Category: Dear Diary

We watched a fox for a bit until he got suspicious of us and darted into a hole. And there is a crop of deer that just don’t have any reason to be afraid of people. But as we cut through the park we came across a large four legged animal not far from the “Dogs Must Be On A Leash” sign. His presumed owners were lagging behind. We cautiously watched the dog before proceeding and shouted up to the couple, “Is that your dog?” Well, the dog must have just taken a dump (we didn’t see that) because the guy then walked ahead and scooped something into a bag as if we caught them not picking up after their dog. We asked if they could put the dog on a leash and they said what every dog owner says, “He won’t hurt you.” I said, “We’ve been bit twice” and the woman said, “Maybe it’s because you act afraid.” I thought, “Fuck you” and said, “No, it’s because we’ve been bit twice.

This is not a “which comes first, chicken or egg” situation. The first time I was bit I innocently put the back of my hand down for a dog to sniff. The dog grabbed my hand and I couldn’t get it out without ripping my fingers to shreds.” The second time I was bit my neighbor’s new “Seniors for Seniors” dog was apparently “protecting” my neighbor while I talked to him. The dog bit me on my ass.

This may be just a coincidence but the only car parked near the “Dogs Must Be On A Leash” sign had “Don’t Tread On Me” bumper sticker on it. Is there a dog libertarian movement underfoot?

I had a dream, nothing as rich as Dr. King’s, about a new client we had taken on. We had agreed to tackle the task at hand and were trading contacts when they learned we didn’t have a cell phone. How can this be in this day and age? “What if your car broke down?” The ending is fuzzy but I had a sinking feeling when I woke up. I think we lost the clients.

I did a little running around with my dad. Most stops had to do with doctors, a check-up, blood test and new batteries for his hearing aids. We stopped for lunch at one of his favorite haunts, a Jewish delicatessen called Fox’s. My dad ordered “Balogna & the Beast” and a root beer. I had a sandwich called “My Generation” and a chocolate egg cream. This place is only open for lunch yet it always crowded. My dad bought a chocolate cookie to go for Peggi on the way out.

It used to be five bucks for a load of stone. The Penfield quarry now charges ten but it is still a steal. Peggi and I shoveled a ton (literally) of crushed stone into our neighbor’s pick-up yesterday. There are about ten different size stone piles here to choose from. We filled the truck bed with the finest grade and then loaded ten buckets or so of stone that was about two inches in diameter. We’ll use the crushed stone on our road and the course stone will go down in a drywell that we plan to dig for better drainage near our mailboxes.

I shoveled a lot of stone when I was working for Mitchell Construction Company in Bloomington. I was on a three man crew that built forms and poured concrete for garage floors and sidewalks. But before we finished any concrete we had to shovel dump truck loads of stone into the forms.

The boss of our crew was named “Frenchie.” He had a party boat that he and his wife rode in on one of Indiana’s manmade lakes in the summer. They drank tomato juice and beer cocktails. The other guy on my crew was named Wayne Anderson. He turned us onto Al Green. The only reason he was hired was because the 30 person company needed to have at least one black employee in order to bid on University jobs. I remember one of the guys on the carpentry crew asking me, “What’s it like working with a nigger?” The owner of the company drove a convertable Mercedes sports car like Robert Wagner in “Hart to Hart.”

All that came back to me while I was shoveling.

Hope Solo was back in the goal against the Flash tonight. We stalked her before the game. It was her first game since her arrest for domestic violence last weekend. She has apologized to her fans and says “adversity has always made us stronger.” Can’t argue with that.

Abby is still out for the Flash and wasn’t even in town but the Flash are playing better than ever. They were up 1-0 tonight against first place Seattle but then kind of ran out of steam in the second half before going down 2-1.

When it came down to it, there was no question. The Copa Mundial came before Jazz Fest so we missed the first part of last night’s musical offerings.

