have no idea what goes on farther down Lakeshore Boulevard at the official Durand-Eastman beach. We never make it that far. I trust they still have lifeguards, the ropes that keep you from swimming out too far, and the Port-o-Johns. I’ve always liked this “no rules,” wilder end. I mean, there is a “No Swimming” sign in this photo, but no one pays any attention to it.
The sun is out now, but we just had a half inch of rain and the lake is about a foot and a half above its long-term average for August. Because the lake gets deep so gradually, there is very little sandy beach above water. Right along this strip is where the old Durand Beach House stood, with its dramatic, tunnel-like entrance to the beach, right through the long brick building.
My mother would bring us down to the lake on hot summer days, alternating between here and Charlotte. Both places had somewhere you could buy suckers. On our way back today we tried our best to recall Steve Hoy’s lyrics to MX-80’s “Summer 77.”
You know, this has been a really very bitter cold for many of us. And recently a friend of mine put down the words the way some of us may feel about these approaching summer months. I’d like to sing. “I’ve seen all you girls in your heavy coats walking in the snow with you hats and gloves and scarves and your hearts all covered with scars All winter you stayed inside read books, watched TV, looked at magazines But underneath your hearts were all waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting for Summer 77″
My favorite image of Saint James is this dreamy Baroque oil by Guido Reni from 1636. Rich recently sent us a deck of Patron Saints cards. Saint James wasn’t in the deck, but Kateri, the first Native American saint, and Mother Teresa, two of the newest saints, had their own cards.
Today is the feast day of Saint James. My cousin Maureen says she is celebrating with fish tacos. Known as Santiago in Spain and São Tiago in Portugal, he is the patron saint of both countries. He is also known as Matamoros (Moor-Slayer) because he miraculously appeared riding a white horse to help Christian armies defeat the Muslim Moors at the mythical Battle of Clavijo.
The city of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain is a centuries-old pilgrimage destination. We walked there twice, once from the Pyrenees in France (with Maureen) and once from Porto in Portugal. Could we still do it? I like to think so.
I picked up these Saint James holy cards along the way. As you can see, he is shown as both benevolent and vicious. And his horse isn’t always white. This helps explain why so many people consider themselves Catholic. It’s pretty easy to bend the rules when they’re not much more than myths. Al Pacino’s show-stopping scene in Julian Schnabel’s Dante movie is a beautiful case in point.
Here's the version for true believers: Saint James (the Greater) was one of Christ's twelve apostles named James. King Herod Agrippa executed Saint James by beheading in Jerusalem around AD 44. James's disciples, Athanasius and Theodore, placed his body into a stone boat. (A stone boat!) The crewless, rudderless vessel was guided by angels across the Mediterranean Sea. The boat landed on the Atlantic coast of Galicia at Iria Flavia (now Padrón, where pimientos de Padrón originated). Queen Lupa, a local pagan ruler, tried to thwart the burial by giving the disciples wild bulls to pull the cart carrying his body. The wild beasts miraculously became tame, converting the queen to Christianity. The tamed oxen pulled the wagon inland until they stopped at Libredón, the current site of the cathedral. The tomb remained forgotten for nearly 800 years during Roman and Visigothic rule. In 813, a hermit named Pelagius followed a shower of guiding stars—or bright lights—to a field. Pelagius found the hidden tomb, and Bishop Teodemir confirmed the bones belonged to Saint James. The area was named Campus Stellae ("Field of Stars"), which evolved into the word Compostela. In 844, an intervention reportedly occurred during the mythical Battle of Clavijo. King Ramiro I of Asturias led Christian troops against the superior forces of the Emirate of Córdoba. The night before the battle, Saint James appeared to King Ramiro in a dream, promising victory. The next day, the saint charged into battle on a magnificent white horse, carrying a white banner and a flashing sword. Inspired by the apparition, the Christian army rallied and defeated the Moorish forces. King Alfonso II of Asturias declared Saint James the patron saint of his kingdom and ordered the first church built over the tomb. Inspired by the apparition, the Christian army rallied and defeated the Moorish forces. King Alfonso II of Asturias declared Saint James the patron saint of his kingdom and ordered the first church built over the tomb.
John Gilmore at the Little Theatre Café for a Margaret Explosion show.
Someone we don’t really know recently asked, “Whatever happened to that guy that used to come out to Margaret Explosion shows and sit up front in a lounge chair.” I told John that someone had asked us that and he laughed, happy to have been remembered. He said he was feeling stronger and hoped to make it out to a show again.
Bob Mahoney called this morning to tell us that John had passed, at home, maybe three days ago. That didn’t add up because we had received a text from him on Thursday afternoon, a picture of his son, Pat, graduating. We congratulated John, our last brief connection.
John Gilmore and Bill Hill in Madras
John brought this photo over a while ago. He was pretty sure the other guy was Rex Daniels, a classmate of ours who was killed by friendly fire in Viet Nam. I told him it was Bill Hill, not Rex but it is still a fabulous photo.
