Author: Paul

There was hardly anyone out this morning. Must have been the low temperatures and the threat of rain. The gentle waves hitting the shoreline had me in a meditative state. I could have walked all the way to Niagara Falls where my cousins are having a closed funeral for my Aunt Ann. We perfected this state while walking the coastline of Portugal last year on our third Camino.

The waves work like a mantra because they are not perfectly timed. I take that back. They are perfectly timed but not quantized. And each wave sounds different from the last. It is nothing like a drum sample. I paid 45 dollars to learn TM when I was in college. The person who gave me my mantra told me not to time it with my breath or say it in a rhythmic way but just let it be the next thought each time. This is really tough for a drummer but I got it.

Right now I would like to just drift off with these wave and let them wash this whole thing away. This is Day 59.

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I don’t know if I ever knew what my parents were discussing when I took this picture. With seven kids there was always something going on. If I had to guess I would say someone had gotten into trouble.

The last of my mom’s siblings, my Aunt Ann, has died. Her husband is the last man standing in the generation before me. They were our favorites on that side. So easy to talk to and laugh with. Interested and interesting. Her parents, my grandparents, are both in the big family picture from 1920 that I just put up on the Tierney Market page. Although she wasn’t yet born she knew these people and that link to the past is gone.

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The owners of this house on Wisner planted a different kind of grass, something that goes brown in the Fall and only comes back when you think it never will, like the early days of Summer. And then every Spring there is this green tuft of ordinary grass right in the middle of it all.

We can’t walk to the library anymore because its closed. And we used to walk to Wegmans but we do Instacart pick-ups now. When its below forty we walk in the woods and usually work our way up to the lake at some point. Above forty we are weary of brushing up against ticks so the golf course at Durand, which is closed due to the virus, has become a great place to walk. They still haven’t put the tee markers in or the flags in the holes. If you spot someone a hundred yards away you just change course. Sometimes we’ll hug the perimiter and sometimes we’ll get right out in the middle.

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I just love this title shot. YouTube picked it for me, their AI that scans your recently uploaded video for the likely best still.

In a pandemic induced sharing mood I put the rest of my Super 8 footage online (with a Margaret Explosion soundtrack) and sent a link to our former Bloomington friends, none of whom are in Bloomington anymore. We went to school there. I dropped out but hung around. This is my favorite Bloomington footage, my friends in the trailer, the kids who lived across the street and the locals on the street downtown. One of the kids playing on the hill in the beginning of the movie flashed the peace sign at me and then while downtown with Brad Fox one of the little girls there give us the peace sign. Sarcastically, of course. This was 1970 or so.

The movie, Breaking Away, depicted the tension between the college kids and the locals, called “Cutters” in the film because of all the stone quarries around town. When we were there they were referred to as “Stonies” and it was as derogatory as it sounds. For me, the real creeps were the college kids. Like the three guys in the blue windbreakers with yellow Greek letters on them who jumped out of a car and beat the shit out of me because my hair was too long.

I bought the movie camera through my father who picked it up a the Kodak store in Kodak Park on Lake Avenue. It shot film without sound in a 4 by 3 format. When I dropped the clips into iMovie the top and bottom gets cropped off so it fits the 16 by 9 format. I nave no idea what I’m missing because it still looks great.

Here is the rest of my Super 8 footage in these video clips.

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The lake is prettier than ever. We get there most days by one route or another. A wind storm is headed our way, forecast to be as bad as the one in March 2017 when we lost power for four days. We spent the day preparing. We bought gas for our neighbors generator so we can justify running an extension cord to our refrigerator. We moved the metal chairs, which we had just put for the season, out to safer ground. I managed to make enough room in the garage to get the car in. A first. We plan to sleep in the basement, on the spare mattress on the floor where our guests usually sleep. And we talked of a tofu recipe that we could do over a fire out back. Our life is more purposeful during the pandemic.

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