Church Supper (Idle Words)#

10.15.2002

The most amazing crystal blue day, with a crazy patchwork of fall colors scattered all across the mountains. The fall has been taking its sweet time with us, doing all kinds of ochre and subdued yellow things since the middle of August, unusually early, and suddenly we are in the middle of the real leaf season. The most magical thing about fall in Vermont is how different each year is from the next, and how unpredictable the colors can be. Soon the leaves will start falling and we will face the heartbreak of resetting the clock for the winter ( dark at four, dark at three... ), but just right now life couldn't be any sweeter. Even this itchy little cold can't get me down.

I spent the weekend with a group of programmers, united in the pursuit of semantic search engines, and we all went to a chicken pie supper in Cornwall. It was a wonderful chicken pie supper, even if the chicken supper organizers seemed to be in an unseemly hurry to move everyone along, and get the second (and eventually third) shift of chicken eaters in place. We ate in a packed upstairs room in the Cornwall church, surrounded by grizzled veterans of suppers past, and discovered that the Cornwall supper crowd makes a mean biscuit. Half the programmers had fun, the rest suffered in silence, and I had my girlfriend for good company.

Over the course of this and other meals I learned that that there are two breeds of computer men - those who can stop talking about computers for just one tiny second, and those who can't, or won't, and who vex us terribly. I also learned that there are people who will cook an entire chicken without salt. May they be forced to spend an eternity in each other's company.