September 30, 2012

Cold sweet tea with the morning pills.

Drive to Atlanta to co-celebrate my sister’s and my birthdays. We eat at Chili’s, my nephew Daniel’s favorite, and see the movie End of Watch, which manages somehow to be both badly written and gripping. Drive next morning to North Georgia College and State University, a sprawling, handsome campus in a part of Georgia which is far more beautiful than I had expected. Up on the third floor of the science building, the windows reveal misty mountains fading away fold after fold. The door of the building is guarded by an iron T-rex. Linda is doing a practicum there, and David is a student. We didn’t see him because of an away soccer game. There is a golden spire. Off then to Monteluce, which seems to have been meant to be a massive planned residential community, all of which collapsed in the housing slump except for the winery, now prosperous and elegant. We took the deluxe winery tour with a couple from Tennessee. He was a health care professional, who–futilely–explained his job to me at some length. She was Korean and quite stylish. Big turquoise rings. The tour was informative. Maybe my own search for land would be more precise if I decided to grow vines. South facing hill, good drainage. The Monteluce wines are rough and new, but they seem to be going about it all in the right way. We had to hurry because there was a wedding there in the afternoon. The land is beautiful. The houses that got built are in faux-Tuscan style, both charming and, in North Georgia, a little silly.

God made the grape so much more complex than other fruits.

Saw video of their trip to Thailand. Video is amazing because however exotic a place sounds when it’s being discussed, when you see pictures of it, it seems recognizable and neighborly. But for the banana trees, Jonathan’s little village might have been Georgia. David stabbed a pig for sacrifice and a community dinner. You can’t slit its throat, apparently, but must stab it and let it bleed to death slowly to propitiate the spirits. The enterprise there is to preserve the culture of the indigenous people through sensible farming (bananas, tea, coffee) rather than universally disastrous corn. They made sure to include shots of the trees I had bought for them. Apparently a little bit of money can purchase a wilderness of coffee and banana. Babies screamed all through the videos, which I thought as funny but the people in the midst of their drama seemed not to notice.

Got my ping-pong game almost up to primordial standards.

Drove home through rain an darkness, but, making not one stop and seeing not one cop, arrived in record time.