Peggi has stayed in touch with her junior high swim mate and we stop by to see her whenever we get back to Detroit. A few years back her husband was telling us how he had heart attack at a Red Wings hockey game and the doctor told him he shouldn’t watch any more hockey. Serious. I was thinking about that scenario today as we watched the US lose the 2-1 lead they had seconds short of the final whistle. I was exhausted by the end of the match.

I’m keeping track of the Jazz Fest over here.

That title is a lie. The summer calendar is just jam-packed. And on top of the social events we have the World Cup and Jazz Fest at the same time. The weather is telling you kick back and get out there at the same time. I can handle it.

Got to get down to the garden and check on these wispy little leeks that we put in before the thunderstorms.

The guy in the center here is Paul Dodd, my great uncle. I wasn’t named after him. I was named after Saint Paul of the Cross, on whose feast day I was born. The guy on his left is my father’s father, my grandfather, Leo Dodd. My dad was named after him. And the fellow on the right is their brother, Gus Dodd.

Leo owned a restaurant on the corner of West Avenue and Thurston Road. It was a speakeasy before it was a bar. Paul played semipro baseball as a catcher for Gilsons. My Dad, Leo Jr. sent me a 1906 newspaper article recapping a game in which Paul hit a home run at Sheehan’s Field, where the twelve corners in Brighton is today. 300 fans were in attendance and Gilsons won. Gus was by all accounts a fun-filled, free spirit. His granddaughter, Judy Farrell, (sort of a cousin of mine) sold my parents’ house a few months back and she told us a few stories.

My dad also found this POLICE COURT entry on Paul Dodd from Rochester’s Democrat & Chronicle:
Paul Dodd. arrested a week ago on a charge of violating section 3 of the city ordinances by shooting craps on the street claimed in police court yesterday that he was not playing a the time, and Judge Ernst let him off with a caution. When the case was first called, last Friday, the judge wished to have it established that the game was one of chance, but no one could be found who would own up to knowledge of it. Yesterday Detective McKelvey took the stand and demonstrated that fortune plays an important part in throwing dice according to the rules of “seven-come-leven.“

It is no secret that the older you get, the closer together your medical appointments are. You need a good calendar to keep track of them all and someone to take notes. I am that someone, taking notes on my iPad when my father meets with his doctor. After our last visit we stopped by CVS to fill a new prescription and I picked up a New Yorker from the magazine stand while the pharmacist filled the order. I had already looked at the issue and took a chance that my father would like the long excerpt from Roz Chast’s brilliantly honest, graphic memoir on aging, Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?. I quietly checked back for a reaction and found my father almost doubled over with laughter.

After today’s appointment my father told me he had finished her book and it wasn’t pretty. He had seen the author on Charlie Rose and ordered the book. But I got the clear sense that he liked the book because he wanted to talk about it. That would be the dark comedy factor working. We have the book too and Peggi finished it the other night. She read whole sections aloud to me because they just couldn’t wait. Funny thing is Peggi’s mom used to say exactly that (title of the book) to us when we talked about something unpleasant.

This year Kentucky Derby Day presents a dilema. Do we go down to O’Laughlin’s to wager a bet, watch the 2 minute race and gaze out at the sailboats or do we dress even warmer and cheer the WNY Flash on in their first home game? It was much warmer in Kentucky when watched the race in person while on our first date.

We watched as the lawyer led my parents through the final steps of transferring the title of their house to the new owners. It needs to be “broom clean” and we have to find the garage door opener and she asked if we had a carbon monoxide detector. I said, “We did until I gave it to the church a few hours ago.” I unplugged it and put in one of the last boxes to go. It went off in my hand and was as loud as hell until I found the little button on the back. As Paster Jack was putting the last few boxes in the truck it went off again and I’m laughing just thinking about looking at him holding that thing in his hands while the alarm was going off.

Now, I’m wondering. Do I send the new owners the video I made of my parents and me putting the awnings up?

