Category: Dear Diary

We took advantage of Wednesday’s warm sunny weather to chew up some leaves and move a stack of firewood closer to the house. We have an electric leaf blower, not as loud as a gas-powered one but loud enough for ear protection so we each put our Home Depot noise canceling headphones on. Peggi blew the leaves from the driveway and patio onto the lawn and I prepared to chew them up with our mower, a “mulcher” with two blades, but the pull cord broke on my first tug. A couple of Youtube how-tos later I had it successfully rewound. I only mowed the lawn once this year. We have so many trees our ground cover is just scattered weeds and chewed up leaves from years past.

I don’t like listening to neighbors mowing but I like mowing myself. We used to go to my grandmothers’ on the weekends and my father had me mow her lawn while he helped her around the house. My family had a yellow push mower and because that was something I had to do I remember not enjoying the experience. In Bloomington I mowed lawns for the University. They owned rental houses all over town. I had a near religious experience on that job when a woman leaned out her window and called me over to hand me pairs of her dead husband’s socks. I left the office in the morning with my gas powered mower, mowed like a madman, hid my machine in the bushes and rode home to the trailer to hang out until quitting time. I bought my first when Peggi and I moved into a rental house together.. It was a Sears special – 100 bucks! When we moved here I mowed our rental and three or four of the surrounding neighbors’ lawns. Like Pete LaBonne, “I Mow the Lawn.”

The purple leaves above could be the last of our basil and the tomato plants are mostly brown but they’re still producing fruit. The arugula and lettuces love the cooler weather so there is plenty for salads. Our neighbor needed a cup of cilantro last night for a dish he was making and we were able to provide that. The habanero peppers go a long ways. I chop them into tiny little pieces and my fingertips sizzle when I’m done. The green leaves are mache (pronounced mosh) lettuce and we love it. We planted a row in the early Spring. It went to seed months later and now we have a whole patch in full bloom. Our Padrón pepper plants have provided us with an appetizer each night for the last two months. I guess I’m giving thanks.

“Isn’t planning a way to steal the present’s greatest mission?” – Eduardo Chillida

The beach was crowded over the weekend, as crowded as a summer day. We ran into our yoga teacher down there. His class stopped meeting in the pandemic and never came back. Apparently the space, in a grade school gym, raised the rent. Peggi and I do a little on our own but it is not the same as setting aside a block of time and forcing yourself to relax for the duration.

Minimalism always works. It maximizes the impact of the elements. I photographed Pete Monacelli’s drum set during Debbie Kendrick’s break when they played the Little Theatre Café. Yes, this is his whole set now. Pete was a master of the hi-hat. Coming up in the swing era he kept time with it. I use my hi-hat more like a noise-maker. Pete is short one leg these days so he has stripped down his uncle’s 1930’s set to just the snare and this cymbal mounted to the snare. He has great feel and still sounds like he’s playing a full set, especially when playing his beat up brushes, right hand sweeping while playing the butt end of the left hand brush on the rim. It is a wonder.

And another wonder is kids. I need reminding of how much fun they are. Their boundless energy, their openness, their wackiness are all gifts. Melissa, who plays cello with Margaret Explosion, brought her two over again for a swim and we picked up right where we left off. Our niece was here earlier in the summer with her kids and my sister brought three of her grandkids over after that. And with each visit I realize how much responsibility they are. How they need elders to draw boundaries and establish limits. That too is a gift. Having grown up as the oldest of seven these revelations all come back with ease.

We had to have our car at B&B Automotive by eight this morning. We were past due on inspection and way past due for an oil change. Peggi mentioned the brakes making noise and and sure enough they found our front brakes needed replacing. They told us it would take a couple of hours.

We usually walk to and around Seneca Park while they work on the car. Sometimes we’ll cross the river on the walking bridge and sometimes we just walk around the lake in the middle of the Frederick Law Olmsted designed park. Today we walked along the trail on the eastern edge of the zoo. There is a huge wooden fence that keeps the animals in and people out but occasionally there is a knot hole in the boards. I took this photo through one of them. Peggi made a video through another. The animals could hear us but not see us. We had a conversation.

