Holy Trinity basketball team, mid sixties. l. to r. Paul Dodd, Alfred Williams, Jim Schneider, Albert Williams, Jim McClellan, Russ Minor’s older brother, Bernie Finch
Seems like we won a few games. We must have. Maybe St. Stanislaus. St. Boniface? Holy Trinity didn’t even have a gym. We played in the parking lot during recess while other kids smoked cigarettes in the woods. Our league games were played downtown in the Auditorium at the old CYO where the Garth Fagan dancers rehearse now. I came across this photo while I’ve been painting the six players on the 1957 Myndersian Academy basketball team. The caption above the team photo reads, “Team Faced Tough Competition.”
Our neighbors down the street asked to keep an eye on their house this weekend because they were driving down to DC to visit family. There really isn’t much to the job. Their cat has his own entry and a food dispenser that automatically refills itself. But before they left they gave us the most beautiful Thanksgiving Day flower arrangement to reward us for the task.
We didn’t watch the parade or any football and we didn’t get together with any family members. We didn’t even have turkey but we used the flowers as a centerpiece when we celebrated the holiday with four friends.
I’m not sure how people call themselves vegetarians but then eat fish. We know a few people like that and two of them were having dinner with us. Our menu Was comprised of what we all brought to the table and it was just fantastic.
We started with cheese, some stinky Bleu, Manchego and a New York Chedder and then followed that with a few tapa like portions of warmed, fresh figs with a vinegret and goat cheese dollop and then some calamari in Peggi’s homemade tomato sauce.
We sat down for the rest but the conversation never stopped. Baked potatoes, sliced but not all the way through so they were still in the form of a potato, poached white fish in a cream sauce, roasted Brussels sprouts and a kale salad made an arrangement as sweet as the flowers. And then the pumpkin pie, which baked while we ate, sent us over the edge. Somehow the night went on forever and I am thankful.
My parents weren’t home so my sister brought her grandchild over here and let her loose. I was working on some paintings so she wound up down in the studio with me. I managed to carry on but at least half, no, more that half of my time was spent as assistant to her. More paper, fresh water, bigger brush. “I’m done with this one,” she would say and I’d drop what I was doing and attend to her needs. I really got a sense of what it would be like to be an artist’s assistant. They want to keep the juices flowing and stay productive and all of the mucky muck is handled by the assistant. My work was secondary. The world is demanding dinosaurs for their refrigerators.
Margaret Explosion has a very special show lined up for tomorrow. It’s a vegetarian, as in no vocals, Thanksgiving eve performance of all new material.
It doesn’t seem fair but most of our leaves blew across the street onto our neighbor’s lawn. The weather was way warm today, near seventy, and we had some high winds which will surely bring in some colder weather. It took down the rest of the leaves so we got out there and raked the remainder, the last batch for the year, and then chopped them up with our mower.
Margaret Explosion “Disappear” silkscreened CD covers
“What was your favorite childhood food?” We were helping my father transfer funds from one account to another today when we stumbled over this question today. This is where we’ve come to, an international banking conglomerate asking us what our favorite childhood food was. We got the question wrong. Twice. We had one guess left and we would be locked out. Locked out from our god damn money because we couldn’t remember if it was “peanut butter,” “peanut butter and jam” or maybe “peanut butter & jam.”
I was thinking of the time I took too much LSD. I was nineteen and we had hiked halfway across town to someone’s house where we thought we could get some downers but he wasn’t home and things were getting really strange, strange, that is, in the few moments where I was lucid enough to realize how strange things were. My friend wanted to get to the roof of the campus library where he thought he would meet god and I wanted no part of that so I convinced Steve Hoy to take me to the health center where I came to in an an elevator with a nurse asking me, “What is your name? What is your name?” I had no idea.
Willow and milkweeds near golf course in Rochester, New York
Maybe we should stay right here for a while. There is snow to the south of us, a ton of snow to the west in Buffalo (even talk of canceling Sunday’s Bills/Jets game) and apparently snow to the east. Matthew and Louise, on their way to Vermont, turned around in Watertown yesterday and came back.
I took the photo above a few minutes ago. We usually take the path that runs into the woods behind the willow tree but the sun felt especially good today so we stayed on the fairway. There wasn’t a soul out, just the way we like it.
