Skidmore

Everyday I walk to town. Sometimes more than once. During the walk there are many moments of felicity, walking past all of the homes with lush vegetation, listening to my ipod on shuffle, thinking only of writing : the intricacies of craft, learning to translate all the salient details of any incident, the wealth of subjects. I pay special attention to all of the plants. What grows here? What do people like? It is colder here than Nelson. No rhododendrons, azaleas. Lots of hostas and hydrangeas. Hostas might be the floral emblem for the county of Saratoga. And then looking at the earth, does everyone have the same gardener? Even the less affluent homes have the earth mounded up just so with the same type of mulch everywhere and very few weeds. I feel very pathetic on the gardening front. I even have dreams where the secret is revealed to me and it is fertilizer.

Just as I leave campus there is a beautiful pine on the corner of the path. One afternoon the sun was shining, there was no wind, and at about 3:30pm the beautiful pine split and ½ of it fell onto the path that I walk on. It was very tragic. No one was there, but I did contemplate that with the ipod on I probably would not have heard the preemptory crack had I been walking by. Just like the guy in Cranbrook where the helicopter fell on him. I examined the split on the trunk carefully and you could see it had been a very gradual process with dirt and pine leaves accumulating in the wedge as the two sides gradually pulled apart. The ½ remaining is being cut down today. I was sad but knew that it was inevitable as the trunk seemed to have too narrow a waist where the missing part detached to support the rest of the tree.

I’m starting to understand why the program has so many returning students. I adore being immersed in the world of writing. As students there is no real expectation of each other. People rise at varied times with no embarrassment, no excuses. There is a collective understanding that the process of writing is so individual there is no need to adhere to a prescribed time frame. We meet as a class from 1-4pm M,W,F. Tuesday and Thurday afternoons are optional question periods with various visiting writers. Every evening are readings from visiting writers – almost all Pulitzer prize winners with an even balance of fiction writers and poets. Then after the readings are socials with fruit and cheese in order to mingle with students and visiting writers. I try to attend everything. You never know where you are going to get your next tidbit of information. I have noticed with admiration the regular attendance of a poet – Frank Bidart. I don’t know if he is on staff. But he is older and still attends and listens with great intensity. You have to admire that. The official head of program and his beautiful poet/teacher wife are also in attendance. I am quite intrigued by her because she always is smiling. I think that she has trained her face in that way, I don’t think it could have naturally fallen in that way. I enjoyed the week with Margot. I have a new appreciation for craft and also an intense interest. I used to think writers taught at these creative writing schools because they needed the money. Now I am able to see that it could be that they are just in love the mechanics of craft. It is sort of like having an intuitive knowledge of your native tongue and then being exposed to grammar and realizing that it is like a giant puzzle. A number of students in the class found Margot’s style of teaching very alienating. They believed she disliked, or in the words of one classmate ‘hated’ them. I found that she seemed to not like my comments but I was able to overlook it and in fact found myself freed by her ‘dislike’ – there was no need to impress her. Our new teacher is almost too funny. I find it difficult to concentrate on the subject because I’m laughing too uproariously at his comments. Unfortunately he will not let me have the class criticize my newly revised novel because he has put too much work into my older version. Oh, well.
Aside from attending classes or lectures I just walk around town. I have photographed many of the beautiful homes and I am interested to see if people can spot the new victorins vs. the old. Some of them have required much scrutiny by me and even then I’m not 100%. I usually ere on the side of thinking them reproductions if I am questioning.
On one of my rambles I encountered the taxi driver from the first day. He raced his taxi up to me at an intersection and said “Hey remember me.” I said of course, my first day in Saratoga. He quizzed me how I was liking it and I waxed on about the loveliness of it all. “Move here,” he demanded again. I hestitated, I can’t. Its lovely but… “Marry me.”
I just laughed. “I’m off Monday and Tuesday”. Oh, those are my most intense class days.
“When are you leaving?” He was prepared to drive me to the airport in his own car, but I felt a cab was better. So now I am to request him specifically and book ahead. Mark Buffo? I’m not sure about the last name. I didn’t think I’d forget it so fast. But I’m sure the story of a 44 yr old former horse trainer with a Brooklyn accent will be interesting.

Saratoga

I am too old to choose the physical deprivations associated with living in dorms. That is probably the biggest drawback to the Saratoga experience. However, I am starting to like the fact that you never need to worry about housekeeping staff . I find that worrying about when housekeeping will show is a subliminal stress that somewhat mars a hotel experience. Whereas here in the dorms you never see any cleaning people ever. I do wish they would sometimes appear and clean the communal bathroom though. Aside from the hard, exceptionally hard plastic coated mattress, the biggest drawback is that communal bathroom – one per 5 suites. One night in the middle of the night I found myself sitting on a seat wet with urine - incredibly disconcerting and upsetting. So now I furtively shield my Clorox wipe underneath my handtowel as I hustle to the bathroom. Now the bathroom has a wonderful residual odour of cleaning fragrance. And now I have taken to debating with myself at great lengths – do I really need to go to the bathroom – probably a prequel to a bladder retention disorder.