My title could be sung to that Pete Seeger tune.

If Margaret Explosion was responsible for this blog there wouldn’t be any words. Little Theater – Wednesday nights.

I vaguely remember my camera turning on inside my pocket. I reached in for some reason, maybe out of nervousness, and felt the lens extend into my palm. I didn’t realize I had taken a picture in there until I found this extraordinary shot. Well, that made my day.

I spent the morning out in Webster at my dentist. He had scheduled me for a two hour appointment, just enough time to remove a bridge that had some decay under it, fill the cavities and take a mold of my mouth for the new bridge. My dentist is a real craftsman and I suspect somewhat of a perfectionist, exactly the type of guy you want working on your mouth with power tools. He told me he wasn’t going to pry the old bridge off because he didn’t want to damage what was left of the teeth below. He said he was going to cut it off.

He put some wrap around sun glasses on me to protect my eyes from flying porcelain and went in there with something like a mini grinder. When he was done the assistant showed me a small pile of pieces that she had pulled out of my mouth. I left with a plastic, temporary bridge and I’ll stop back in two weeks to pay the big bucks and get my new bridge cemented in.

The rest of the day was spent prepping my parent’s garage for their garage sale this Saturday. Unfortunately we missed Louise when she stopped by with some important papers and a book by Julian Barnes called “Levels of Life.”

Steve called me from South Carolina. He was thinking of heading north to check on his trailer in Tennessee but he heard there might be snow there tonight. He told me our temperature is supposed to drop 40 degrees today. His trailer sits on a hilltop in the woods near a giant manmade lake. One of his neighbors up there emailed him a photo of the trailer after someone broke in. The door looked like it had been bashed in by a backhoe. He had a pretty good lock on there because he had already been broken into before.

The neighbor who emailed the photo said that he too was broken into but he knew who it was. It was his ex-wife and she spray painted the the inside of cabin.

This colt is probably no more than a few days old. The small stable on Wisner Road breeds racing horses and this one looks promising. I took about ten shots as it pranced around with its mom blocking my line of sight and then they headed back in the barn.

For us the “Winter Aconite” is the marker. I’ve tracked the yellow flowers every year since we first became aware of them and it is such a momentous sighting that I mention it in this blog. Type “yellow flowers” in the search engine above and you can see the dates from the last five years. This one is particularly late. They usually poke defiantly through the snow before Saint Patty’s Day. In 2012 they were blossoming on February 20th.

And our local rackaholic says the bucks are dropping their sheds, so get out there if you want to bring home a trophy.

My brother was in town, helping my parents downsize in preparation for a change of address. My dad has been going through the items he’s squirreled away, giving them one last glance, scanning some old clippings, drawings and photos, choosing the ones he can’t live without and then letting the rest go either to offspring or Viet Nam Vets.

My brother loaded his car with a bookcase full of Harvard Classics and my dad showed him a hardback copy of “Gulliver’s Travels” that he had come across on a shelf. A chamber had been carved out of the inside pages, big enough to hold a small plastic box. As he was telling us this it all sounded vaguely familiar and I mean vaguely. I remember reading the book for a class and seeing a movie where someone hid a gun or something in an old book but would I have done something like this?. Maybe, not so much to hide pot in or anything (I kept that in my pocket) but just to do it.

The NYT’s Karen Rosenberg recently described Robert Bechtle’s paintings of San Francisco streetscapes as “resolutely banal.” That phrase struck a chord with me. I have an affinity for banal. This photo came about in the most banal of circumstances. Peggi was visiting el servicio en Sanlúcar de Barrameda and left me on the street standing next to this readymade.

OK. We’re back but we want to go back. I have a few photos to sort through first. During the Viet Nam war, when I was hitchhiking back and forth to to Indiana, the truck stops in Ohio always carried these hats with the unofficial Marine motto, “Shoot ‘Em All. Let God Sort ‘Em Out.” I keep about half.