Almost Wholly Wholesome

My evening yesterday verged on being overly
positive. (If you've ever been to a Pete Seeger concert, you know what I mean.) After dinner—a relatively light, healthy dinner, unfortunately—I walked (walked) across town to the community garden. I could go anytime, but Wednesday is the designated evening for people with plots there to garden together communally. Isn't that nice? And actually, it was. I talked to a few people about their gardens, and they talked about mine, in a low-key orgy of caring about each other's relative gardening fortunes. One lady said she'd never grown peppers before and her plant had disappointed her by putting forth just one pepper so far. Ever the pollyanna, I said that she was at least one pepper better off than she had been before, and she agreed. Glass half full!

Then this nice couple asked me if I was walking over to the park stage to hear the free concert that customarily happens every Wednesday night. Well, how could I say no? They lent me a chair, bless them, and we listened to a pretty good bluegrass band. How evil and debauched can you feel, listening to bluegrass?

After seven or eight tunes the band took a break, so I thoughtfully folded up and bagged the chair the nice folks had loaned me, expressed the sincere hope that I'd see them the next time they came to the gardening deal, and walked through the park toward home. People were having wholesome, outdoor fun everywhere—young men played volleyball; children swung on swings. It was an idyllic summer evening in a well-ordered, upstanding community.

So on the way home I stopped into a local hostelry and ordered a martini. Mind you, there's nothing wrong or bad about martinis per se, but drinking them is like hiking in bear country—you're usually going to be OK if you watch yourself, but there's always a bracing, stimulating whiff of danger involved. I could feel the evening, so positive and healthy just a few moments before, coming back into balance. All things in moderation, that's what I say, including and especially moderation itself.

The place was just about deserted, and the dark wood of the bar under my elbows stretched for yards in either direction, gleaming and unsullied. I sat there in blissful peace, taking the occasional pull at my drink. Before long the glass was half empty. After a while it was empty altogether. So I ordered another. It was delicious.