Category: Dear Diary

Some tree trunks grow into two trunks and sometimes three, dividing just a few feet from the ground. They are always compromised. Moisture and debris gather in the crevice and the two or three trunks lean away from each other seeking light of their own. Most of the growth on the separate trunks is weighted toward the lean. The trees are beautiful but doomed by gravity. We have seen so many of them split apart with one trunk crashing to the ground whether we were there to hear them hit or not.

We had seen the split in this one and knew it was on borrowed time so it was no surprise to find it laying across our walking path. It would be a ski path if we still had winter around here but it was 60 degrees today. It wasn’t just crossing our path it fell along the path so it would have been impossible to ski around without stopping and taking off our skis. We had to address this problem but we needed to enlist an engineer so we stopped down at Jared’s.

We had our chainsaw in our wheelbarrow along with the oil and gas containers and Jared contributed a couple of wedges, a maul and a short handled sledge hammer. We spent a good part of the afternoon making strategic cuts in this one hundred foot tree. You can see how the bottom part of the tree was hovering above the ground. It had fallen into a few other trees and was hung up but spring loaded between the trees. Many of our cuts resulted in surprising releases. A most enjoyable afternoon.

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My cousin, a nun, drove in from Erie for my dad’s service. She was one of the first guests and she came right up to me, took both my hands, and said “Just want to let you know I’m praying for your dad.” I looked at her blankly. My mom’s words from years ago, when people were praying for peace, came back loud and clear. “I wish they would stop praying and just do something.” I love my cousin and know she meant well.

We were picking songs for the celebration and my sister, Amy, suggested we include Mel Torme’s “Brooklyn Bridge.” My father loved the song and had a lifelong fascination with the bridge. We started the service with it. Qued it up just before the final guests were seated and only then did it strike me as the perfect allegory for passage.

My uncle was next with a poignant Thomas Merton quote. I had scoured my dad’s computer for quotes that he liked or ones he had used in past Christmas cards. We included a couple of G.K. Chesterton beautys in the program and arranged for others to be read aloud.

My father left the church back in the sixties and by chance a priest, who had a reputaion for pushing the church to the left in that same period, lives in the same apartment building as my mom and dad. His Christmas tree caught on fire last year and he almost burnt the place down. My parents never met him but my dad was aware of his reputation. I asked my dad at the end of his life if he was interested in seeing Father Donnelly and he said he was so I gave him a call. I tried to get him up to speed on my dad’s small “c” Catholic thing and I think their Hospice visit went well.

When my dad passed I asked Father Donnelly if he would do the homily at the service and of course he agreed. I told my sister Amy I was uncertain as to where he would go with the thing and she suggested I tell him that nature was my father’s religion, and her’s too for that matter. I called and tried to describe what it was like to to walk in the woods with my father. His sense of wonder. And I sort of broke down trying to relay it.

Father Donnelly found a perfect theme. Being observant and fully present and being creative, especially, is enough. The subtext being you don’t have to spout scripture or swallow dogma. Living a meaningful life is enough for god.

People shared thoughts and stories about Leo. I was so proud of my six siblings. Each one spoke eloquently, a fitting tribute from their own experience and from the heart. I did have a favorite summation though and that was Peggi’s.

About six months ago my father heard someone sing Danny Boy at one of his Kodak luncheons. He loved it and said the guy who sang it told him he knew Peggi and me. I figured it was Ben and asked my father if he would like me to ask him to sing that song at his funeral. My father said, “That would be nice.” Bob Mahoney took this picture of Ben Mac An Tuile singing Danny Boy” at the close of the ceremony. Peggi and I are sitting on the altar to the left of the lectern. It was a perfect send off.

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My dad used to read bedtime stories to us and at some point I noticed he didn’t have a book in front of him. He was making the stories up. And they were better than the ones in the books. As kids we watched in awe as he painted Disney characters on the heat ducts in our basement. Weekend outings were walks down Atlantic Avenue to look at the trains, real adventures.

