Leo Dodd 2015 watercolor of downtown Rochester, NY
My father disappeared from this earth this morning. I took a painting class with him for twenty years or so and this old time view of downtown Rochester was one of his last paintings. He was an inspiration to me. I’m dedicating the song below to him.
Margaret Explosion plays our last show of 2015 tonight. The band returns to the Little Theater Café in March of 2016. Curiously, “Disappear,” the title song of Margaret Explosion’s “Disappear” cd, is not on the cd. It was recorded after the cd was released.
“Disappear” by Margaret Explosion. Recorded live at the Little Theatre on 10.22.14. Peggi Fournier – sax, Ken Frank – bass, Bob Martin – guitar, Jack Schaefer – bass clarinet. Paul Dodd – drums.
Listen to Margaret Explosion – Disappear7 Comments
Fallen white birch on ridge in Durand Eastman Park in Rochester, New York
Hadn’t had a chance to walk in a few days so yesterday’s jaunt through the woods felt like recess back in Holy Trinity. Our most travelled route even felt brand new, especially so when we discovered Peggi’s favorite white birch had fallen.
Peggi did a few paintings of the eye-like knots in the bark and we’d marvel at the tree, the biggest in this birch stand on top of a ridge, each time we passed. They are funny trees. The bark is impervious to rot, perfect for lining Native American canoes. Thet look fine one day and then fall over the next.
My siblings, Peggi and I found a new home for my mom today. Peggi and I plan to drop off the application, the PRI and POA forms in the morning. The admissions assistant, who gave us a tour this afternoon, was perfectly professional until she went off the rails in answer to a question about the food. Something about the chef serving peas and pimentos that she found very odd.
Meanwhile my dad is spending his last days in a different nursing home, one that doesn’t separate their hospice and dementia clients. There’s a woman in a wheelchair who does laps of the hallways while talking a blue streak. She is absolutely delightful, David Greenberger material, but she tried opening the door to the stairs last night and set off a painfully loud alarm that no one seemed to know how to turn off. She told us she “was the only man in her family.” And there’s a man who wanders the halls while pulling his shirt up over his head. He went down the elevator with some visitors the other night and wound up in the basement. He was perfectly happy but the staff freaked out.
Note my father left on my mother’s chair as we left for his last doctor’s appointment
We were cc’d in on an email from the people at the end of the street. Their dog had been missing since yesterday and they were asking the neighbors to keep an eye out for it. Earlier we had noticed a dog’s bark that sounded like it was coming from the woods behind Rick and Monica’s house. It wasn’t Rick and Monica’s dog because they are out of town. And it wasn’t the sharp, shrill, shriek of the next door neighbor’s dog. It must have been the missing German Shepherd.
We called the owners and told them their dog might be down in the woods. We were heading out for a walk anyway so we met the neighbors out front before we headed down the path into the woods. A dog was barking. Sounds bounce around down there and it is often hard to tell where they are coming from. The neighbors found their dog inside the dog pen behind Rick and Monica’s house. The dog had somehow gone through the gate and then managed to close it behind him. He spent the night in the pen.
Jeanne Perri and her father working in the Ice Cream Shop at St. John’s Home in Rochester, New York
Our friend, Jeanne Perri, moved to Nashville years ago but she still comes up over the holidays to visit her dad. He volunteers at St, Johns where his wife once spent some time. Sometimes he works in the gift shop but most of the time he works behind the counter in the ice cream shop. We found Jean assisting her dad as we walked by.
My dad was upstairs, flat on his back. He had just asked if we could take a ride and I suggested he close his eyes and take a ride.
We stopped in Rubino’s this afternoon looking for something special for Christmas Eve dinner. We usually have a group over, my brother and his family up from New Jersey and our friend, Duane, from Brooklyn and whatever family members we can round up. Rubino’s was mobbed so we just took in the scene and left, but not before pausing before a “Pray for Me. My Wife is Italian” t-shirt.
