1. The rain and chill made it unpleasant to do outdoor chores around their home on Rose Lake, so Jake and Carol Lee decided Thursday would be a good day for ride to Montana to have lunch, do some light gambling, and go see Goose at Stangs Food Center and Liquor Store in St. Regis.
So Jake and Carol Lee picked up Ed in Kingston and picked me up just before noon and we humped it over Lookout Pass and glided into the quiet of Saltese, MT and made ourselves at home at the Old Montana Bar and Grill. I enjoyed a thick burger on a brioche bun with a side of beer battered fries and washed it down with the King of Beers. Since I usually drink craft beers, I was startled by my first sip of Budweiser at how sweet it tasted. I did a double take, wondering if I'd been served a can of pop instead of beer, but I almost immediately settled down within myself and realized that the Bud is a maltier beer, properly known as barley pop.
We did some good yakkin' at our table. After we ate, we all took a seat at a different gaming machine and played for a little while and each one of us left the Old Montana Bar and Grill with a little more money than we came in with. That doesn't happen very often.
2. We piled back into the Jacobs-mobile and made our way to St. Regis to pay Goose a visit at Stangs, where he and Mother Goose, Janice, own and operate their fine grocery and liquor store. Mother Goose had to get Goose on the horn and have him return to the store from home. He arrived and we had a lot of fun standing around, eating snickerdoodle cookies, and finding out how things are going in St. Regis and about the trip Goose and a bunch of other guys took a month ago to Lewiston to play golf and hang out with Don Knott. Goose, Jake, and I swapped gout/arthritis stories and I filed away some of what they had to say, thinking it might be helpful if I have another flare up. Before leaving St. Regis, we stopped for a short visit in another little gaming room. This visit ate into my winnings a bit and I resigned from playing pretty quickly, sensing that that the machines in this room and I were not on good terms.
3. Back home, I napped and then dove back into some more of Joseph Mitchell's writing. I read a Christmas story he wrote five years into the Great Depression about a couple who were destitute and lived in a cave in Central Park. Mitchell interviewed them and his story attracted a lot of attention around New York City, but I won't give away what happened after the piece was published. I will say, though, as with much of Mitchell's writing, the accumulation of details about this couple increases their story's ambiguity, making the story for me, an enigmatic one. By the way, this reminds me of something I used to try to explain to my Shakespeare students. Rich ambiguity results, not from the withholding of details, but from copious details. The more we learn, for example, about Macbeth, the more ambiguous, even mysterious, his character is to us. I have to chuckle. This point reminds me of minor arguments I had, from time to time, with writing students when I suggested they develop more detail in their compositions. Often, their response would be, "I was trying to create ambiguity." I would almost imperceptibly sigh within myself and then try, with mixed success, to explain that ambiguity doesn't result from underwriting something, but from fully developing the contradictory nature of most ideas worth writing and thinking about.
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