He saved some money on our new house in Webster by paneling the family room and the bedroom above it himself. He involved us in the whole process, by betting candy bars on whether the pieces would fit. He dragged a dead tree home and planted it in our backyard. It was beautiful but he took some heat from the neighbors. He hand-dug a built-in swimming pool in our backyard. I don’t remember being much help. He hung four Rouault prints in our living room, a vivid early art influence for me.

My dad embraced technology and was an early adapter. He let me borrow a half megapixel, digital camera, one that Kodak was developing. It was the size of a lunch bucket. He had a Mac II before we did.

We never knew what my dad did for a living because most of his work at Kodak was classified. He did some freelance work at night and I had the opportunity to work with him on slideshows for a computer chip maker. This high-tech company would bring their top scientists into the conference room and they’d describe the advantages of their newest technology while my dad sketched. He had an amazing ability to visually simplify complicated processes. I could sense the respect others had for him. These were high pressure jobs with insane deadlines and Leo was having fun!

His favorite saying was, “I can’t talk without a pencil” Flow charts were his way of organizing the world. He made one on his iPad a couple of weeks ago in Highland Hospital where he laid out the chain of command for the doctors in charge of his care.

Leo was incredibly active in retirement. He was always doing a research project, presentations or websites. I was his tech support and I got drawn into his many projects. We took a painting class together for twenty years. He called it “therapy.” Getting to know Leo in all these situations, not just as my dad but as an interesting and unique human being, was a real treat. It was a privilege to be able to help him near the end of his life.

Leo’s computer is at our place now because he asked us to finish a few projects. He is still getting email. LeoDodd.com is still online and there are plenty of new paintings to post. The wildflowers in Edmunds Woods will still come up again this year. But as Leo would say, you’ll have to get there early in the Spring, well before the leaves fill in.

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Hadn’t had a chance to walk in a few days so yesterday’s jaunt through the woods felt like recess back in Holy Trinity. Our most travelled route even felt brand new, especially so when we discovered Peggi’s favorite white birch had fallen.

Peggi did a few paintings of the eye-like knots in the bark and we’d marvel at the tree, the biggest in this birch stand on top of a ridge, each time we passed. They are funny trees. The bark is impervious to rot, perfect for lining Native American canoes. Thet look fine one day and then fall over the next.

My siblings, Peggi and I found a new home for my mom today. Peggi and I plan to drop off the application, the PRI and POA forms in the morning. The admissions assistant, who gave us a tour this afternoon, was perfectly professional until she went off the rails in answer to a question about the food. Something about the chef serving peas and pimentos that she found very odd.

Meanwhile my dad is spending his last days in a different nursing home, one that doesn’t separate their hospice and dementia clients. There’s a woman in a wheelchair who does laps of the hallways while talking a blue streak. She is absolutely delightful, David Greenberger material, but she tried opening the door to the stairs last night and set off a painfully loud alarm that no one seemed to know how to turn off. She told us she “was the only man in her family.” And there’s a man who wanders the halls while pulling his shirt up over his head. He went down the elevator with some visitors the other night and wound up in the basement. He was perfectly happy but the staff freaked out.

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We were cc’d in on an email from the people at the end of the street. Their dog had been missing since yesterday and they were asking the neighbors to keep an eye out for it. Earlier we had noticed a dog’s bark that sounded like it was coming from the woods behind Rick and Monica’s house. It wasn’t Rick and Monica’s dog because they are out of town. And it wasn’t the sharp, shrill, shriek of the next door neighbor’s dog. It must have been the missing German Shepherd.

We called the owners and told them their dog might be down in the woods. We were heading out for a walk anyway so we met the neighbors out front before we headed down the path into the woods. A dog was barking. Sounds bounce around down there and it is often hard to tell where they are coming from. The neighbors found their dog inside the dog pen behind Rick and Monica’s house. The dog had somehow gone through the gate and then managed to close it behind him. He spent the night in the pen.

