Author: Paul

Two doors down from the house with the pink door, the purple bench out front and the Trump 2016 sign on the porch there is this cute little 13′ Scamp camper. We thought it was surly a vintage trailer but I looked it up when got home and found they are made to order. Now that the US Women’s soccer team is out of the Olympics we’re thinking maybe we could do a little traveling in one of these.

Our second planting of lettuce and spinach is in the ground. The seeds are supposed to germinate in 7 to 10 days and this is day four. The temperature has been in the nineties so we’ve been watering twice a day to keep the ground moist.

Every time we go go down to the garden we bring back produce. I picked our first eggplant today and few more tomatoes along with a perfectly plump jalapeño. We have enough kale for a small army. A few of our tomato plants are now over nine feet tall. I asked Peggi to stand by them so I could take this shot. Our stakes stop at six feet and I’m afraid they are going to fall over soon.

Our bumper crop could go bust if a ground hog shows up. One of our tomatoes had claw marks in it.

Politics is rude, everything about it. You don’t discuss it in polite company. You discuss it at home or with friends and like minded people. We were riding our bikes down Lakeshore Boulevard today when we spotted this gem. Political lawn signs are especially rude because there is no discussion.

My cousin used to be the first house you come to as you travel west along the lake, but then they built a house behind them, actually on the lake but the driveway runs off Lakeshore so they are the first house you come to now. And after that is the house that Ted Turner stayed in many years ago when he sailed Lake Ontario with the owners of that big grey place. This sign is in front of The fourth house after the beach where the owner spent most of the past year building a big berm around his property.

While I was taking this photo Peggi spotted the camera mounted to the tree above and behind the sign. You can see the camera in the blow-up of this photo. He was getting footage of us as we laughed at his sign. We speculated as to whether he was capturing audio or not and just in case Peggi looked at the camera and asked him what he thought of the recent Russian connections to Trump.

The last two Catholic funeral masses we’ve been to were said by priests with accents so thick it was nearly impossible to understand what they were saying. It is almost as if the church is going back to Latin, the way it was when I was serving mass as an altar boy. The church is desperate for priests as well as congregation.

With tall ceilings, cream colored walls, abstract stained-glass windows and no statues except for the crucifix on right hand side of the alter and the slim Blessed Virgin mounted to a wood panel on the left, Mother of Sorrows Church looked like a big, modern chapel, a “Spiritual Vessel” as the the type on the wall proclaimed. A Renaissance style painting of Mary looking skyward with the crucified Christ collapsed in her arms was the central alter piece. Two dimensional representations of the fourteen stations of the cross were hung on a navy blue panel that circled the sanctuary and it looked like the Yankee logo was mounted on the ceiling although I think it was a particularly decorative letter “M.”

After the mass I picked up a holy card in the foyer. I have added it to my holy card collection. It has a picture of Blessed Virgin with a small vessel on her heart with seven small swords piercing the vessel. Above the picture it read, “Devotion to the Seven Sorrows of Mary” and it was followed with instructions to say one Hail Mary while meditating on each sorrow.

1. The Prophecy of Saint Simeon.
2. The Escape and Flight into Egypt.
3. The Loss of the Child Jesus in the Temple of Jerusalem.
4. The Meeting of Mary and Jesus on the Via Dolorosa.
5. The Crucifixion of Jesus on Mount Calvary.
6. The Piercing of the Side of Jesus, and His Descent from the Cross.
7. The Burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea.

On the way out we drove by the back of the old church rectory which was right next to the abandoned Mother of Sorrows school and I took this shot. This situation could be number 8.

This old school funk band, playing on the street in midtown Manhattan, sounded great a block away. A perfect formula, pumping bass, drummer dragging the beat, scratchy guitar and soulful sax. I wish that sound, the era that Chic dominated, would come back.

We spent some time in midtown this visit, soaking in shows at the Modern, the Met and the new Met Breuer, and I couldn’t get over how good the fake Buddhists are. They look the part, shaved heads, orange robes, innocent smile, and people were giving them money. Don’t people read the news?

We walked through the park to get to the Metropolitan and stopped at the pond where a miniature sailboat race was taking place. We thought we would start with the Cornelia Parker piece on the Met’s rooftop but we had to work our way through the Roman sculpture garden, one of my favorite stops. We found Julian Schnabel in there holding hands with a young woman. He was wearing his pajamas. I got a photo of the two as they walked away. The rooftop installation, the facade of a house like the one in Psycho which Hitchcock based on a house in an Edward Hopper painting, struck me as a dumb art project but I got over that in a hurry. The house was really otherworldly against a backdrop of modern skyscrapers.

Peggi and I celebrated our fortieth anniversary over dinner at an Italian place. The waiters were Hispanic and they played early seventies pop. So bad some sounded good. Two of the worst got stuck in my head, Chicago’s “Saturday In The Park” and whoever does, “Take It To The Limit.” The playlist led to a discussion of how punk rock saved us from this shit. And then Alan Vega died that night.