PopWars

Bill and Geri’s neighbor’s are moving. This might be the time for someone to snag the white, wrought iron love seat that sits in their neighbor’s front lawn. It looks like a romantic rocket launcher for memory laden dreamers.

I enjoyed Michael Kimmelman’s article in the NYT this morning and passed it along to my father and our Madrileño amigo, Julio. A relatively inexpensive park built on top of a newly buried highway that had once torn the city apart with 1970′s style urban blight is transforming the lives and livelihoods of Madrileños.

The City of Rochester recently lost it’s bid for state funding of the “Death To The Inner Loop” project in Rochester but this this is not the time to put this movement on the back burner. Why should the state have to pay for this? This is a money maker. Let’s bring the canal back to the city center and fill in the portion of the Loop between East Main and Monroe. This will transform the lives and livelihoods of Rochesterians. Mr. Kimmelman will be back to do an article on this bustling cultural center.

Last time I posted a picture of a deer Steve Piotrowski painted a picture of it and used it as his holiday card. The card arrived today and is stunning. I’ve known Steve since our Holy Trinity days. We were in a split class together, 5th and 6th in the same classroom, about fifty kids in the class.

We were just talking about Catholic school at dinner last night. My memories of it play like a Fellini movie and I have a deep well of stories but they go over best with other one time Catholics so I’ll restrain myself.

We drove out to Eastview Mall for Lord & Taylors “Friends & Family Sale”, whatever that means, with our email coupon. We did the same thing last year, the last time we were here, and we ran into the same two people that we ran into last year, a married woman and her male “friend”. Peggi bought some jeans and I couldn’t find anything. I have better luck at Sears or the Salvation Army’s Thrift Store.

We drove home through Pittsford and then Brighton instead of hopping on the damn expressway and we took a few detours to look at the lights. This house on Knollwood Drive right near Oak Hill Country Club, home of the 1989 US Open, had these life size,”life size” is not right, human sale snowmen, “snowmen” is not right, snow people. One for each member of the happy extended family (click the photo to see the whole thing). Or maybe the whole clan lived here. The house was gigantic.

Trees are so theatrical! And much more so when they’ve lost their leaves. Their exaggerated gestures tell you which way the wind the blows, where the light is, who’s the toughest, how the ground rolls. And I just love this reduced palette of browns and grays.

We have a leaner out back, a widow maker. It’s very big but it’s dead. It’s bark is pealing, the woodpeckers have had at it but it’s oak and worth burning. We were planning on taking it down yesterday so we stopped down at our neighbors for some practical advise before we tried this one. He looked at it for a while and suggested we wait until it falls over or the wind blows it down. He thought it was too dangerous to work under and he was quite certain we would cut it at the base and pull it away with a rope tied to the trailer hitch on our car only to have it slide off the trunk and still be hung up. He’s a lot more practical the us but not as much fun. I’ve been thinking about ways of throwing a rope around the top of the tree somehow and then pull it until the tree breaks below where it’s hung up and then maybe the trunk would just fall over like was going to do when it got hung up. We’re going to sit on this one for a bit.

We thought this guy moved away or went on the wagon or died maybe but he’s still around. At least he has slacked off a bit. These are the first cans we’ve found in months. Same guy for sure because the 22 ounce Budweiser cans were in the exact same spot. They look kind of Christmasy.

We often smell deer before we see them and sometimes we’ll hear them before we spot them but usually we just catch a glimpse of them “hightailing” it. They stick their tail in the air and puff it out while prancing away. They know we’re not hunters and that there is no hunting around here so some of them are pretty cocky. This guy stomped his leg at us.

I was headed out to pick up the paper but met Rick Simpson at the door this morning with our paper in hand. He said he had already grilled Bob Mahoney about the trophies that someone left in our yards over the weekend. Rick got bowling related ones and I got basketball trophies carefully arranged in the horseshoe pit. This is the second visit from the “midnight trophy prankster”. We found a bunch a few years ago and suspected Rick and Monica of planting them. I’m thinking Rick planted this new batch in both yards to throw us off the scent.

Rick is a bowler and a good one at that. I was not much of a basketball player. I’m still open to any new clues.

Watch Pete LaBonne’s “Trophy Bowler“

I stop at “So Many Records” every morning. First audio of the day and it often gets me time traveling, mostly in a backwards direction but not entirely linear, more like the opium fueled dreams of Robert DeNiro’s character in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon A Time In America.” The older you get the bigger your memories play in your present. The only reggae we had when we first met Kevin in 1976 was Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff. I am one of Kevin’s friends who was blown away by the “THIS IS REGGAE MUSIC (Volume 3)” collection that Kevin talks about in yesterday’s post.

I think we might have walked in on somebody’s play at the top of the big luge hill in Durand Eastman. The lighting was so dramatic and the trees were posed so theatrically. We just kind of stood there. It was a slow moving play but it didn’t last long.