For the last few days we had lunch at McCann’s Local Meats on South Clinton. It is close to Saint John’s. They have a lot more than meat but meat certainly takes center stage. It could be the best deli in town. We were there in the off hours and the owner was sitting at the counter, a big guy in a blood splattered apron. I told him my grandfather was a butcher and owned a store further down the street, where the Indian grocery store is today. I said I couldn’t get over how much the the tools of the trade have stayed exactly the same, the conical roll of string, the big roll of paper to wrap the meat cuts in, the hooks for the sides of beef, the band saw, the hanging sausages, the white enamel display case that my grandfather stood behind when he handed me a thick slice of liverwurst.
A hospice aide came up to sit with my father for an hour so we took a walk in Highland Park. As beautiful as the clear blue high sixty degree day was I worry about all the flowering fruit trees. Will they blossom again when Spring really comes? We walked through the Poet’s Garden and found a bench from 1916 with “To live in the hearts that know love is not to die.” It’s from the Scottish poet, Thomas Campbell, and it really hit the sweet spot.
Photos on table in rec room at St. John’s Nursing Home
Circumstances led my father to St. John’s Nursing Home. His room overlooks Frederick Olmstead’s Highland Park. The glass conservatory is a stone’s throw from his window. I opened that window to let the bird sounds in but all I got was traffic so I found a website with loon and wood duck sound samples and played them for my dad. I left the window open all night in hopes the traffic would die down. It’s been so warm here that next year’s cherry blossoms are already in bloom.
The home is sort of open plan. People on hospice are next door to multi-year residents. Dementia patients wander the halls and some of them do so many laps of the halls each day they are bound to live forever. The staff leads groups of people to the tv room so one person can keep an eye on the lot. They call the floor a “neighborhood” and there are common areas for eating or playing cards. These photos are under a clear plexiglass clipboard in the game room. They were arranged just so one day, scattered on the table top the next, and then right back in place today. They creep me out and I plan to ask the staff about them.
Antique bottles found in the earth near the Brickyard Trail in Brighton, New York
Up in the hospital last week my dad reminded me that he had a Morandi book that I should take. I had recently emailed him a few photos that I took in Chelsea of some Georgio Morandi paintings in the Zwirner Gallery. He had mentioned this book a few times and I was pretty sure I had already borrowed it and never returned it. I told him as much.
A few posts back I mentioned this new trail in Brighton that runs from the town hall on Elmwood through the woods and meadows to Westfall Road. A big sign at each end identifies it as the Brickyard Trail. This piece of land was saved from over-development because there is standing water on the property. It is not a real wetland. There is only standing water here because the brick makers of yore removed layers of clay leaving big depressions of unporous soil.
My father has long championed Brighton’s vanished brickyards. In fact he has been somewhat of a lone wolf on this subject. He was unable to attend the groundbreaking ceremony for the trail and the last time I took him over to the trail he couldn’t get out of the car. But he had me get out to talk to the surveyors to make sure they let someone in the town know if they came across a trolley track or any remnants of the old brick making facility, the one he had been reconstructing in his architectural drawing program.
I was coming home from Saint John’s where my father in in hospice, and I decided to stop and look at the trail. It is as wide as a road now and covered with stone. There is even a bridge over the small creek. I tried to find the old junkyard that I had spotted in my last visit and off to the side of the road I saw a small cluster of antique bottles. The workers had set these aside for my father. I cleaned them up and posed them for a Morandi-like photo and showed it to my dad this morning. He was thrilled.
Peggi and I went to our first yoga class in a month. It has been busy. The Yacht Club, overlooking the lake at the mouth of the river, is the perfect setting in any season and Jeffery, who ad-libs his classes, decided to do a restorative class. Man, did that hit the spot.
We took my mom up to see Leo today. They had been apart for the last week and their reunion was really sweet. Not a dry eye in the house. They held hands for a few hours.