We continued on the trail past the zoo. There was someone in the woods to our left either preaching or having a very loud conversation with himself. It didn’t sound like English. Beyond the park we hugged a trail along the edge of the river. The gorge is so wild, such steep drop offs at the edge of the trail and no guard rails. I imagine it looks just like it did when this land belonged to the Native Americans. We circled back on the other side of the park and zoo and picked up our car. A second cutoff coffee was waiting for us.

We picked our garlic a couple of days ago, about 130 heads, the same amount as last year. It won’t be enough to get us through the year but almost. It is hanging in the garage now and I have to say the garage smells great. I picked a big bunch of arugula today. It comprised about fifty percent of our salad tonight. I love how bold it is.

Back in the 80’s I would watch professional photographers like Chris Maggio tart up food before photographing it. Sometimes dyes were involved. Lighting and timing were crucial. Nowadays everybody bangs off pictures of their food. I took the photo above back in January. It looks like a hearty winter pizza. Gloria gave Peggi some sourdough starter years ago and Peggi continues to feed it even if she doesn’t have time to make bread. Lately she has been making pizza dough with it. We had a really good arugula pizza a while back but I guess I neglected to photograph it.

Once a month we park at the CoOp grocery on South Avenue, just down the street from where my grandfather’s grocery store was. Instead of going in right away we walk downtown, stop at Fuego, and then walk in a loop around downtown before crossing the bridge and heading south to the Ford Street Bridge into the South Wedge. Today we stopped to admire this brick house with the spire. Peggi looked it up on Google and and found that it was built in 1855. We thought about that for a while and then stopped in to visit Pete and Gloria before shopping.

We were out early on Memorial Day, maybe 7:30, and there was hardly anyone in the park but the dog walkers. It was a gorgeous day as the few people we passed acknowledged. We walked along the beach and saw only one sailboat which seemed odd until we realized there was no wind. As we walked up Zoo Road a black car came up behind us, traveling too fast for the park but also too close to us. We saw the owner get out of the car. He had a dog, on a leash, thank god, and he headed up the road ahead of us. I looked at the sticker on his car, a blue American flag with the words, “Support Your Sheriff” below it.

We walk faster than most people, for now, so of course we caught up to him. We were about ten feet behind him when he started yelling, barking really, at his dog. “No! ” he shouted as he yanked the leash around the dog’s neck. The dog looked like a Rottweiler and I was thinking about turning around. There was an article in our paper yesterday about a pit bull who killed his owner.

As we got closer to the guy the dog looked our way again. I didn’t want to look at the owner. He scolded his dog for turning our way and said, “I’ll teach you military style” as he yanked the dog’s leash. We got ahead of them and his phone rang. We heard him telling someone he was in the park and “had to hang up before the dog destroys someone.”

We were not sure if we would be up for going out on our first day back so we waited til we were boarding the plane in LA to buy tickets to Tony Brown’s show at Hochstein. At that point the tickets to Branford Marsalis were half price. Marsalis has been playing with the same band for a few years now and they show it. Not by being tight so much as in their willingness to move as a unit toward new vistas. They reached for it in the very first song surprising us, but we are not that familiar with him. By the third song they were taking their ties off. The drummer was a force of nature but just as comfortable playing like Denardo Coleman when doing an Ornette song. They brought the house down with Keith Jarrett’s ”Long as You Know You’re Living Yours” and the bass player stepped aside at the encore to let the Eastman’s Jeff Campbell play on Monk’s “Epistrophy.” So glad we went.

The lettuce, arugula and spinach we planted before leaving is all up. The Mache lettuce, that surprised us by coming back after winter, was about ten inches tall when we got back. We were only gone twelve days! I picked a huge bag for the next few dinners and we brought our pepper plants home from our neighbors where they were sitting in the window while we were gone.

“Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen. We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down the cost of living for American families, to unleash American energy, to bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more.“ – Lee Zeldin, Environmental Protection Agency

Do I have to say how sad I find this.