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We stopped in Rubino’s this afternoon looking for something special for Christmas Eve dinner. We usually have a group over, my brother and his family up from New Jersey and our friend, Duane, from Brooklyn and whatever family members we can round up. Rubino’s was mobbed so we just took in the scene and left, but not before pausing before a “Pray for Me. My Wife is Italian” t-shirt.

For the last few days we had lunch at McCann’s Local Meats on South Clinton. It is close to Saint John’s. They have a lot more than meat but meat certainly takes center stage. It could be the best deli in town. We were there in the off hours and the owner was sitting at the counter, a big guy in a blood splattered apron. I told him my grandfather was a butcher and owned a store further down the street, where the Indian grocery store is today. I said I couldn’t get over how much the the tools of the trade have stayed exactly the same, the conical roll of string, the big roll of paper to wrap the meat cuts in, the hooks for the sides of beef, the band saw, the hanging sausages, the white enamel display case that my grandfather stood behind when he handed me a thick slice of liverwurst.

A hospice aide came up to sit with my father for an hour so we took a walk in Highland Park. As beautiful as the clear blue high sixty degree day was I worry about all the flowering fruit trees. Will they blossom again when Spring really comes? We walked through the Poet’s Garden and found a bench from 1916 with “To live in the hearts that know love is not to die.” It’s from the Scottish poet, Thomas Campbell, and it really hit the sweet spot.

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Circumstances led my father to St. John’s Nursing Home. His room overlooks Frederick Olmstead’s Highland Park. The glass conservatory is a stone’s throw from his window. I opened that window to let the bird sounds in but all I got was traffic so I found a website with loon and wood duck sound samples and played them for my dad. I left the window open all night in hopes the traffic would die down. It’s been so warm here that next year’s cherry blossoms are already in bloom.

The home is sort of open plan. People on hospice are next door to multi-year residents. Dementia patients wander the halls and some of them do so many laps of the halls each day they are bound to live forever. The staff leads groups of people to the tv room so one person can keep an eye on the lot. They call the floor a “neighborhood” and there are common areas for eating or playing cards. These photos are under a clear plexiglass clipboard in the game room. They were arranged just so one day, scattered on the table top the next, and then right back in place today. They creep me out and I plan to ask the staff about them.

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Up in the hospital last week my dad reminded me that he had a Morandi book that I should take. I had recently emailed him a few photos that I took in Chelsea of some Georgio Morandi paintings in the Zwirner Gallery. He had mentioned this book a few times and I was pretty sure I had already borrowed it and never returned it. I told him as much.

A few posts back I mentioned this new trail in Brighton that runs from the town hall on Elmwood through the woods and meadows to Westfall Road. A big sign at each end identifies it as the Brickyard Trail. This piece of land was saved from over-development because there is standing water on the property. It is not a real wetland. There is only standing water here because the brick makers of yore removed layers of clay leaving big depressions of unporous soil.

My father has long championed Brighton’s vanished brickyards. In fact he has been somewhat of a lone wolf on this subject. He was unable to attend the groundbreaking ceremony for the trail and the last time I took him over to the trail he couldn’t get out of the car. But he had me get out to talk to the surveyors to make sure they let someone in the town know if they came across a trolley track or any remnants of the old brick making facility, the one he had been reconstructing in his architectural drawing program.

I was coming home from Saint John’s where my father in in hospice, and I decided to stop and look at the trail. It is as wide as a road now and covered with stone. There is even a bridge over the small creek. I tried to find the old junkyard that I had spotted in my last visit and off to the side of the road I saw a small cluster of antique bottles. The workers had set these aside for my father. I cleaned them up and posed them for a Morandi-like photo and showed it to my dad this morning. He was thrilled.

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Peggi and I went to our first yoga class in a month. It has been busy. The Yacht Club, overlooking the lake at the mouth of the river, is the perfect setting in any season and Jeffery, who ad-libs his classes, decided to do a restorative class. Man, did that hit the spot.