John moved up here from Long Island. I first heard about him as one of the guys from our high school class that drove a car straight through the T intersection of Holt and Ridge Roads. They crashed well into the cemetery. Dave Mahoney and I went up to look at the wreckage. That was my introduction to John. A high school wrestler, he was bursting at the seams with life.
Joe Barret and John Gilmore in Bloomington
John came out visit a few times while I was in Indiana and it was always somewhat of a clash. John was just a little rough for mellow Bloomington. I drove out there with John one time. He had a cooler between the two front seats of his VW van, loaded with Genny Beer. He drove, drank and talked the whole way.
Hand-colored photo of Mark Dodd and John Gilmore at 116 Dartmouth Street
John had a Jeep when I returned to Rochester with Peggi. We will never forget screeching through downtown on 490 or missing a turn in Mendon and running off the road. John was entertaining us.
John Gilmore with his son, Willie, and friend, Greg at our wedding in 1976
He already had a son by the time we were married and went on to have three more along with two daughters. A family man, but the one time we met him to play golf he was tripping on acid. John lived life to the fullest.
Gilmore with sign
We went to a play with John and his wife, Kathe, a musical about Janis Joplin. He was carrying around cushions at the time and this one is familiar. John made the reservations and he posed with the sign on our table.
John Gilmore’s mail box and farm field across the street from his house
He and his friends built a house in Geneseo. It seemed to me the middle of nowhere. Once he was in he threw a big party for all those that helped. When we got there John was sitting on top of the hood of a car that was driving in circles around his house. He was belting out the lyrics to Jefferson Airplane’s “Crown of Creation.”
Stan Merrill taking a photo of John Gilmore at Paul Dodd “Crime Faces” opening.
John was the only one who called me Paulie. Bob was Bobby and John’s mid-career, drink-of-choice, vodka and ginger ale, was a “Johnny.” He lived life to the fullest.
John Gilmore with Wavy Gravy at the Little Theatre.
John was like a character out of Kerouac book. He could recite Lord Buckley verse. We went to a Ken Kesey talk with John — the premier of the Wavy Gravy movie at the Little and a Grateful Dead show in Boston.
John Gilmore with Pete LaBonne
We bonded over a Traffic album we were listening to in my bedroom at my parents home. John was always there for the music. Pete, shown here with John, plays piano on the “Ballad of John Gilmore” (below.)
John Gilmore in a suit post Kodak
His career as an electrician at Kodak came to an abrupt end and he wore a suit for a few days while he tried to find a new job. He asked me to take this photo of him in a suit. We are going to miss John.
“Ballad Of John Gilmore” by Margaret Explosion. Recorded live at the Little Theatre Café on 05.08.13. Peggi Fournier – sax, Ken Frank – bass, Pete LaBonne – piano, Bob Martin – guitar, Paul Dodd – drums.
Listen to Ballad of John Gilmore by Margaret Explosion 201313 Comments
Pete Monacelli has an art opening in Geneva tomorrow night. We stopped by his place after shopping at the Co-op and he gave me a new book he had just finished, Duchamp Takes New York, by John Strausbaugh. Pete said an artist friend had given it to him with instructions to pass it on to another artist. A review in the front of the book referred to Duchamp as having moved art “beyond the tyranny of good taste.” I’m thinking I’ll send it Duane’s way when I finish because I know no bigger Duchamp fan.
Pete and Emily packed up everything, sold their house, their cars—everything—and took the kids to Italy, where they have already bought a house. They rented a car, loaded it with their essentials, and drove to JFK. We’re gonna miss them.
We had been over there a few times during their sale, and on their last day here they texted to say they were getting ready to throw the rest away. We stopped by again and brought home a long 2×10, a pile of art paper and mat board, and a big fan. They didn’t have air conditioning either. Pete pointed to some drumsticks, but I forgot to pick them up.
The next morning, as we walked by their empty house, I poked through their trash—years’ worth of family photos on top—looking for the sticks. Larry walked by with Ernie and we got talking. Peggi told him we had tried to buy some ligularia like his (they do well in the shade), and he suggested we just stop by and dig up the ones that had spread in his yard.
Of course, any visit to Larry’s mandates time talking about and looking at art. Larry had just finished Life with P. Journals, 1966–1976 and offered to let me borrow it. I’m bad with real books because I can’t help circling passages I love and putting asterisks at the top of a page—or worse—so I might just buy the book. We told Larry we had seen the show in New York. We actually spent half a day at the small 18th Street Hauser & Wirth. I told him I would send him some pictures from the show.
It was a beautiful day on Friday, so the downtown library had us perform outside in the courtyard. Garry Geer took some photos.
Margret Explosion poster for July 2nd gig at Little Theatre Café. Photo by Garry Geer.
Someday I thought I might design a T-shirt with the slogan “I Can’t Believe It” on it. I would wear it.