Nick Massa’s grandparents. Photo on the wall at Nick’s Sea Breeze Inn, Rochester, New York
One of the last pieces of life’s puzzle is a prepaid funeral arrangement. If we had any sense we would be shopping for ourselves but we were helping my parents choose between two nearby places that we chose from a list that came from a friend of my father’s. One was moderately priced and one was considerably cheaper.
My parents have chosen a green burial with a shroud and no embalmment, a “direct burial” in funeral home jargon, basically pick up, preparation and delivery to the cemetery, but one place was about twice the cost of the other. So we read a lot into the transaction in these short meetings.
Both salesmen were late. We were late for both appointments as well but the salesmen were later. I don’t hold that against them. One was slick and well spoken. One was a kid who my father said looked like he just washed his hands and sat down. The slicker one slipped when he said they would probably just wrap the bodies in a sheet unless we provided our own shrowd. And the kid didn’t do himself any favors when he got off on a logistical tangent about how they dig graves when you’re buried next to someone else. “They dig slowly with the back hoe and if they hit the top of a casket they move over a bit.” I’m sure we were all picturing a shovel going through whichever corpse went in the ground first.
I’d go with the kid but my dad will call the shots. After the meetings we headed down to to Nick’s where my mother, Peggi and I all ordered the “Italian Special.”
We are attending to our neighbor’s fish while they out of town. When the water temperature reaches 45 degrees the fish go into hibernation and lose their interest in food. The pond temp was right on the cusp when our neighbors left. Peggi sprinkled the food in this morning and they ignored it. It’s 38 degrees out there but we gain an hour tonight so I’m not complaining.
Gerry and Diana Brinkman were in full costume last night at Atlas Eats, Gerry as kitchen manager and Diane as maître d’. Their daughter is now the head chef and last night’s menu theme was Spain. The fixed price menu is served two times and we were there for the late shift. The tapas portion included Gerry’s “Tortilla Espagnola,” a recipe he shared with City Newspaper back when he was running the Rochester Club restaurant. Spain’s national dish, it is incredibly simple but tricky to do right. We still have that clipping and follow his recipe whenever we throw a party. Diana gave us some Smarties as a nightcap.
We finished the night up near the lake at Mastrella’s in Sea Breeze. We had not been in there since the seventies when we saw a five foot Elvis impersonator bring the house down. This bar is like a movie set. I couldn’t tell who was in costume and who wasn’t. I love not being able to make that distinction. It was a perfect Halloween.
View of downtown Rochester from moms hospital roomlg
My current dentist has a cute little bulldog that he keeps in the office. It seems a bit unprofessional but he pulls it off. His office is out in Webster where I used to be a patient of his father. I went out with that guy’s receptionist. The elder recommended I see Dr. Cupolo for a bridge and I liked Rocco so much I switched to him. Dr Cupolo had an interest in a bagel store in Culver Ridge for while and his son ran the Victor Grilling Company. Today his son owns Rocco, a great downtown Italian eatery. The place is named for his father.
My mom used to take the six of us (my youngest sister had not yet arrived) up to Dr. Cleary’s office in the Medical Arts Building on Alexander Street. His office was on the sixth floor with a great view of the Emergency Department of the old Genesee Hospital. They had an elevator operator back then. We’d wait our turn while we read Highlights (Find Ten Things Wrong With This Picture), and ran up and down the stairway of the place. There was a soda fountain downstairs in the pharmacy but we never had any money for that.
Dr. Cleary was old school. No novocaine. “Hang on,” he would tell us as he swung that old, slow-speed drill with a 1/4 inch bit around. He was a Red Wings fan so we talked baseball and between patients he would smoke cigarettes in the office.
I just rode my bike over to the hospital where my mom spent last night. She has a few blood clots that they are attending to but she slept well. When I walked in she had just finished a breakfast of pancakes and bacon.
Someone had looked at the weather and warned us we had better get going unless we wanted to get caught in the rain. It was our second day in Maine and of course we were headed out for another walk, this time in the opposite direction of yesterday’s adventure, out to Pemaquid Point and its storied lighthouse. Years ago my father took a watercolor class near here and they sat on the rocks at the end of the point while looking back at the lighthouse. He has the painting on the wall in his art room. The weather remained sunny. The day was filled with magic.
We found a spot where the tide had rolled large round rocks back and forth thousands of times wearing tracks in the large stone surface and rounding the bowling balls of the gods. The lanes ran downhill out into the sea and diminished into the sun. We got lost in the nonstop sound of the waves so much so that I considered infinity. Is this what afterlife looks like? Have we already moved on?
