Category: Dear Diary

I was so happy to find it raining this morning. It was so dark we had to turn the lights on to read the paper. We were planning to meet the neighbors down at the pool to take down a dead tree and the rain would put that off. I really grew to like rainy days when I was working construction. The days off were so cozy.

Ah, but the sun was out by eleven and we headed down there with our work gloves on. Rick came down with his video camera and Phil climbed a ladder and tied a rope around the tree about fifteen feet up and then Jared pulled the rope taught with his tractor in the direction that we wanted the tree to fall. We cut the wedge with a chainsaw in a perpendicular orientation to the direction of the rope and on the same side of the tree as the direction we want it to fall in. The wedge is cut approximately a third of the way through. On the other side of the tree we cut straight in, again perpendicular to the direction we want it to fall but six inches higher up than the wedge was. The tree is only held up by a wedge in the center and a gentle tug on the rope encouraged it to fall into the open wedge and land right where we wanted it.

Margaret Explosion tonight. Here’s a song from last Wednesday. Pete LaBonne plays piano.

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We met my mom and about half of my immediate family down at Vic & Irv’s for Mother’s Day. My mom likes their milkshakes and their onion rings are the best but the rest of the food is a little rough. My dad ordered fried bologna with onions and cheese.

I had some ginger tea to settle my stomach. A few slivers of ginger root in the bottom of the cup is the way to go but we didn’t have any ginger so I used a Yogi tea bag. My fortune read, “Happiness comes when you overcome the most difficult obstacle.” I thought it was the journey that mattered.

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Spring is almost over. The white magnolias are finished. It always knocks me out how fast it comes on. Winter hangs on forever and then bang, one wildflower or blossoming tree after the other and then they’re gone. We’re going green.

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The Ramones had some classics. “I’m Against It” was one. George Winter, Webster’s code enforcement officer, is quoted in this morning’s newspaper as saying “A few people called and said, ‘I’m not sure what it means, but I don’t like it.’ I think it’s something from a Bob Dylan song or something.”

He was talking about a sign that read “HOW MANY DEATHS WILL IT TAKE ‘TIL WE KNOW TOO MANY PEOPLE HAVE DIED?” The sign was put up on one of the seven empty lots where houses used to stand before the Christmas eve gunman set fire to the place. In fact he was standing up on the ridge pictured in this photo when he shot and killed the firemen who responded to the fire. We had seen the sign before and I thought about photographing it for my sign collection but it was ugly, all caps lettering, and the sign itself was already commentary. The sign is in violation of code so someone covered it with a tarp and then someone else sprayed “Censored” on the tarp. I photographed that and maybe that will work on my sign page.

The article prompted us to walk down there again. You go across a small seasonal bridge (it will swing open for fishing season in April) and you’re on a sliver of land barely wide enough to contain the road, an old railroad bed and some tiny houses. Lake Ontario is on the north and Irondequiot Bay on the south side. It’s a beautiful spot but the elements make it too rough for luxury homes. There’s an impromptu shrine to the firefighters and an historical marker from the 30s denoting the spot where the French army landed in 1687 before invading the Seneca Indian territory. Both of these displays are permissible.

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Our first morning in Madrid a few years ago we found big tent set up in the plaza in front of our hotel with food vendors inside. One of them was selling tray sized cakes with crosses on them. On closer examination the crosses were only visible because of the absence of powdered sugar. There was no way we going to buy a cake that large but the image stuck.

Peggi found a recipe for the pastry, mostly crushed almonds with eggs and some butter. Santiago (the apostle Saint James) is the patron saint of Spain and they probably sell cookie patterns in this cross shape in Spain but I made the pattern with paper mounted on cardboard and wrapped in packing tape. It took me about as long to make the pattern as it took Peggi to make the cake.

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All it took was a 60 degree day in March and the geese formations are overhead, although they seem to be headed west instead of north, the witch hazel is out down at the park, I spotted an ant in the kitchen and these little yellow flowers are are poking through the snow.

We stopped at an estate sale at the old Parsons’ farmhouse on East Avenue. It was a Jack Wanderman (Susan Plunket’s brother) production and Dick Storms was there. He told us he doesn’t go to those things early anymore and he was only there to see Jack. Of course Jack brought most of the stuff into the estate. We looked around for some of Peggi’s mom’s stuff but didn’t find any.

We met a guy in a beard there. His beard seemed to swallow his whole persona. He said,”You probably don’t remember me but I used to come see your band.” He said he’d been out in LA and was back for family reasons and his name was Brian and he had made a movie that was coming out on Netflix. He told us he had fought to keep the music of John Martyn in his film because music is very important to him. We were thinking, “Wow, we know another guy from Rochester named Brian who made a movie with John Martyn music in it” but when he told us the name of the movie, something to do with a river, it wasn’t “The Butterfly Knot.” Could it be that this was the same Brian and something as simple as a big black beard made everything so different?

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We took my mom out to the mall today. It was real treat watching her roam the aisles in full hunt mode. She has great taste and used to give us a shirt or sweater each year, one time a bike bag that I still use, but always something I would wear, like all the time. People still compliment me on a shirt and I’ll say, “My mom gave me this.”

She got a little flustered though when the saleswomen in Lord & Taylor took her pants out of the dressing room while she was trying on another pair. Peggi had to go find my mom’s pants and when she did the clerk apologized, saying, “we like to keep a clean fitting room.”

We looked at this furniture for a bit. Our friends, Pete and Shelley, make chairs like this. They seem right at home in the Adirondacks but look a little wacky in the mall.

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Peggi and I headed out to the mall this weekend. We don’t get out there much but Peggi needed new jeans and our niece told her Old Navy was the best place go for jeans. The corridors to the big box stores are lined with small vendors and once I figured out what this Russian guy was selling I took out my camera to grab a shot. He asked, “What are you doing? I said, I’m taking a photo for my father. I know he would want one of these but I don’t know which team.” What was I supposed to say? “You have a bizarre product line.”

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Our neighbor, a writer, reads plenty and she is a library regular. We returned a pile of their books when they left town for a bit and she commented that “the library fines here are draconian.” We had a short pile of books that we forgot about until the automated reminder call came from Monroe County. Our fine, which we chalk up to supporting the library, totaled twelve bucks. The little note above was tacked to the cash register.

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Saint Francis of Assisi, the Italian mystic who took a vow of poverty, is usually depicted with birds on his shoulders. In fact I have a small statue of him in the window near my desk. St. Francis was the first recorded person to receive the stigmata, the wounds of Christ’s Passion, and these marks are shown on the small hands of the statue. If there was a popularity contest for saints, he would easily win.

He is the patron saint of animals and the environment so it is fitting to have found him lying flat on his back in the woods.

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