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A few more words -- and pictures -- from this past weekend...
| Sunday morning I went to church with Charlie and Donna... Charlie was filling
in as the minister. This is the church we attended when we were kids --
The Ponckhockie Congregational Church. (I really should write an entry
some day about the history of that church -- known as the oldest reinforced
poured concrete building in New York State and quite possibly the first
such structure anywhere -- but not today.) Membership has declined over
the years and can no longer support a full time minister. When their part-time
pastor is out-of-town, church members, such as my brother, have to fill
in. (By the way, he did a very good job.) |
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That's the house Charlie and I grew up in... It doesn't look quite right
because the color has been changed, all of the wooden shutters have been
removed, the deck of the lower level porch has been removed, the trees
and flowers and such that had been in front of the porch have been replaced
with grass, and some kind of wooden spite fence has been installed between
this house and the property on the right.
That bay window on the left side of the house was one of my favorite spots to read when I was a kid. There was a comfortable chair there, lots of light through the windows, and a radiator for cozy warmth in the winter. I used to scrunch way down in the chair and put my feet on the window sill (despite repeated warnings not to do that) until one day my foot slipped and I accidentally kicked the glass out of the window. (Yeah, after than I kept my feet down.)
Speaking of dumb things kids do... When I was young I had the bedroom above
that bay window (which was at the end of the dining room). One night when
I was probably about four or five I got this stupid idea that I could make
my parents think it was raining. They were in the living room (the front
room) listening to the radio (back in those pre-television days) and so
I kept quietly going into the bathroom, filling a glass with water, tip-toeing
back into my bedroom, climbing out onto the roof of the bay window area
(which had a very steep slope, you could not pay me to go out onto that
root today), and attempting to fling the water out far enough that it would
fall past the living room's side window. Much to my disappointment, my
parents did not leap to their feet and cry out "It's raining! We should
close the windows." Fortunately for me, they did not notice anything
and they did not hear me going back and forth with glasses of water, and
eventually I gave up and went to bed. (Yes, also fortunately I did not
slip and fall from the roof and break any bones. In fact, I somehow survived
childhood with all of my bones intact.)
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A view of the Hudson River from Hasbrouck Park.
This is in the upper portion of the park, where there was (and still is)
a large picnic pavilion and a grassy field suitable for softball (or soccer
-- once, when I was a kid, a British naval ship visited Kingston and we
watched some of the crew members playing this very strange game where they
kicked a round ball back and forth -- it didn't make much sense to us --
and I don't think I saw another soccer game until I had graduated from
high school).
I am standing on a small hill that has me perhaps twenty or thirty feet
higher than that guy in the white shirt who is sitting by a chain-link
fence (that sort of shinny line going across just above his head), the
trees that frame the view on left and right are just this side of a very
steep drop off (the fence is a safety precaution) and the trees in the
middle are actually the tops of trees far below... as this area in the
park is more than two hundred feet higher than the river. The light green
you see at the edge of the blue of the river is actually also part of the
river -- that is a tidal flats area and is underwater at high tide. (Yes,
although this is ninety miles from the ocean, the Hudson River is a tidal
river here.)
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This is a picture of the Rondout Lighthouse. The Rondout Creek (which is
a navigable waterway and once was an important regional industrial transport
route although these days it is mostly used by pleasure boats) flows into
the Hudson at Kingston. I took this picture from Hasbrouck Park using the
telephoto zoom feature on my camera. I was amazed at the picture because
the lighthouse is almost a mile and a quarter away. |
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Oh, by the way, "Ponckhockie" is the name of my old neighborhood.
When I was a kid I swear I remember being told it was derived from a Dutch
word for point or hook (because of the way the land juts out into the Hudson,
forming the area called Kingston Point) but the Internet says it is from
a Lenape word (the locals prior to the European invasion, the Lenni-Lenape
tribe, an Algonquin group that lived from New Jersey up through the mid-Hudson
Valley) meaning place of annoying insects (or place of dust or ashes, according
to another expert who says the guy who translated it as place of annoying
insects is a moron).
Well, at least "Kingston" was easy to spell. We felt sorry for
the kids who lived in the City of Poughkeepsie.
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