Category: Dear Diary

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.

I’ve been thinking about my old friend Brad lately. My father’s financial advisor used to live across the street from us and he asked about Brad and his name has come up in a few other contexts. I’m remembering things like how Brad used to singe the hair on his legs with his cigarette between puffs. And how he used to punch me in the arm so hard I couldn’t even lift it. I’m bad on the phone but I owe him a call.

We were on the way out the door of Nick’s Sea Breeze Inn when my father asked, “Where else would you see a bench like this?” We have seen it used when the waiting room is full but not in the dead of winter. My mom ordered her usual spaghetti and meatballs, my dad went with the broiled Haddock and Peggi and I each order the “Italian Trio” special (choice of three: Manicotti, Gnocchi, Lasagna, Chicken Parm or Eggplant Parm) with a salad.

Nick stopped by our table as he always does. My dad used to meet here once a week for lunch with his retired engineers’ posse and Nick and my dad have some sort of rapport. Even though Nick played football for Geneva High School he said he wouldn’t be watching the Super Bowl. “Bunch of babies. That’s not football. That’s a circus.”

He inserted the story of how he shined shoes at the Naval base on Seneca Lake and brought the money home to his mom and then how he dragged blocks of ice upstairs at Club 86 and chipped them by hand to stock the bar before Jimmy Dorsey or whoever took the stage. He worked his way back to a football analogy. “Those guys make one small play and then cut to a commercial. I go in the back room here, he said, and the dishwasher will say ‘I’m on break’.” Nick looked at his watch to illustrate. “I have two more minutes! In my day they would tell you your hours are 9 to ‘u’, nine AM to unconscious.

Rochester architects Chris Brandt and Craig Jensen contacted Peggi through her Don Hershey website and arranged to meet here yesterday afternoon to talk Hershey. We woke up without heat. The small motor that opens the flap on our furnace flu burnt out so the boiler had gone into rest mode. Wayne Heid rescued us hours before the meeting.

The architects brought Cynthia Howe from the Landmark Society along as well and we stood around the table talking about homes that we all suspect may be Hersheys. He designed 300 some houses in this area and some of them are really tucked away. It was a delightful three hours spent ping ponging around town on cell phone maps as we pooled our knowledge. Cynthia pushed Peggi to write a book on Hershey. Peggi has a spread sheet of confirmed Hersheys that she continues to add to and someday it will all be on the site. Craig bought a stack of photos that he bought from Dick Storms after Dick scooped them up at Don Hershey’s house when the architect died and the kitchen shot above was in there.