Last weekend in Dunewood, Fire Island, C, who I never did see so I have come to think of her as Goldilocks, slept in G’s bed; G doing her first shift as hostess at Le Dock in Fair Harbor, FI, the next town over, the place with the grocery that sells a boxlet of dryish blueberries for the equivalent of a quarter apiece, G (our host’s daughter) not getting home until sixish in the morning because she too had slept over at a friend’s, Goldilocks gone in the morning before M and I get ourselves together after having tied one on (What I say to M as we make our way to FH from D when we arrived by ferry on the bay side where the waters are receding, “Let’s tide one on!”); Goldilocks is off to the wedding, what I first hear as her uncle getting married that I later learn is less wrong than incomplete, the reason she couldn’t sleep in her own bed the previous night because her uncle’s family and friends had taken up residence there for the weekend, but then, much later, when we are sunbathing on the ocean side, I learn that it’s G’s (Goldilocks’) uncles who are getting married. Her uncles taking advangage of the Great Cuomo Summer Triumph, getting gay married.
It is M and my anniversary that day (August 20), twenty-two years to the day before the uncles’ nuptials so we pick ourselves up from under our umbrella and sand-laced reading materials, sun block and go to check it out because G (our host’s daughter) says they are getting married in a ceremony right on the beach, only a short walk away, and sure enough, we see a chuppah, a traditional Jewish marriage canopy made of wooden sticks, topped with leafy branches on each end, and gauzy curtain whipped up in the late afternoon ocean breeze. Six green straight-back chairs are arranged facing the chuppah; there is a sign nearby but no people, but M says it looks like it is one of the ubiquitous “Don’t Walk on the Dunes” signs, not one that announces that this is the place of Fred and Jim’s wedding.
We don’t wait to see if the grooms are coming. Instead we walk back to our tidy little encampment for more sunbathing before a quick dip in the bay and then dinner.
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Okay, the US government is cutting and will cut programs. Get a load of this. It would have Richard M. Nixon turning in his grave (if you wonder why, read this piece by Kurt Anderson) http://nyti.ms/ocm64D, but there is a Web site started this year with taxpayer money, courtesy of the of the Department of Agriculture, that shows that 10 percent of country is now a food desert http://1.usa.gov/kJcR1U. What’s that? Well, any census area where at least 20 percent of inhabitants are below the poverty line and 33 percent live more than a mile from a supermarket, The Economist, July 9, 2011, http://econ.st/oaduow.
And guess what, as The Economist report points out, Americans are making “good food” progress, according to the site, with the number of people living in a food desert declining to what seems a reasonable 13.5 million people, from when the site opened in May, to 23.5 million in 2009. Closer inspection shows that this reflects bureaucratic fudging of numbers and doesn’t represent, as The Economist writes, “a single additional banana bought or soda shunned. So what’s the takeaway? The Economist’s conclusion:
“The unpalatable truth seems to be that some Americans simply do not care to eat a balanced diet, while others, increasingly, cannot afford to. Over the last four years, the price of the healthiest food has increased at around twice the rate of energy-dense junk food. That is the whole problem, in an organic nutshell.”
This in a country in which, as Harper’s Index reports in a recent issue, about half of American households do not earn $2,000 during a thirty-day period.
Next: Running for Your Life: The Fall Ahead
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