We took my mom up to see Leo today. They had been apart for the last week and their reunion was really sweet. Not a dry eye in the house. They held hands for a few hours.

Peggi spotted Father Donnelly outside the door to my mom’s apartment and we asked him if he could stop up and see my dad. My parents left the church in the late sixties, back when they turned the altar around and dropped the ancient Latin nonsense. My parents left because those meager Vatican II changes were not nearly enough. They started their own inter-denominational church called the Servant of God Community and when that fizzled they looked to nature.

My father remains a Thomas Merton, small “c” catholic and there is a newspaper with the pope’s picture on it on my dad’s drawing table at this moment so he is optimistic. As my mom left he told her they would be together some day.

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My father made the mistake of trying to pick my mom up when she fell. He fractured a vertibrae in his back and that set off a chain reaction of pain. This was four months ago but the pain was especially bad yesterday so his doctor squeezed him in before the start of his regular office hours. My father was still sleeping when I stopped by to pick him up at 6:30 and I hated to wake him. The doctor is very thorough and he did what doctors do, he ordered a battery of tests. Cat scan, blood tests, x-rays, bone scan and a urine test. He also prescribed pain killers and muscle relaxers to make my dad more comfortable.

The bone scan was a two part experience. He was injected with a radioactive dye and told to return a few hours later for the scan. The nurse took my father back and said it would take about an hour. She told me to sit in the waiting room and I told her, “I can’t handle the soap opera” (playing on the tv.).” She said, I know what mean. You could always wait in the hallway and I’ll find you. I read the paper which I had fallen behind on. The San Bernardino mass shooting story was on the front page. A guy standing across fromsaid, “So that story is plastered all over the front pages. Just what they want, more attention.” “Shoot the messenger,” I thought.

I went back in the waiting room and sat down. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? was on the tv. I got sucked into it and before I knew it my dad came out.

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I was taking our trash out to the street last week when our neighbor reminded me there was nourish pick-up that day because of the holiday. I thanked him and wheeled it back. The day after the holiday I was still in my pajamas when the Waste Management truck came down the street. I dressed quickly and carried our two recycle bins out to the truck. We usually separate our paper and plastic even though another neighbor, one who enjoys engaging the trash truck operator in conversation, told us that we no longer have to separate the two. It all gets done automatically at the facility.

For years we have been putting the flimsy plastic bags that our newspapers come in in the box and we had those shrink-wrap and the seal they use under yogurt tops and a plastic bag from some take-out all in our our box of plastic. I hand the box to the operator and he looked inside of it and said, “Plastic bags are not recyclable.” Incredulous, I said, “They’re not?” He looked right at me and said, “No, they’re not.” Plastic bags made of recycled plastic are not recyclable? What am I missing?

Garbage Man

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One of my earliest memories is being outside Good Counsel Church when my aunt and uncle were married. She was my father’s older sister and she worked as a nurse at Saint Mary’s hospital where I was born. My father tells me she was our first baby sitter. She was my godmother too, not that that amounted to much. Guess she would have taken me in if something had happened to my parents. She did send me a gift every Christmas and that was special.

She was special too, the sweetest, kindest person I have ever met. She met my uncle in the hospital after he had a farm accident. They lived lived in 200 year old house at Starkey’s Corners near Dundee and Seneca Lake. Their place, the big red barns, the cows, horses, goats and chickens was heaven when we were kids. No matter how hard we tried to dude up, boots, jeans and cowboy hats, my uncle would laugh and call us a bunch of “city-slickers.”

My aunt died over the weekend and I will miss her. That is her, above, with my father on the running board of my grandfather’s Model T.

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It has been espcially clear around here lately, very low humidity, so we rode our bikes down to the lake. There were a lot of people strolling on the beach and a guy who appeared to be alone taking selfies with one of those sticks. He was turning around with the stick extended and the phone attached to the end. We watched him for a few minutes and walked out to the end of the pier.