Peggi spotted Father Donnelly outside the door to my mom’s apartment and we asked him if he could stop up and see my dad. My parents left the church in the late sixties, back when they turned the altar around and dropped the ancient Latin nonsense. My parents left because those meager Vatican II changes were not nearly enough. They started their own inter-denominational church called the Servant of God Community and when that fizzled they looked to nature.
My father remains a Thomas Merton, small “c” catholic and there is a newspaper with the pope’s picture on it on my dad’s drawing table at this moment so he is optimistic. As my mom left he told her they would be together some day.
Leo Dodd gets his last haircut from Bob the Barber at Highland Hospital, Rochester, New York
Handel’s “Il Pastor Fido: Incidental Music” was playing on the radio station that my father found on the hospital tv last night. The sound was coming out of the tiny speaker in the telephone-sized hospital remote that was sitting on his bed. This device not only changes the channel it cranks the bed up and allows you to page the nurse. The music was just perfect. Dreamy and moving at the same time. My dad was sleeping but surely absorbing it on some level.
I took this photo last night. My brother in law, Howie, arranged to have Bob, my father’s regular barber, pay a house call to the hospital. We had been up there all day but my father was encouraging us to stick around so we could meet Bob. Bob refurbishes pool tables on the side and keeps some in his barber shop on Monroe Avenue. Bob knew “the Deacon,” the local pool legend, Irving Crane. “He’s got some great stories and some of them are true” is how my father introduced Bob.
Leo is beginning to let his engineering side go. The first few days up here were an onslaught of doctors and to make sense of it all my dad constructed a flow chart on his iPad so he could keep the players straight.
Above a solid line he drew ovals for the three doctors responsible for his health before he entered the hospital. Below that line he drew the team he thought was running the show here. The Palliative Care doctor, nurse practitioner and intern were placed in these spots. Their role has been so outsized that my dad put them above his so called “chief hospital doctor.” I gently corrected him and he scrubbed the names out, placed the head doctor up top and put the palliative team on the next tier along side the oncologist, physical therapist, occupational therapist and social worker.
The way it was explained to us this crew was to collect their data and report back to the head doctor who would then inform us of the game plan. The thing is, my dad had it right the first time. At some point the Palliative Care team were the only ones that mattered. the only sane ones.
From my dad’s position, propped up in bed on the fourth floor of Highland Hospital, he can just see the top of the new library going up across South Avenue. A team of construction workers started scurrying about at 8AM. My dad figures the guy with the white hat is the foreman and the blue hats are the carpenters and the green are the plumbers. The red hard hats are the electricians. In better days this would be the formative stage of a painting.
Leo was adjusting to the idea of hospice. A prescription would be ordered soon and we were discussing the location. The prognosis was a longer window than the qualifications for the Leo Center allowed. The appropriately named Palliative Care Center in the St Ann’s complex, near my parent’s apartment, is considered the Cadillac of hospice facilities. Fred Lipp, the painting teacher my dad and I had for twenty years, spent his last days there earlier this year. Fred was lucid til the end and telling me in his last days, “Your father is a trip.”
My dad was talking about the Chinese burial items that we had seen in a case at the Metropolitan when we went down to the Van Gogh show. He was working on some paintings of them. I found some pictures of those items on my iPad and he thumbed through them. He has an insatiable art appetite, something he passed onto me.
I remember arriving early at that Met show. We took the train in from Montclair with my brother, Mark. We studied the Van Goghs, ate lunch in the cafeteria and returned to the show for more. We took a break for dinner in the dining room and went back up to the show until closing. Somewhere along the line we saw the Chinese burial objects. Holy Sepulchre’s green burial, which has already been arranged, probably precludes artifacts in the grave.
My dad didn’t care for the lunch that was delivered and the nurse said we could call down and order whatever he wants. He was thinking about a peanut butter sandwich so I placed the order. Light on the jelly and whole wheat bread, preferably without the crust. The person on the other end said she couldn’t do that at this hour so I explained that it was all my dad wanted. She thought for a bit and said, “OK but you’re gonna have to cut the crust off yourself.” I described the route that Jack Nicholson took in “Five Easy Pieces” to successfully order toast. And that produced a hearty laugh from my father.
