I'm starting to think of hiking: longer paths to taller peaks, the scampering of tiny chipmunks and the call of invisible birds along the way, the sweet thigh-burning of the climb.

And its starting to seem more and more misguided to lock a child in a room with a single marshmallow and tell them they get two if they wait. This may be an effective test to see if they can endure delayed gratification, but it teaches them nothing of how to enjoy it.

Sit them instead in front of an oven, with a box of Chips Ahoy in the trash and a big bowl of cookie dough in their laps and teach them to roll the sweetness into a ball; Marvell had it wrong, there's time enough for this. Lined up on a pan, popped in the oven. Longer than it takes to pop a cookie from a plastic tray, but not unpleasant for the extra time; no squirming, hand-biting, self-denying sacrifice. Just the smell of baking cookies.

I'm learning to inhale.

What to do, what to do.

Ya’ll, we are rural. I mean, rural rural. I mean, you have to drive 20 minutes to get to a bank, and almost an hour to get to a wal-mart. I mean the-town-clerk-also-runs-the-liquor-store rural, I mean the-closest-stoplight-is-two-towns-away rural, I mean “the-best-coffee-for-a-hundred-miles”-is-shit-but-I-still-believe-its-reputation rural. That’s how rural we are.

Accordingly, my wistful wishlist of things I’d like to do includes an awful lot of leaving Springfield Center. I have a lot of conversations that go like this:

“We’re only four hours from Montreal!”
“Uh huh.”
“And only four hours from NYC!”
“Uh huh.”
“And only four hours from Boston! I’ve never been to Boston! Can you believe I’ve never been to Boston?”
“Uh huh.”
“And really, it’s just one hour to Albany, and then three hours by train. Doesn’t that sound wonderful! Let’s go to Montreal!”

[I’m the one with all the exclamation marks, and William is the “uh-huh”er, in case you didn’t figure that one out on your own.]

The problem with this fantasy is that it’s a Saturday morning and William is working. And the season hasn’t really started yet. Once things really pick up, he’ll work Sundays, too, and have one day off per week if he’s lucky - and that day will be Wednesday. A Tuesday night in Canada is not precisely the same thing as a weekend in Canada… and a little harder to justify.

So the question becomes, what is here to do around here - as in, less than four hours away? Fortunately it’s an absolutely beautiful area. We’ve done the closest hike already, a leisurely little trail in the state park just four miles away, but word at the opera is that the Finger Lakes area has some wonderful trails less than an hours’ drive away. We’ll be checking at least one of them out tomorrow.

The roads are also pretty bike-friendly; not a lot of drivers on them, since we’re so incredibly freaking rural. And while there’s lots of rolling hills on the horizon, the roads hug pretty close to the lakes, so they’re quite flat - good for my lazy, out-of-shape butt. We took a bike ride up to the closest gas station the other night (two towns away, I’m not making this stuff up, and they pump your gas FOR you because they haven’t figured out what century it is).  It was probably the most invigorating beer run I’ve ever been on. I think everyone should have to bike a few miles through green hills and beside glistening lakes before buying a six-pack. It would be great for our collective health, both physical and mental.

Speaking of beer, there are quite a few little breweries in the area, including some that make some darn good beer. So on my more-probable, less-than-four-hours-travel-time things-to-do list, I’ve included a lot of brewery tours. 

Hikes, bikes, and beer - honestly, that pretty much exhausts the immediately-surrounding possibilities. Not completely, of course: we went to the local art museum already (maybe too soon - should have saved it for later in the summer) and there are also museums dedicated to sheep and baseball. Pity I’m not into sheep or baseball. We also drove for an hour last night and went to a drive-in: the closest movie theater is 45 minutes away, so might as well go a little further and get two shows for the price of one, right!? So we’ll probably do that again, although dusk comes pretty late and two movies last a long time, resulting in a terrifying drive home at 2 a.m. when the rain is pouring down (it rains like every day, I swear) and the roads are potholed and poorly marked.

And a fifteen-minute drive away, there’s a little bar that also serves Chinese food. (Well, the Chinese food is made at the restaurant next door, but you can order at the bar and they bring it right to you, so… yep, a bar that serves Chinese food). It’s not much of a destination in itself - all wood paneling and locals who look at you funny, since you are immediately obvious as an opera person - but on Thursday nights they have karaoke. And a lot of people who wind up working backstage or in admin at an opera house have an extraordinary amount of vocal training… which makes for a hell of a karaoke show.

There you have it. My nearly-exhaustive list of things to do in this little corner of the world.. Meanwhile, if you need me, me and my bookshelf will be right over there.

Things I did today:

 Applied for two jobs
Bought local kale and honey
Cried for an hour
Recovered
Ate rhubarb coffeecake
Wandered around a used bookstore for an hour before buying a $2 collection of James Woods' essays
Started cold press coffee (life without an electric kettle, my friends!)

 Not in that order.

Empire State of Mind

This blog is getting revived because I appear to have a complete inability to think about things without writing about them. Which meant that during school, my classwork was all I thought about, which was fine. But also means that now that I'm out of school, I stand the very real risk of not thinking about anything at all.

Out of school... I've always thought of that phrase as signifying freedom, something like out of jail, out of prison, led out of slavery, etc. But now I'm thinking that it's more akin to out of sugar... out of eggs... out of money... out of time. Not that I've been set free from something, but rather that I've used it all up...

Well, we'll see. Anyway, out of school for now. Yes. I graduated. On Sunday. I am no longer a Davidson student. And that should be very earth-shattering or, at least, odd, but I've met it with more of a "meh" and a shrug of the shoulders.

Also, a shuddering, hacking cough, because I got sick the weekend of graduation and therefore while everyone else was crying, drinking, and hugging each other, I was drinking ginger ale and trying to stay upright. Struggle city: Population, me.

Actually, my current location is upstate New York. Near Cooperstown, aka the home of the baseball hall of fame. I'm working for a summer opera festival as their new general admin intern, where as far as I can tell I will be juggling an awful lot of mail. I learned several years ago that it's a bad idea to blog about work, so that is officially the last thing I am going to say about my job.

Instead, I'll pretend that this is still a travel blog (and isn't this the sort of thing where, if I pretend it, it's true?) and say that this part of New York is beautiful. We're on a lake - Glimmerglass Lake, which led Alex to rather reasonably ask if I was working in Fairyland - and it's lovely, surrounded by low rolling mountains covered in trees. This is one of those parts of the east coast that help you to imagine what it must have been like when it was all forests, trees from Maine down to Florida and inward towards the Mississippi... back in the Shenandoah Valley, even in the forested mountains you can see the wide expanse of farmland that fills the flatlands. Here, every lawn looks like an island, a meadow hacked out from the pervasive trees, and the overwhelming sense is that if you turned your back for too long everything would melt invisibly back into the trees that surround you in every direction.

There are other lakes, too, a few miles in any direction - at least that's what it seems like. On my to-do list: visit the Fenimore art museum, visit the Finger Lakes, go kayaking, find a road I can jog on without getting hit by a thousand cars.

On my more immediate to-do list: buy coffee that isn't instant.

Toodles.