Three kids on one jet ski were riding back and forth in the high waves and then they suddenly made a beeline back through the channel to the bay. Peggi guessed that one of them had bit his lip. We walked the pier back to shore and that guy was still taking selfies. If I had my camera I would have taken a picture of him but all I had was my iPad mini and it just can’t hack those harsh lighting situations.

I sent my Sony pocket camera in for service. It had oily looking spots in the same place on all my photos. The warranty people had the camera for five weeks and when they returned it I was only able to squeeze off a few shots before another bizarre computer glitch-like problem appeared on the screen. I took it out to Rowe where I bought it and they didn’t even want to look a it. Nobody knows how to fix cameras anymore. They did offer to send it back to the warranty place again.

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 I took this shot from the deck on the roof of the Capron Street condominiums downtown. A little further to the north, off to the right of this picture, is the Broad Street Bridge and beyond that the Main Street bridge. There is a plan in the works to re-water the aqueduct under the Broad Street bridge, to remove the road surface and let a portion of the Erie Canal flow over the Genesee River again as it did a century ago. Like so many European cities this center city attraction will be a year round magnet. Let’s make it happen.

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Once my grandfather retired, well into his eighties, he would hold court from a green chair in my grandparents’s living room. Near the end of his life he was pretty much living in the living room. I remember helping him to the bathroom and then helping him get up off the toilet. At the very the end he was just lying in a bed in the middle of the living room, groaning in pain. I asked my mother, “Isn’t there anything they can do to help him?” She said, “He’s dying” and she said it a way that struck me as “He’s dying, you idiot.” My mom was hard core. And she made it clear that dying at home was the way to go. She said she hoped she would be able to do the same thing.

Well, you are hardly ever as lucid as my mom was when you get to the late stage. Today, she asked point blank. “Paul, what is going to happen to me?” I laughed and said “No one knows what’s going to happen to anyone. We could leave here on our bikes and get run over. No one knows what’s going to happen to them.” Sort of a cop-out on my part and not exactly what she wanted to hear but the best I could do on the spot.

She is not happy now. Her legs bother her. She sleeps to escape her uncomfortableness and she told me she feels as though this is happening because of something that she did. She says “I feel as though I did something wrong.”

I told her she did nothing wrong. “This is what happens in old age. People don’t live forever.” There was a picture of my grandparents, her parents, near where we were sitting and I handed it to her. She studied it for a bit and I said, “Your mom and dad are gone. They died. No one lives forever. That’s life.”

She worries about everything and the best I can do is to. say, “Just don’t worry about it.” I wish I was as hard core as my mom.

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Our neighbor has a little project going on, one that requires a dumpster. I asked him if I could photograph their dumpster. He said, “What?” I repeated the request and explained that I photograph dumpsters. I said, “I have a collection of them.

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We were maybe an hour and a half out of the city headed toward Grand Central on a Metro North train making last minute plans to hook up with Duane when he got out of work. He had some shopping to do in the East Village so he suggested meeting down there. It occurred to me that we would be in Greg Highlen’s neighborhood so I emailed Greg (he and we are some of the only people I know without a cellphone) and he said he could meet us in Washington Square Park. I was able to text Duane back minutes before we went underground and magically all three parties found each other near the fountain under the arch in the park.

It was a gorgeous day, sunny and cool, like one of those trippy Spring afternoons in Dunn Meadow on IU’s campus. Duane and Greg had never met but hit it off and between their conversations Peggi and I talked Bloomington ’69 – ’72, the years we hung together.

When I first met Greg he was an art major living not in a dorm but in his studio in one of the Fine Arts buildings. He talked of the trailer as a creative hub and despite downsizing his art collection has hung on to a copy of Rich Stim’s “Trailer Tails.” By chance we ran into Greg in the Village in the early eighties but hadn’t seen him since. Now he’s on top of the art world, living in the same fifth floor studio apartment for the last thirty eight years.

Before we met in the park I joked that we looked exactly the same. We didn’t but we sure acted the same.

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