Damascus, Part III

Continued from Damascus, Part II

Back at the house and thirsty, we went for the Brendan’s cooler. Matt, Brendan and I each grabbed a beer. Dee had a diet coke. All of our first drinks went quickly.

I asked if anyone wanted to try some of the wine I had brought. Brendan and Matt were both eager. Dee explained that he had a liver condition, so he was not able to drink at all.

Dee asked Brendan “Have you ridden this trail before?”
“Yeah, I brought my family here last summer.”
“How did you hear about the trail?” I asked.
Brendan said “I get a magazine called ‘Rails to Trails’ it tells you about all of the train tracks that have been converted to bicycle trails around the country.
“I like to ride on the Silver Comet Trail. It is 61 miles long, from Smyrna, GA to the Alabama border. On the stretch that I take my kids there is a long tunnel. I have a light and an air horn on my bike. I like to ride behind my kids, turn on the light and blow the horn.
“I got up one morning and decided to see how far I could go. When I got to Alabama I called my wife to let her know I was going to be home late.”

“I have been riding a bit lately,” Dee said. “I had been lifting weights, but that only put more weight on.”
“When I started running I ran every day until I got up to 3 miles a day,” Matt joined in, “then I got the flu, and didn’t run for almost two weeks. It felt like I was starting all over.”

I chose not to say anything. The only aerobic activity I do is ballroom dancing, and I didn’t feel it was quite in the same league. Besides, I had just met these guys today, and that didn’t seem the way to try to impress them.

Matt ducked into the house to check the score of the game. He was a Tennessee grad. They were playing Kansas for the women’s basketball championship. While he was inside he looked at the wine bottles I had brought.

“How do you make the different kinds?”
“I buy kits that come with 4 gallons of juice from that grape variety. You pour the juice into a bucket, add 2 gallons of water and sprinkle yeast on top. It ferments for about 2 weeks, then you siphon it off into a glass bottle for another 4 weeks, adding a couple of chemicals that make the wine go from cloudy to clear. Then it is ready to bottle.”
He was looking at my Pinot Noir. “I like the label.”
“Yeah, I have fun with those. To start, I type the name of the wine into Google and do an image search. Pinot Noir has a sort of hedonistic mystique surrounding it. One sommelier called it ‘Sex in a glass.’ So when that picture came up,” referring to the painting of a topless woman walking along a coastline with a sailboat in the background, “it seemed to fit.”

I went into the house for a minute. When I came out, Brendan and Dee were telling stories about when they were in the service.

Matt asked them, as veterans, what they thought about the war in Iraq.
Brendan talked about Saddam Hussein as the greatest ecological terrorist in history. He talked about the first gulf war, and the burning of the oil wells.

Later Dee started talking about Japan. “When I was over there I met American guys who swore they would never move back.”
I said “I met one guy who used to live there. He said Tokyo was the most civilized place on earth. He has since moved back there.”
He said “The guys I was talking to said that the women over there doted on the men.”
“I have a friend who married a woman from China. He said he was amazed at the way she would drop everything and pay attention to him.”
“Yeah, it is the same way in Japan. Of course, my ex-wife is Japanese. But she adapted too well to America.”

He said “At one point I had clicked on something at Match.com and I started to get all sorts of messages from women in China that wanted to meet me. But I am not really interested in Chinese women.”
I said “One thing that surprised me over there was how diverse the population is. The population is supposed to be 1 ethnic group. Something like 94% are ‘Han Chinese’, but there is a lot of variety in that group.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. The people were very different in the 3 parts of the country I visited.”
“Which had the best looking women?”
“Xi’an. I was shocked at all the beautiful women walking around.”
“But Chinese women don’t have any curves.”
“They do in Xi’an.”
“Maybe I should go back to Match.com.”