A New York welcome?

One of the pleasures of having a guest is showing off your town to the visitor. But so far my sister-in-law Judi, who is in town from a small town in California, isn't impressed.

Mostly, it's the people she doesn't like, especially Price Chopper workers.

During a lunch/shopping expedition there earlier this week, we were first confronted by a deli worker who would obviously had rather been anywhere than where she was, and made us feel like she was doing a favor by taking our order.

Then Judi asked another worker where to find packages of dry spaghetti sauce. He thought for a few seconds and said they didn't carry it, he never heard of it, all the while seeming somewhat annoyed with her for asking. When she found it and (nicely) told him, he was not impressed - more like annoyed.

This was after Judi made the mistake of asking the woman at Starbucks how she was and hearing a tale of woe about extra work she had to do, but before the woman checking us out at Toys R Us who had failed to put in her teeth that morning could barely mumble to us as we paid for a purchase.

"No wonder people are leaving New York,'' Judi said to me after that encounter.

She also noticed that other people met casually just seem much less likely to return a gaze and a smile than at home, which is a town of about 12,000 people in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains an hour and a half east of Sacramento.

She suggested the difference is not so much between NY and California as between small towns and bigger places.

This is all a bit disconcerting to someone like me who has always found the area, and all of upstate for that matter, full of people far friendlier than from bigger places.

The situation was somewhat saved today when Judi asked a worker today at Indian Ladders Farms in Altamont how he was doing and he said, "just another day in paradise.'' When she asked him if it was OK to eat an apple while picking others for sale, he pretended to get on the phone to the "apple police'' and told them to focus their cameras on her. That's more like it, fellow Albanians.

Later, though, as Emily and Judi walked between rows of trees on their way to pick apples, people seemed to Judi to avert their gazes rather than risk engagement.

So what gives?

I guess Delmar and its environs are not as friendly as small-town America, at least the California version thereof. But since I'm such a good hugger, Judi has promised to come back anyway. We'll probably just stay away from Price Chopper during the next visit.