It bugs me when we pass somebody who says, “Nice day for a walk.” I always want to shoot back, “Any day is a good day for a walk.” That being said, we could not have picked a better day to walk across the swing bridge into Webster. The bridge closes on April 1 and we had not been down this way in a bit. We walked to the end of our street, into the woods, out to Culver and then down to the lake where the road gently curves and follows the lakeshore as Lake Road. In the photo above the bay is behind me and the lake is on the other side of this mound, the old Hojack rail line. We turned around at the end of the new Sandbar Park. There was a time when we walked all the way around the bay in preparation for the Camino. Turning around here would make for eight miles or so.

Culver Road is my favorite road in the city and the north end of it is the coolest. In the day it ended on Hot Dog Row. Today it has more of an international flair. The bowling alley has changed hands. The mural outside slants youthful. Their sign in the window is looking for bowling league members. The Parkside Diner was packed at noon and the Asian place was all lit up. We went to the door of Frametastic to check on Joan but a small note on the door read, “Out for Lunch.” The parking lot for the Irish bar was full. Union Tavern looked like they were open. Nick’s, where my father met his Kodak buddies for lunch for years, had a sign that read, “Open for Dinner Only.” The pizza place looked busy and Anatolia’sl was hopping. We would have had lunch at the Bayside if they hadn’t torn it down. We stopped at Don’s Original on the way back for a chocolate Almond Custard. It was stuffy inside so we sat outside in the sun.

I mentioned above that any day is a good day for a walk. Yesterday was too. We parked at the CoOp and walked downtown. The city looked like an expressionist painting.

We spent a day in the garden before getting back to “our project,” one that took us the better part of three days.

First, the garden, because that was a breeze. We went down there intending to plant lettuce and arugula but we discovered our mache lettuce, sometimes called “corn salad,” had survived the winter. It had spread from its original location so we transplanted the clusters back to where they belonged. We did a bit of weeding and and turned over the earth for two new rows of lettuce and arugula. Peggi counted at least a hundred garlic sprouts. She picked some collard greens to bring home. They were left from last year as well. We tried to do a little raking but it got too windy to keep all the leaves in one place. So windy in fact we heard and then saw the top of large white pine snap off and land in our neighbors’ yard.

Yesterday we finished “our project.” One of our oak trees fell, away from the house, and it landed in a way that one of the branches kept the tree mostly off the ground. A lot of really good firewood, except we had enough firewood. So we let the tree lay there for three years before tackling the project. I cut the branches off and we carried them down our hill and piled them up by the road. I made log length cuts in the trunk and let the chunks roll down the hill. Peggi was down there but safely off to the side, making sure there were no cars coming by. It was impossible to control where the big logs would roll. Some crashed into trees on the way down, others careened across the road. We rounded them up, rolled them up a board into our car and drove them up to our woodpile.

While we were down there I took a photo of the new road sign. It’s kind of an eyesore.

Not sure who took this photo. Kim had a journalism degree but her camera is in her lap. I’m thinking it was Rich with a timer. He looks like he just slid into place and is trying extra hard to be nonchalant. That is just a guess. Rich and Andrea had a darkroom. Peggi and I did too but there is no way I could get that comfortable after releasing the shutter.

Peggi and I had driven to Mississippi where Steve was living and the three of us got in his pickup and drove all the way out west. We slept in the back. I remember Peggi playing her sax back there while Steve drove and I rode up front, not the whole time of course, but long enough to nail the Hi-Techs recording of “Boogaloo Rendezvous” when we got back.

We stopped in LA to spend some time with Peggi’s sister and then drove up the coast to San Francisco where Kim and Dave and Rich and Andrea were living. It is time for another visit, planning stage anyway. And we are adding another leg to see Matthew and Louise in Honolulu. We will do this one by air.

Back in grade school at Holy Trinity Joe Barrett’s brother Tom coached our 6th grade soccer team. We beat the seventh and eighth grade teams and it was thrilling. I fell in love with the sport.

I went to high school at Bishop Kearney for two years and played there. I remember trying out for the varsity team and stealing the ball from the central midfielder, John Numetko, but getting kicked in the shin with his cleats. They were those hard plastic football style shoes back then and I still have a scar on the front of my leg. At the same time I was playing summer soccer in Webster at the old high school. Most of that group was older than me and I learned the European style game under Ralph Wager.