Back at Alice and Julio’s we decided not to go anywhere for dinner. Jeff prepared a knock vegetable pasta dish from on-hand ingredients. We never left the table. The night went on forever. We were lost in the rhythms of Julio’s animated Castilian pronunciation. I had a view of three of Alice’s paintings, some of my favorites. Peggi asked Julio, who has split his life two if he dreamed in Spanish or English and Julio said “both, depending on where he is in the dream.”
Buildings near Saxon Recording in Rochester, New York
What do they call those big rocks, really big rocks, that stick out of the ground in the Adirondacks and White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Green Mountains in Vermont and even in Maine? Maybe they are everywhere. There is a name for them that I have heard my father use and maybe Bob Mahoney, a geologist. We spotted a few near the side of the road. We needed internet access to find out.
As luck would have it, Alice and Julio used the term in conversation our first day in Maine.
My grandmother Tierney’s birthday party in 1950 with me in my father’s arms
We arrived a little late for our family reunion in the park pavilion. I don’t think they can really call it a “reunion” if it happens every year but it is not my call. We’re always a little late and so are most of the people in our family but this year everyone had eaten and the charcoal fires had already died down. We had thawed out some hot dogs, ones left over from another family picnic, but we forgot them. My brother-in-law offered us two left-over Hebrew Dogs, those skinny dark red links, not the fat juicy things that made this town, and we made do.
I sat next to our Niagara Falls cousins who had brought along this picture of the family. Their mom wasn’t married yet so she was pictured without my uncle. The first of seven, I was the only kid in my family at the time (upper right in my dad’s arms). My cousin, Greg, who is my age, is in his mother’s arms at the other end of the photo (see enlargement). By the time I had identified everyone in the photo and confirmed with my cousins, the meal was breaking up.
I was talking to Greg’s brother and a call from Greg came in on his phone. Greg is living in Arizona now and I hadn’t talked to him in ten years. He used to live in a house behind us on Brookfield Road and we played all the time. We double-dated and even went out with the same girl at one point, my dentist’s receptionist. He went to McQuaid and his parents threw him a graduation party where he took me aside to tell me, “Don’t tell anyone but I didn’t graduate.” He worked at Gray Metal across the street from Maracle industrial Finishing where I worked and we’d go out at night. He and his first wife bought a house near our’s in the city. He had two Great Dane’s and I went down in his basement one time and watched him scoop up the piles of dog shit with a snow shovel. He got into even larger animals and went to school to be a farrier. He shoed the Rochester Police Department horses when I was working for the City. My cousin was ready to let the call go to voicemail but I said, “I’ll talk to Greg” and he passed me his phone.
Greg was harboring some sort grudge that we were able to get past in the first few minutes and we had our own little ten-year reunion.
Produce stand in the country near Rochester, New York
It’s bounty time here in the northeast. The carefully tended gardens are offering far more than we can consume. So it was a little strange to come across this roadside stand without any corn or blueberries or peaches. Everything is in season.
We brought back three good sized eggplants from our garden with a handful of oregano and a bag full of tomatoes. Our neighbor was marveling at the beautiful purple fruit on our counter and he offered his Jamie Oliver recipe for “Mellonzanne alla Parmigiana.” His recipe suggests that you grill the eggplant slices on an outdoor barbecue, no drenching of the poor thing in egg and batter just roasted dry on the grill. We used our fresh tomatoes, some onions and parm from our brand new fridge. You bake the dish for a half an hour and it was fantastic. The eggplant was light and creamy, not heavy and greasy.
The guard behind the emergency room check-in desk yelled “Where are you going, mam?” My dad was sleeping, I was on my way home to sleep for a few hours and this woman in a blue hospital gown and socks was trying to get out. She said she just wanted to step outside and the guard said, “I can’t let you do that.” He was someone not to mess with, former military, muscle bound, busting out of his security uniform.
He looked uncomfortable, like he couldn’t even let his bulging arms relax at his side. “Did you have an IV? It looks like you did?” “Look, I just want to have a smoke,” she said. “Didn’t they give you a patch.” “They did but I just want to step outside.” “I can’t let you do that.” A fellow guard called upstairs and said, “You have a patient down here who is trying to leave the hospital.” I got out while I could.
