Category: Dear Diary

Dreary is a quality. Yesterday was about as dreary as it gets. We planned to visit two friends in two different hospitals, and we brought both of them some cookies from Rubino’s. We left our car in Rubino’s parking lot and walked to Rochester General to visit John. I still think of it as “Northside,” but that’s left over from when Charlie Coco‘s mom worked there and we used to pick her up after work. She couldn’t smoke at work so she chain-smoked Marlboros on the way home.

I was struck by this house on Ridge Road. I didn’t think there were any houses left there. Rubino’s and Pasta Villa are still standing, but East Ridge Road is mostly chain restaurants that we have never set foot in, like Moe’s Southwest Grill, Jersey Mike’s Subs, and Dave’s Hot Chicken. I went to Kearney for two years, and there used to be a house on the corner of Goodman and Ridge that we stood in front of while we waited for the bus. When it rained we stood on their porch. Golden Point was just across the street, where Starbucks is now.

Up at Highland, Pete got going on the many bands he played in. He inherited his uncle’s Slingerland set and was in a working band in 1962. Rock and roll at that time required both a sax player and a guitarist. Pete was the lead singer from behind the kit for the first couple of years. They played clubs in all the small towns between Rochester and Buffalo, including bars frequented by migrant workers who at that time all came from the South. In Olcott, the doorman, a Black guy, sang along with the band while they were on stage. He sang so well that they asked him to join their band.

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Despite the recent thaw, the level of Lake Ontario is about a half a foot below its long-term average. I read somewhere that more snow evaporates than melts, and we saw evidence of that yesterday as we walked through the park. Snow piles in shady areas were surrounded by puddles, and the ones in the sun were not. Trust but verify. There was, however, enough water running out of Durand Lake and under Lakeshore Boulevard that we were unable to walk along the beach without wading into the stream as it cut across the beach.

There are two kinds of witch hazel in bloom in the park. The tree at the top of the hill on Zoo Road is so fragrant you smell it before you see it. The yellow winter aconite is wide open. The pussy willow buds are in their prime. Spring unfolds so quickly. Someone has to keep track of it. We listened to red-winged blackbirds singing in the marsh and saw a pair of pileated woodpeckers making a racket overhead. And we stopped at the garden on the way back to pick our second batch of wintered-over mache.

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The first thing I remember after my colonoscopy was a nurse asking me if I preferred Lorna Doones or Fig Newtons, two brands from my childhood that I never imagined were still available. I mulled the two over long enough for her to say, “I’ll bring you both.” And they were both delicious.

Thinking of Peggi’s father and mine, who were born ten years and two days apart in early March. Both were early risers, and this week provides daylight at 6 AM. We’ll spring forward on Sunday. Before the upcoming “False Spring” 70-degree weekend, we woke up in a crystal palace with ice clinging to every branch. It sounds like it is raining now, but it’s only the ice on the trees melting and dripping on our metal roof.

We visited Pete up at the Highland Hotel and learned this bit of local trivia. Alec Wilder wrote “I’ll Be Around” for Marian McPartland in the Sheridan Hotel on 111 East Avenue. Peggi plays the song on piano. It was first recorded by Rochester-born Cab Calloway in 1942. Here’s Marian’s version.

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Like the chipmunk above, we really don’t know what to do with ourselves as the snow melts other than watch the ice slide off the roof. We walked through the neighborhood yesterday and found the mail truck (with a substitute driver) wedged up against a band of four mailboxes. A woman from one of those four houses was out there with a small throw rug that she had put under one of the wheels, and she had a bucket filled with white pellets of some sort. We offered to push and gave it three or four good tries, but the one wheel that was engaged just kept spinning on the ice. The mail truck passed us about a half hour later, and he stopped to thank us. He told us his boss had pulled him out, but in the process they wrecked all four of the mailboxes.

While we were still reading the paper, we noticed our neighbor Jared shoveling his driveway. He injured his shoulder playing tennis and normally clears his driveway with his tractor, so something was up. We offered to help. He told us his wife was having her coffee group (“the gals”) over and the battery on his tractor was dead. This was heart-attack snow, with heavy water and ice content.

We took a short break, and I asked if he would have some time later in the day to help me with a project I had been meaning to get to since we moved in. One of the copper pipes from our radiant heat setup was visible in a corner of our living room. It came out of a brick ledge below our window and went down through an opening in the floorboards — a small visual irritant that took endless speculation before we came up with a solution.

I hollowed out a white PVC board, leaving only an eighth of an inch to hide the pipe, and used that as floor molding. I had never used a router. Jared had one, and he guided me. A retired chemical engineer, he likes to think projects out completely before going ahead — just the opposite of my approach. And because this piece went around a corner, I needed to use his radial arm saw to cut the forty-fives. He has one of those. The plastic shavings went everywhere in his garage, and the tiny pieces had enough static electricity to stick to every object in sight. The longest part of this project was spent with his shop-vac roaring away.

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 I had a whole other idea for a post and I was going to use this photo with it but I found myself staring at the photo for so long it became the subject.

I took the photo in December just before Christmas. We were in the city for a few days and the newly re-opened Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan was the centerpiece of our visit. This woman was standing outside as we walked by. As I moved closer to take the photo she pointed and yelled something. I had the feeling she might have been yelling at me. I didn’t even see the ironing board she was standing behind.

