Category: Dear Diary

From where we sit in upstate New York we had a deep partial lunar eclipse on last night, approximately 96.2% of the moon was covered by the Earth’s dark shadow (umbra) at its peak. It was a slow burn but more dramatic than the solar eclipse we experienced in ’24.

We watched from the pool property down the street, the lot with the most sky showing. Clouds drifted by but that only increased the drama and added color. We were there when it wasn’t even clear which side of the moon would get a bite taken out of it. It turned out to be the bottom left. And we headed home two and half hours later when just eight percent of the moon was showing although at that point the rest of the moon had a soft glow to it.

We were in and out of the pool. It was warmer in but still in the seventies out. The moonlight was strong enough to read a book when it started and then not enough to take a photo as the eclipse reached its peak near midnight.

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All the picnic pavilions were full (or booked) when we walked through the park on the Fourth. These two guys were smoking meat for a party of one hundred. We stopped to talk for a bit. Peggi asked them what they were smoking, and the guy on the right said, “Just some yard weed.” We laughed, and Peggi said, “No, in the smoker.”

I was intrigued by the two gas cans hanging off the side of the smoker. They said, “It’s not gasoline, it’s cement.” And he pronounced cement like “see-ment.” He said the weight keeps the cooker from rolling over when he opens the top.

We had an invitation to a loft party downtown. The building overlooks the river and is right next to where the city sets off the fireworks. We decided to go low-key and join Kathy in her backyard overlooking the bay. The people on the other side usually put on a show for the boaters, and this year they went all out.

Today is our first day off from soccer in a month. The quarterfinals start tomorrow with only eight teams remaining. Our favorites—Spain, France, and Brazil—are all still in. I was pretty certain the U.S. team would go out when they met one of the European teams, and Belgium made short work of them. I felt sort of sorry for them, playing their best striker only after an intervention from Trump. Can you imagine how the world would have reacted if they had pulled off an upset? The guy wrecks everything he touches.

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Elizabeth told us a few times that if we ever sold our house in the city she would buy it. The thought was unthinkable, but twenty years ago it came to be.

She recently contacted us to say that two letters, addressed to us at her address, had come from a Paul Taylor. She left them between the two front doors, and we eventually picked them up. We learned Paul had moved back to the area. He included a photo of his artwork on an invitation to a dance performance he had commissioned at MUCCC.

We left the house for the eight o’clock performance just minutes after watching Spain defeat Uruguay. Our names weren’t at the door, but we went in anyway. The house was full, and we took two seats down front, close enough for one of the dancers to brush my leg. We looked around for Paul, but we could only vaguely remember what he looked like forty-five years ago when his wife, Jeanne, danced behind the screen at Personal Effects’ multimedia show at the Community Playhouse.

There were nine short pieces. Some were cringe, but most were startlingly good. A Taiko drum and woodblock piece performed in coveralls. A dancer in a backlit, scrim-covered cage performing to a spoken-word piece. Paul Taylor’s piece, performed by Claire Spenard to Jonah Kreitner’s atmospheric “Spiral Jetty,” was our favorite. Spenard opened under a blanket and, with movement that was at once physical and graceful, shed it, commanding the space in a dreamlike dance before rolling herself back up inside.

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I startled a fawn the other morning as I went out to pick up the paper. It was sleeping in our pachysandra. It jumped up and ran headfirst into our deer fence.

We went down to the garden this morning and heard a clicking noise. Something was shorting out the four strands of electric wire that surround our garden. We were prepared to find a toad with one leg on the wire or maybe a chipmunk. Sometimes they’ve been on the fence so long they are charred.

This was different.

A deer leg was pinning one of the electric wires against the metal fence, and the rest of the deer was missing. The thigh was still showing spots and the leg was small, so it must have been a fawn—maybe the same fawn.

Our garden is in our neighbor’s backyard, and they both came out at some point. Everyone had a different theory as to how the deer met its quick demise.

A few hours later a mama deer and her newborn twins sauntered by our front window.

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The Landmark Society’s spring tour took us (and hundreds of other retirees) to Beach Avenue in Charlotte where we toured four homes on Lake Ontario, the Secret Sidewalk and Holy Cross Church. We learned Beach Avenue used to run behind the houses on the north side of the street, where the Secret Sidewalk is today. And a street car ran where the Avenue is today. When the City of Rochester annexed Charlotte in 1916 they moved Beach Avenue to where is today. Some of the homes still show signs of being oriented to the north. Of course most have been either rebuilt or added onto beyond recognition.