Leo Dodd taking measurements in old barn on Westfall Road
I took this photo of my dad a few weeks ago. We were out at a doctor’s appointment and I noticed he had his camera, tape measurer and a pile of paperwork with him. I asked if he wanted to stop somewhere on the way home and he said he’d like to go to the barn.
I’d been to the barn on Westfall Road with him before. It’s falling apart and my dad is pushing the town to restore it. In fact he is drawing architectural renderings of what the restored barn could look like. I helped him take some measurements and he took some photos.
We visited the barn today but this time my dad was having a hard time walking. The doctor had told him he should be “putting his things in order.” I drove through the field and right up to the barn door. I supported him as we slowly walked to the center of the barn. We laughed at some spray-painted graffiti that read “Kill Your Friends.”
Something was off in his computer model and he was looking for the error so we retook some measurements. He sheepishly said “I probably shouldn’t be out here” but he was clearly loving it.
We stopped down to the garden and picked a big batch of cilantro and some spinach. A bounty for mid December in Rochester! The temperature was near seventy and Jared’s goldfish had come out of hibernation. They were hungry and scurried to the side of the pond when they heard us.
Peggi put the freshly picked cilantro into a plastic bag and I set it down on a burner that had just been turned off. The bag melted immediately and stunk to high heaven. I threw the bag out and then opened the doors to clear out the stink.
We wanted to use the burner tonight so I turned on the overhead exhaust fan, put the burner on high and left the room. The melting plastic odor filled the house. I opened the doors again and lit some pine incense. In hindsight I suspect Jared, a former Kodak chemist, would have had a better solution for removing the plastic from the burner.
T-Bird in my father’s doctor’s office parking lot, Rochester, New York
Saint Ann’s had a great turnout for the afternoon Holiday Bingo event. The lights in the Oak Room were up bright and most of the residents were wearing green or red. Refreshments were on the tables and the moderator was calling out numbers and letters. It sounded like a party and I wished my parents were in there but age has gotten the best of them. And Bingo was never their scene anyway.
I was picking up my dad up for an another appointment and driving his car this time. I had snagged up a City newspaper at the Margaret Explosion gig last night and had already skimmed through it. They feature one city house in each issue, a regular column sponsored by the Landmark Society, and this week’s house was 107 Burlington Avenue on the west side, the house my dad grew up in. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I handed the paper to my dad and he laughed so hard he cried.
The radio was tuned to his station, Jazz 90.5, and they were doing a 24 hour Frank Sinatra marathon to celebrate one hundred years since the Chairman’s birth. Non-stop melancholy songs like “Last Night When We Were Young” and “Moon River.” Johnny Mercer is my father’s all time favorite.
We parked next to the Ford Thunderbird, above, and I finally discovered the secret to opening the trunk on my father’s Honda Accord. I had had such bad luck before, pressing the buttons on his key fob over and over before the damn thing popped, that I would just hand it to him and let him pop it so I could get his walker in or out. It’s actually my mom’s walker but he has taken to it lately.
We were visiting his primary care doctor for the last time and as we got out of the car I asked, “Why is it that this trunk opener works for you and I can’t get it to work?” He demonstrated his technique and explained that he just holds the button down until it opens. The time factor! I am still learning from my father. He has given me so much by his example.
The good doctor pretty much handed my dad’s care off to a Palliative Care specialist and he shook his hand, a final gentlemanly goodbye. On the way home I said, “I wish you and mom could trade places.” My mom wants to die. My dad is eternally young and in the middle of so many projects. And there are always the birds to watch.
I don’t know if it is the dark side of me that finds this extremely limited, grey/brown, late Fall palette so appealing or the minimalist side. It doesn’t much matter. I am attracted to it and I trust my instincts. I feel like I’m living in an austere Bergman movie as of late.
