Sing with me, this is 40

If your close friends are getting old, does that mean you're getting old?

Mark Bertin turned 40 today (9/30), and he marked this transition to manhood by hosting a gathering of his closest friends at his parents' weekend home in Medusa, NY, up in the Catskills. It was a terrific time.

I started the weekend on Thursday night. First, Cathleen and I attended "curriculum night" at The Brooklyn New School, where we sat on tiny little (ridiculously uncomfortable) chairs and listened to Max's pre-K teacher discuss what the class structure, philosophy, goals were. The experience confirmed for me many of the reasons why we stayed in New York / moved to Brooklyn -- his class is stinking with diversity and he will be learning in a progressive environment. That, and Cathleen discovered on Friday, one of his classmates (his favorite classmate, it would seem), is the daughter of an accomplished novelist, Myla Goldberg. Cathleen read her novel "The Bee Season," and I really like to listen to "Song for Myla Goldberg" by The Decemberists. After the one-hour meeting at school, we headed home, put the kids to bed, I quickly packed a bag and than hustled to Grand Central where I caught the 8:52 train to Katonah, armed with a pulled pork sandwich and a bottle of Boylan's Birch Beer.

Mark picked me up at the train station at 10 pm, and we then stayed up until 12:30, sipping a few glasses of the Clynelish single malt I had brought him for his birthday ("notes of buttescotch," the guy at Smith & Vine had told me), and we just shot the shit about everything and nothing (the scotch facilitating the discussion of both). We used to have time to do a lot more of that, especially when we would just hang out at ultimate tournaments (or practices, or summer league games), or on runs together or dinner parties or whatever when we lived three blocks apart, but now life changes have changed all that. It was nice to just be hanging out again. And a little drunk.

Zach got us up the next morning at around 6:30, and by 9:00 or so we were on the road to Medusa. We arrived at the house about two hours later, with Zach asleep in his carseat. Elizabeth agreed to stay alone with him while Mark and I went for a run. By the time we had changed our clothes, inserted contact lenses and stretched, Zach woke up from a disappointingly short nap, but Mark and I took off anyway. It was, after all, his birthday weekend...

Medusa sits just north of the Catksill mountain range, about 45 minutes southwest of Albany. It is, by most yardsticks, the middle of nowhere. Mark's parents bought 180 acres of that nowhere about four or five years ago, and constructed a modest but comfortable house on the hillside top of a meadow in the middle of the property. They have spent the past few years carving hiking trails around the property (the northern side of which abuts a state park), and Mark and I set off on one of those hiking trails, then crossed over into the state park before reconnecting with paved roads. It is the Catskills, and the run was uphill and downhill the entire way. The final half mile of the run (which in toto was probably in the neighborhood of about four miles) featured a killer uphill climb that led to an amazing view of meadows, mountains and valleys. Breathtaking by all possible understandings of the term.

After the run we lounged around in the house and then the four of us (Mark, Elizabeth, Zach and I) set out for a short hike in the woods. We spotted many red efts (yes, spotted is a pun!), and Zach and I had a nice time bonding over the water spigot from his Camelbak. Upon our return to the house, we ventured into the garden and ate sugar snap peas right off the vine, picked a small bucket's worth of sweet cherry tomatoes, and pulled a dozen squat carrots out of the ground. Country livin'.

Elizabeth and I then invented a new game called "Squid," where we sat on a couch on a screened-in porch, facing a stone fireplace; you had to pick a stone on the fireplace and then, while seated with your back against the back of the couch, throw a whiffle ball off that stone and catch it. If you made a successful throw and catch off of the pre-called stone, your opponent would have to replicate the effort, failure to doing which would earn him or her a letter spelling out the game's name. First to SQUID loses. It is with pride that I report that I took home the championship trophy. Making "squ" you jokes midway through the game was a highlight.

By mid-to-late afternoon, Mark's college friends Don and Stefan arrived from, respectively, Richmond, VA and somewhere in the East Bay (CA). Mark's parents also arrived from a week in the Adirondacks -- as babysitters for the weekend, they left for home with Zach in tow at his bedtime. That is when the drinking began in relative earnest. Opening beers were followed by the four or five bottles of wine that Mark had been stowing away for a decade or so for the right occasion; they were steadily consumed through the late afternoon, dinner of fish burritos, and late-night lounging until another college friend, Dave, arrived from Fort Collins, CO at a little after midnight. I finally went to bed at a little after 1 a.m.

I awakened at around 8:30, determined that sounds of life existed somewhere else in the house, and was out on the back deck with a cup of coffee by 8:50. Mark, Elizabeth, Dave and I (eventually joined by Don and Stefan) sat on Adirondack-style rocking chairs for about four straight hours. The view, looking south, is magnificient: a meadow surrounded by trees beginning to succumb to the beckoning autumn, and giving way in the distance to the Catskill mountains (approximately 15-20 miles away); looking southeast you could see clearly for probably 100 miles. Over this entire expanse, signs of industrialized living were few and far between. Hawks intermittently flew by. The sun was shining bright, the air was crisp but warm. There was no reason to move anywhere else.

A bit past noon, Dan Katzive arrived from Manhattan, and then Cathleen and the dogs arrived from Brooklyn (Max and Eliza under the care of Sophie and Joseph for the day/eve). We booted up and took a one-hour hike around the property, wending our way on trails through the forests, across old stone walls and small, dried-up river beds, and through the meadow which was blazing with the colors of small wildflowers.

Back at the house, we had a small horseshoes tournament (Cathleen and I were smoked by Elizabeth and Dave), tossed the disc for a bit, and relaxed some more. Mark's friend Elio arrived (from California), rounding out the well-traveled group of revelers. Eventually we motivated towards dinner (veggie lasagna that our hosts had prepared beforehand) with particular joy in the air at the news that the Mets had re-tied the Phillies for first place that day. While waiting for the endlessly-poaching pears to poach for dessert, I delivered a rap "toast" I had written on the train-ride up, the highlights of which included my concluding a verse about Mark's move to Katonah with a line about that town's having "houses so pretty they give me a bonah," and then using 31 different words to rhyme with Zach in another verse. Cathleen and I packed into our car by 10 pm and hit the road for home, arriving in Brooklyn at about 12:45.

It was a pretty darn good weekend as weekends go and I am certain that it transpired exactly as Mark had desired. If you can truly judge a man by the company he keeps, Mark Bertin at 40 is doing alright for himself.