One of the homes, our least favorite, was brand new. Solar panels on the roof, heat pump for air conditioning, an elevator, a full bar and rec room in the basement and this painting. You are not supposed to take any photos while in the homes but I couldn’t resist sneaking one of this.

The homes on the tour were spread out so we walked along the Avenue to the destinations and then back along the sidewalk with the huge back porches, decks and outdoor living areas on one side and the the boathouses and lake patios on other. The lawns all seem to run together back there. I was picturing a croquet tournament and gin and tonics but it wasn’t even noon.

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The face cords of firewood we have are normally stacked closer together than this. The stack to the left collapsed over the winter, and all this debris gathered between the rows. I started to clean it out and disturbed this snake. I kept poking him to scare him off, but he had apparently made this his home and didn’t want to give it up.

Instead of restacking the fallen row, I decided to distribute the wood to the neighboring stacks, pile them higher, and leave this opening for the new wood we have from the trees that fell on our property over the winter. This took the better part of the day.

That night the stack to the left of the snake caved in. The extra weight collapsed the support I had used, an old pallet. We tore the front end of that pile down. Peggi stood on the end of the biggest board we have and, like a teetertater, we lifted the remainder of the stack and rebuilt it.

So this is the better part of three days spent restacking firewood that had already been stacked. I’m trying to recreate that saying about firewood—how it warms you three times: when you chainsaw it, when you split it, and when you burn it. I’d like to add the days we spent restacking it.

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As we neared the end of Zoo Road Peggi said, “I bet we find people swimming today,” and sure enough we did. Mostly kids, and they seemed pretty comfortable in the water. We were unable to walk along the beach, though, because the lake level is so high—more than a foot above its long-term May average.

There was an article in our paper today that referred to Lake Ontario as the smallest of the five Great Lakes. I felt sort of slighted. I had always believed Lake Erie was the smallest. I looked it up to make sure it wasn’t a typo and found that Lake Erie is the smallest by volume, but Ontario is the smallest by surface area. Together the Great Lakes contain one fifth of the world’s fresh water. Don’t spread it around.

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This year, for some reason, we had the hardest time getting our most cherished seeds to germinate. We moved the tiny starter pots with the Padrón pepper seeds down to our neighbors’ house while we were in New York, and they sat in their sunny solarium for a week, but nothing sprouted. Fearing we had bad seeds, we ordered more from Hudson Seed. This time we kept the small pots on our bathroom floor, where they were warmed by the radiant heat. We banged into them a few times, but they sprouted in just under two weeks. And those original seeds—they eventually sprouted as well.

We’ve been chipping away at the fallen trees out back. I had to tackle this portion carefully because the big Y-shaped oak on top was only touching the ground at three points: the root ball at the top and the blunt ends, which are just out of the picture. The limb in the foreground was the most manageable, so I worked my way up it, cutting log-length sections but not all the way through because I was afraid the cut would close and pinch my saw. Mostly, I was afraid that if I shortened the foreground limb the big trunk might roll toward me.

Sure enough, my saw got trapped.

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This happens just a couple of times every year and usually in the early Spring. Big rains wash all sorts of debris, mostly natural, down the river and it gets dispersed along the shoreline at Durand. I brought home an armful and I’m letting it dry in the garage. This was my source for “Los Inmigrantes” a few years back.

We have five rows in now, down at the garden, and we potted up our pimientos de padron, jalapeños, tomatoes, kale, collards and some basil. They are in the widow. And when the Daffodils have finished we’ll plant the root vegetables, the beets and carrots.

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This monolith is in the parking lot of the town hall. It is just one of the supports for the giant cell tower that sits near the police station. I took this photo last week when the sky was impossibly blue. The last few days have been gray and chilly but perfect weather for working outside.

We’ve been cleaning up the debris out back and cutting log-length chunks off the three fallen trees. We roll those down the hill and up a board and into our car, and then drive them around the block to our woodpile. Because the trees all fell downhill, the trunks get bigger as we work our way up, and at some point my chainsaw will not be able to cut through the center, so we plan on calling Paul—another Paul—who burns wood exclusively. He has been here before with a giant saw.

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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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