Ossia’s program on Friday was especially good. They do four or five performances a year, programs that include five or six compositions by contemporary composers, and there are always one or two exceptional pieces. Friday’s program was all killer, no filler.
It included an out of body piece that reminded us of Gearld Busby’s score to Robert Altman’s “3 Women” and a couple of Morton Feldman-like works by the Japanese composer, Jo Kondo. The one that really knocked us out though was by the Icelandic composer, Anna Thorvaldsdóttir. It is called “Ró.” We were sitting in the front row of Kilbourn Hall and our row gave it a standing ovation. Thorvaldsdóttir says her piece of sustained sound materials “reflects my sense of imaginative listening landscapes and nature.” It certainly did that for these woods walkers. We often stop and stare and listen and this is the experience.
Rochester skyline from the top floor of the parking garage at Highland Hospital
My father made the mistake of trying to pick my mom up when she fell. He fractured a vertibrae in his back and that set off a chain reaction of pain. This was four months ago but the pain was especially bad yesterday so his doctor squeezed him in before the start of his regular office hours. My father was still sleeping when I stopped by to pick him up at 6:30 and I hated to wake him. The doctor is very thorough and he did what doctors do, he ordered a battery of tests. Cat scan, blood tests, x-rays, bone scan and a urine test. He also prescribed pain killers and muscle relaxers to make my dad more comfortable.
The bone scan was a two part experience. He was injected with a radioactive dye and told to return a few hours later for the scan. The nurse took my father back and said it would take about an hour. She told me to sit in the waiting room and I told her, “I can’t handle the soap opera” (playing on the tv.).” She said, I know what mean. You could always wait in the hallway and I’ll find you. I read the paper which I had fallen behind on. The San Bernardino mass shooting story was on the front page. A guy standing across fromsaid, “So that story is plastered all over the front pages. Just what they want, more attention.” “Shoot the messenger,” I thought.
I went back in the waiting room and sat down. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? was on the tv. I got sucked into it and before I knew it my dad came out.
I dropped Peggi and my parents off at the funeral home in Penn Yan where my aunt was laid out. The Menonnite family in this buggy had just paid their respects to my uncle and cousins. My aunt and uncle, solid Catholics, lived on a farm near Dundee for sixty years and the land around them was slowly bought up by Menonnites. They became quite close and shared more values then you might imagine. A Menonnite family eventually bought their farm and rented their 200 year old house back to my aunt and uncle.
I had to leave the funeral home as soon as we arrived because I had forgotten to buy a flower arrangement, something my father had asked me to do yesterday. I spaced it out. I found a florist on Google, a few miles out of town, called the “Garden of Life.” There was a sign in front of an old farm house but no flower shop. I pulled in their driveway to lookup a Plan B and I saw woman with her dog and a small shop behind the house. I told the woman that I was going to calling hours at the funeral home in town and she interjected, “Helen? She told me she had already paid her respects and said, “Come on in and I’ll get you something.” She picked out a coral colored Poinsettia and added some other oddball touches. It was perfect.
A man came in the shop and asked about microphones for an event he was planning. The woman told him to go to Musician’s Friend and get a Sennheiser, but not a cheap one, a good one. When he left I said, “that was some good advice you gave that guy.” She asked if I was in a band and I said I was. She said she and her husband played in a band and, as if on cue, her husband, a drummer, walked in the door.
He introduced himself as Richard and said he left school when he was seventeen. He studied at Berkelee when it was still in its original location and his teacher was Louie Bellson. He went out on the road with a big band right after school. He played with the Temptations for six months, the only white guy in the band. They played the same set every night in the same order. He couldn’t take it anymore and quit. His band, “Soul Congress,” backed a long list of soul and gospel groups. They were opening for James Brown on the night that Martin Luther King was shot. Mr. Brown played a long set and wore out his drummer so he asked this guy to sit in. He said, “I’d go out on the road right now. I loved being on the road.”