Mark, Ann and Paul Dodd on steps of 68 Brokfield Road house in Rochester, New York
I loved Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood.” I think it is a masterpiece, an understated, big slice of life, some twelve years worth. Oddly, it didn’t feel like a movie. It was as comfortable as a daydream, the unconscious desire we all have to recapture the time when we weren’t trying to recapture anything. The long movie felt short and crystalized out of the blue with the closing line, “It’s like it’s always right now.”
“Indian Pipes” are sometimes called “Corpse Plants” because they have no chlorophyl. I always thought they were mushrooms. The ones we see around here are white when they’re fresh and black as they die. We were knocked out by the delicate purple vessels we stumbled on in the mountains.
The apartment building where my parents live had an art show this afternoon and my father held court with his paintings and sketch books. A woman brought quilts and a copy of the “American Quilts” book that she was featured in. A man brought a wooden model of the USS Ammen that started making while he was stationed on the battleship in WWII and another woman showed her abstract work. She “likes to start with nothing.” Pete Tierney, who is 101, sat behind a table with his hand carved birds. A younger resident showed us a picture of a painting her grand daughter had done. It was featured in an article about 25 artists under 25. She said I always tell my kids, “You are only as good as think you are.” It was really inspiring. I came home and got to work.
Red pick up truck near the Public Market in Rochester, New York
We felt a little guilty watching the Flash play their last match of the season on ESPN2 last night. We could easily have been downtown watching the game in person but it was a real treat to see our favorite players up close. And the Flash Mob drum section sounded especially good on tv.
The Flash lost but it was a good match with the lead changing hands a few times before it was over. All three of the Spanish Flash players were on the pitch at the same time with Adriana scoring on a cross from Wambach and Sonia Bermúdez putting a wild long shot in the upper right corner. Brittany Taylor, Zerboni Samantha Kerr were all in top form and it is always great to see Jasmine Spencer come on late in the match. I hope they’re all back next year.
Our bikes were crammed in the back of the Element when we found a parking spot on the corner of Latta and Lighthouse, right in front of Holy Child elementary school, a short block from the river and the lake. It was a gorgeous day, pure blue sky, very low humidity and maybe seventy-five degrees. We sprang the bikes, put on our helmets and followed the boardwalk up river.
We stopped in that first block to marvel at the big boats docked along the shore. The seedy part of town looked like it was getting a facelift. Was it Scuttlebutt’s or the Charlotte Social Club that just got busted for running a gambling ring? Maybe it was the place that had a great big Hemingway mural on the side of it’s building. The restaurants and yacht clubs on the east side of the river were in full summer bloom and a group of young girls was headed up river, each in a small sailboat of their own. It was all very dreamy.
We headed down a gravel path that ran right along the river but turned around where the path narrowed. We interrupted a couple there, on the ground near some bushes, that were already rounding the bend of third base and they didn’t look like they were gonna stop for us. We turned around and took the paved path down to Turning Point Park where the boardwalk runs out over the wetlands in that wide water portion of the river where they used to turn around big freight ships. Ducks, turtles and herons all call this place home. Yellow and white flowers were blooming on the Lilly pads and fisher-people with the funkiest equipment imaginable are throwing lines in the water.
The path on south side of the park took us up to Lake Avenue near Riverside Cemetery so rode just a little further to the Catholic section, Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, where we hunted down my parent’s newly carved stones.
Nageldinger grave site in Rural Cemetery, near Lodi, New York
Of course we’re afraid to talk about death. Most people don’t want the party to end or even acknowledge the inevitable. But having helped nudge my parents to get their affairs in order I have a clearer picture of the mess I would leave behind if I stepped in front of an SUV tomorrow.
Our friends, Roc and Barb, passing through town from Bloomington, had just done a project with “A Stroke of Instinct” author, Jill Bolte Taylor, and they let us know that if we checked the “donate my organs” box on our license, it doesn’t include your brain. I was trying to imagine what someone would do with my brain. And then they told us about an old friend whose father died and left a mysterious bank account which they traced back to a second family that the guy had on the sly.
At the very least, a will is in order. Rich Stim gave us a Nolo package a few years back but we never followed up with it. It came on a pc disc and we put our pc in the trash a few years back. The article in the local paper on Rochester’s Death Café noted that most people aren’t afraid to die, they just don’t like picturing the complications that lead up to it.