I put my caption under the photo and then googled “Pigeon woman Metropolitan“ NYC. “I found a recent story from the New Yorker by Ian Frazier with this description:

“She has a folding table; an ironing board; a cart with handles at both ends that contains a dozen or more orange-and-green Fresh Direct shopping bags; a broom; some pet-size water bowls; a pair of hockey sticks; and various bread knives. She has told me that she comes from Poland and now lives in her car, which is parked nearby. Her conversation can devolve into a kind of radio-static recitation of terrible things that happened in Poland in the previous century.”

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Irondequoit canceled this weekend’s Winterfest due to extreme cold. Kathy called us to warn us that you can get frostbite in single digits. We stopped out to see my brother, Fran, who had just had a shoulder operation. His pain blockers hadn’t worn off yet so he was in good spirits. He used to work outside year round and he said, “I tell people there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.” It is Peggi’s birthday today and we went skiing.

This is good weather for diagramming sentences. Not sure how we got off on that tangent but we did. I wonder if they still teach diagraming. I loved how it made sentence structure concrete and fun.

One woman bought six Margaret Explosion cds after our gig on Thursday. She paid with PayPal. Someone who I used to play soccer with came to the gig with his wife and he gave me this picture. He is shown kneeling in front of me in the center of the photo. He was a year ahead of me and I hadn’t seen him since junior year. I reminded him we used to sled on the tiny hill in his backyard and my brother Tim got his tongue stuck to the front of his sled and he walked all the way home with it stuck. Since I have mentioned both my brother Tim and my brother Fran I’ll post a link to my first Super 8 movie. They star in it along with my brother, John.

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But I should regret that I don’t stop to proofread my entries before posting. I just read through the last five or six and found whole passages unintelligible. Distracted, I remain determined to keep track of things here.

Even little kids know mittens keep you warmer than gloves yet you rarely see adults wearing mittens. That’s their loss. Back when I was riding a bike downtown everyday for work (even in weather like this) Peggi bought me a pair of big snowmobile mittens. They look like something a hockey goalie would wear. The temperature has been in the single digits and my thumbs were getting numb while skiing so today I wore the big mittens. They are one of the secrets of the universe.

We bought new skis at REI, French skis, made by Rossignol. We had worn our others out trekking through woods and at times over pavement. I could only think of two other things we own from France. The miniature toast crackers, Petits Toast, we buy from Wegmans and my Edith Piaf 45, “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.”

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A hawk crashed into our big window in the living room. We’ve had other, much smaller birds fly into the window but this hawk rattled the house. We’re lucky it didn’t shatter the glass. The birds usually stand, stunned for a few minutes and then fly off. The hawk stood up, a bit dazed, and then moved toward a Red-bellied Woodpecker that was laying upside down near our house. The hawk stood there with one foot on the prey and after a few minutes it flew off with the woodpecker in its talons.

A few weeks back we saw the hind quarter of a deer laying in the road down near the marsh, fresh from nature’s butcher. So fresh there were no turkey vultures swarming. And on our walk today we came across this spinal column, completely stripped of its meat.

“You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” — Stephen Miller

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When we shop at the co-op we take advantage of the parking spot while we walk downtown, have coffee at Fuego and stroll along the river to the Ford Street Bridge where we cross back into Pete and Gloria’s neighborhood in the South Wedge. Pete is usually at his drawing table in the front of the house and Gloria is usually in the kitchen, at her computer or making noise with the pots and pans. We visit and laugh and move on. This time we added a stop at Axom where we chatted with both owners, Rick and Robin. We were standing in the front of the store while we talked, looking at the buildings across the street. The one to the right in my photo (above) used to be Bobby Moore’s hair salon. Everyone loved Bobby. I pointed to the low lying building to the left, with the datestone reading 1926, it was my grandfather’s grocery store in the thirties. And we all marveled at the brick building in the center.

Robin said some of the shop-owners in the Wedge were working on a history of that section of the city and I promised her I would send a link to photos my father collected on my grandfather’s three stores. The one on South Avenue was short -lived but it was a big enough deal that Jack Dempsey did an in-store appearance.

My grandfather, Raymond Tierney, was born number eight in a family of eleven. He liked to quote what he called his mother, Winifred Maloney’s poem. Whether she wrote it or just had it memorized was never made clear.

“Life is like a mighty river,
flowing from day to day. 
Men are vessels launched upon it,
sometimes wrecked and tossed away.
Some succeed at every turning,
fortune favors every scheme.
Others who are quite deserving,
have to puli against the stream.
Do your best for one another,
making life a brighter dream.
Help the tired and worn out brother,
pulling hard against the stream.”

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The streets were so quiet today. The Bills were playing and we had a half inch of fresh snow. It was cold too, around 18 degrees. I took a movie of the marsh as the sun tried to poke through the soupy grey sky. Peggi and had a short practice. Forty five minutes of making stuff up and another version of Fernando.

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Winter came before fall was finished so our snowman looks a little funkier than usual. We invited everyone on the street to dinner at our house tonight. We left an invite in the mailbox of each of the ten houses. It said we would be serving food from Rubino’s but before we got around to ordering we ran into Pete and Gloria and they suggested Papa Joe’s in Greece. So I’m heading out there to pick up trays of lasagna, gnocchi and Chicken Marsala. Papa Joe’s is new to us. They were not on our Refrigerator round-up of Rochester’s Italian restaurants.

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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.”

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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