My father used to scour the FultonHistory site and he had a subscription to Newspapers.com. He was always doing research on something. On a family tree related search for info on his uncle, Paul Dodd, a semi pro ball player, he found Paul’s box scores and an article where his Uncle Paul got busted for playing craps. He also came across articles where my name was mentioned when I was playing soccer. He gave me the articles. On match days in high school my father would often stop by on his way home from Kodak and he took a few photos of our matches. About twenty years ago my high school girlfriend sent me the clippings she had saved when we were going out. So I’ve been sitting on this stuff long enough. I have posted it all here.

We had some Manchego cheese and wine back in our room that we planned to make a small meal out of but it turned out the little CDB and Beer store near our motel didn’t have any bread or crackers. We asked the clerk if there was a store nearby that was open on Sunday and he told us there was a convenience store about ten blocks south. On the way we walked by a Subway and stopped in there to see if we could buy one of their rolls.

The only employee there was wearing a mask and mopping the floor. When she finished I pointed to one of the rolls on the rack behind the counter and she took it out, put it on the cutting board and cut it in half. We said, “That’s it, how much is it?“ It became clear she didn’t speak English. I tried “solamente pan” and she looked at us blankly. She wanted to know what we wanted on it. We were thinking of the scene in “Five Easy Pieces.” Somehow she caught on that we only wanted the bread and she shook her head. “No.”

We continued on and found the 24 hour convenience store. The door was locked and there was a woman outside who told us the store was open but the clerk was going to the bathroom. He unlocked the door and we asked him where the crackers were. This was the kind of store where the owner buys big boxes from Costco, cuts them open and sells the individual packets, the way they sell one cigarette in some stores, so we picked out a packet of what looked like Keebler Club crackers, no label, just a clear package. At the counter. He told us the packet was one dollar.

It was getting dark by the time we got back and I took the photo above.

We only crossed paths with three other x-country skiers today. The skate skier that wizzed by us said two words, “so good.” With three or four inches of fresh snow the conditions were excellent and it only got better once the groomer reconditioned the trails. This could be the best year yet for us.

I have not worn this playlist out yet. Compiled from the stack of 45s near our turntable. Spotify has clean copies!

We have a fresh 7 or 8 inches since I took this photo. The snow was so deep yesterday we didn’t even make it up to the lake. We could hear it roaring though, big waves crashing on the ice mounds that have built up along the shore.

We heard five bands in the last six days. Kahil El’Zabar at Bop Shop, again, maybe the twentieth time we’ve seen him, New Dawn Trio at Sager-Stoneyard Pub (the crowd had no idea how good the band was), the guitar/cello duo Wren Cove at Red, White and Brew on State Street and later that night, Debby Kendrick Project at the Little Café. On Saturday we caught up with Daniel Aloysius King and Los Pajaritos, as close as we are going to get Spain for a while.

On our down time we watched “The Girl with the Needle,” on Rich’s recommendation. Easily last year’s best movie.

This house, a block behind the World of Inquiry School No. 58 has been torn down. My grandfather grew up here with ten siblings. He and two of his brothers opened a store, Tierney Market, at the intersection of North Street and Hudson Avenue. My grandfather would walk to work. I am so happy they gathered in front of their house to pose for a photographer on their parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. Could they have imagined we’d still be looking at this photo today?

The stories we heard of Pa’s drinking and abusive behavior don’t exactly jive with this photo. The couple reached the half century mark! My mom, Mary Tierney, wasn’t even born when this picture was taken but her oldest sister, Rita is shown in the lower left. She was the first child of my grandfather, Raymond Tierney, top left, and his first wife who died in childbirth. My grandfather rather quickly married my grandmother, upper left and by all evidence they had a wonderful marriage unlike Ma and Pa. I still remember my grandmother in her 90’s saying “I miss Ray.” I miss him too.

Years ago we decided to strap ice cleats on a pair of worn out walking shoes and just leave them on the shoes for days like today, Christmas, with a thin layer of fresh snow on top of icy streets. At the bottom of the steep hill on Hoffman we ran into Daminika. She rolled down hr window to say hi. She was wearing a headband that looked like a Christmas wreath. Peggi said, “”I like your headband” at the same time as I said, “I like your halo” so Daminika said, “What.” We laughed and pointed to her head. She said, “I hate Christmas. I’d rather be out skiing.”