Saratoga is pretty town at least that of which still remains. It has been encroached upon by urban sprawl so that it is now at least 5 interconnecting towns. One of the drawbacks of this is that it is no longer a place that you can walk around with any kind of purpose. All of the stores that used to be small and local are now extinct and big box stores have taken over their function. It is almost impossible to reach these box stores on foot as they are behind the interconnecting highways and are after long tracks of undeveloped green space with no sidewalks to be found. So the romantic inclination is to see lovely Saratoga with all of its Victorian splendor as a wonderful time capsule of a small town. I have seen many posters celebrating the Saratoga porches – massive wrap around verandas decorated impeccably. But in fact you can’t begin to live as though it is a small town because all of your shopping necessities are car rides away. It is quite tragic really, it makes me really value the compactness and completeness of dear old Nelson.

I can’t believe the magnitude of the Victorian homes surrounding the campus. I have rarely seen so many huge homes together. There are even some new indistinguishable Victorian mansions. That in itself screams money as I can’t imagine duplicating them in this day and age. The campus is a very pretty maze. It sort of reminds me of the Banff fine arts center – same age and purpose. The tuition here is $36 000 for instate residents with a population of approx 2400 students. Rather dear. The cafeteria is very amazing. One of my young poet friends was very disparaging about the money that has gone into the aesthetics of the cafeteria – she thought the money better spent on scholarships. I disagree. It is a fantastic place to eat – soaring ceilings, beautiful beams and all restaurants in a circle. It is wonderful to just free range eating from all sorts of exotic restaurants. I just keep putting away my used plate and going with a new plate to a new station. There is a vegetarian , asian, Italian etc.. It almost makes up for the horridness of the dorms. Why weren’t cafeterias like that when I was in University?

I am settling into the routine of the campus. I think I am the only one brave or foolish enough to go free ranging into Saratoga. My poet friend has a GPS unit that has a woman’s voice that actually tells her exactly where to go. I think she could function and never get an aerial view of the place. My aerial view was hard won, almost at the cost of my sanity. Based on a tourist map happily given out by hotels etc, I tried to navigate to Walmart. I cleverly (I thought) googled Walmart and got the address and tried to visualize on the map they gave compared to my tourist version. Walmart is 840 Old Gick road. On my map Gick road had a traffic light superimposed on the Old part (or so I deduced), the road curled around and then was cut off, finally showing as Old Gick further to the side. So I merrily set out on the hot humid day, knowing that I couldn’t check into Skidmore until 3 pm. I walked and walked along Gick road – quite terrifying as no sidewalk, cars were driving as though it was a highway, and the landscape completely treed except for the occasional house. Houses along Gick road don’t believe in house numbers. The dogs that came out barking and growling at me were the first disconcerting sign that perhaps no one walks along this road. Almost 1½ hours had passed when I finally saw that I was only at 100. I was too far along to turn back. I was feeling frantic and dehydrated when I finally spotted a sports field in the middle of the deciduous wildnerness. There was a soccer tournament for the region taking place. Despite the throngs of people there was absolutely no concession stand or phone. There was a pop machine that wouldn’t take my ten dollar bill. I ended up buying some dollars – $6 from a woman for my $10. And then to add insult to injury she ended up needing my change which I willingly handed over to help her make $1.25 for her pop purchase. I stupidly handed it over before seeing if I had enough for myself, all the while tears pouring behind my sunglasses. I luckily had enough change to buy a pop. Somewhat fortified I went in search of a phone. A lovely teenage girl offered to let me use her cell phone. She had to phone information for a taxi number. At first the taxi wasn’t willing to drive out to get me because I didn’t have a phone myself. I thought I might lie down and cry. He finally relented. When the taxi came, it turned out I was in a different town and nowhere near Old Gick road only on Gick that leads to nowhere or hell which ever you want.
It became clear to me that I needed phone in this new world in order to navigate. So armed with my purchases from Target (where I had the cab drop me off) I called another cab. Things are very weird here. Taxis are not metered – some guy at central office just arbitrarily says some amount - and then you drive around while the cab driver waits and tries to pick up other passengers. This takes so long that you get to know the cab drivers a bit too well to the point they are insistent that you move here. I was a little taken aback and said vaguely yes it is a pretty place but….that didn’t dissuade him and then he had to unburden his tragic life story of losing his only daughter at 12 and his marriage disintegrating. It was all too much for me, once again crying behind my sunglasses and afraid to take a cab again.

I am trying to immerse myself in the world of writing – that is attending lectures by visiting writers and not making any attempts to do anything but read and write. My social life is a bit slim pickings. Occasionally I chat with people in other classes. My own class seems to be made up of reserved disparate personalities. I’m okay with it; it sort of reminds me of my vet class – well known throughout the years as being the class with no camaraderie. To invest myself too much socially would maybe detract too much from the solitary study I need to do. Although I do notice without dinner companions and any access to a nice glass of wine I have turned rather greedy and am hopefully scanning the cafeteria for more delectable items. I don’t think this will ultimately hurt me as I somehow manage to miss at least one meal a day and I have a natural penchant for vegetables.

As Margot Livesey’s literary stalker I have yet to make any personal contact with her. I wouldn’t mind a stalker such as myself – holding her in great esteem but content to just observe and listen