I’ve had that idea in a text document of notes that I carry around, a nearly random collection of things that seemed too important to just slip by. I weed the list out from time to time and save the document with a different name. I was using the Pages app for this, but not anymore. I had the document open on two devices, had a problem with one, and got a message that read, “This document was deleted in another location.” I was given the opportunity to click “OK.” I’m switching to the Notes app and reconstructing the list from past documents.
The idea that 1950 is considered the start date for the Anthropocene era. The concept, first proposed by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, defines a new geologic epoch in which human activity has profoundly impacted the Earth’s ecosystems and geology. Peggi and I were born that year, so it got my attention.
This news item seemed worth rereading: “Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the E.P.A., has recommended that the agency reverse its 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare, according to three people familiar with the decision. That would eliminate the legal basis for the government’s climate laws, such as limits on pollution from automobiles and power plants.”
I have a friend who has been creating music with AI, and I was going to pass this note on to him: “The AI-generated song ‘Walk My Walk’ by the artist ‘Breaking Rust’ recently hit number one on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, sparking debate about the future of music. The track, created using the AI music platform Suno, features a gravelly vocal performance and has garnered millions of streams, raising questions about authenticity and the impact of AI on the music industry.”
We saw a Ribera painting in Bilbao where he depicted three saints in one painting. St. Sebastián lies naked, his arm still suspended from the tree on which he has been tormented, while St. Lucia extracts the arrows and St. Irene prepares to apply healing ointment to the wounds.
I kept this social media post from the president: “So we took over the Kennedy Center. We didn’t like what they were showing and various other things. We’re going to make sure that it’s good and it’s not going to be woke. There’s no more woke in this country. NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA — ONLY THE BEST.”
I wanted to remember how much I love the drums at the tail end of Miles’ “He Loved Him Madly.”
There is a good argument to be made for club soccer being better than national team matches. But then the World Cup comes around again and we get swept up anew. For now we are enjoying every minute of the end of La Liga’s season.
We follow three teams in Spain’s top division, and they all finished in the top four. As I have mentioned before, we have taken to perversely rooting against one of them, Real Madrid. With the world’s top talent they were unable to play as a team. They fired their relatively new coach and will likely dump the next one when the season is over. And when you root against them you inevitably grow to like their scrappier opponents. Celta Vigo is one of our favorites now.
Barcelona had already won the title, but they weren’t holding back against Alavés, from the Basque city of Vitoria-Gasteiz in the Rioja region. Alavés needed points because in Spain the bottom three clubs get relegated. They are kicked out of the league, and the top three teams from the Segunda División move up to the Primera División. Alavés outplayed Barça, and we loved watching them defeat the champs 1–0 and move out of the relegation zone.
None of our teams played yesterday, so we tuned into Girona vs. Real Sociedad in the beautiful Catalan city just an hour north of Barcelona. We were already fond of Real Sociedad, from one of our favorite Spanish cities, San Sebastián, but Girona was in the bottom three with only three matches left. We went with Girona, and they outplayed La Real, tied them 1–1, and with that one point moved out of the relegation zone. It was one of the best matches we’ve watched in weeks.
When the division title has already been decided, La Liga still provides an exciting race at the bottom—no position more important than seventeenth.
The good thing about psychedelics is that you don’t have to do them over and over again? I tied most of them when I was nineteen and I feel like I am experienced. A tune up would be nice but not necessary. My last trip was an overload, a wildly strong LSD capsule, but back then you could never be certain what it was you were taking. I wound up in the college Health Center and woke up in a hospital gown after a shot of Thorazine. I had no idea where I was and I walked to the window to try to figure it out. The parking lot below was full of cars and they were all bending and moving in slow swirls.
Reflection from hotel windows on building in lower Manhattan
I was reminded of that experience when I put these two photos together. Both were taken on recent trips, the first from our hotel room in Toronto and the second from our hotel room in lower Manhattan. The building across from us in the Toronto picture was all mirrors so all those wrinkled buildings you see in that photo are not really there, they were behind us.
The building in the Manhattan photo was as plain as could be, an industrial building of some sort with only four small windows. The pattern you see on that building is all reflections from the glass windows of our hotel. The pattern went away when the sun went behind a cloud.
A few erratic warm days and spring goes into high gear. The yellow comes first—witch hazel, winter aconite, forsythia, daffodils, cornus mas—then the cherry blossoms and magnolias, all of it already waning. It is all the more glorious after a long winter. But the winters aren’t long anymore. They fly by. When someone—anyone—starts going on about the winter, I cut them off. I don’t want to hear it anymore.
We have a patch of mâche in our garden that wintered over. We’ve been eating it for a month or so, but after that 80-degree day it just shot up—grew all stalky, with almost an inch between leaves. We’ll let it go to seed and sow some new seeds right on top. It is our favorite of all greens.
Turtle on tree in Trott Lake
We walked through the arboretum and then the fruticetum in the park and down one of those paths to Durand Lake. We turned toward Trott Lake and saw trees newly stripped by beavers. We heard a splash and thought surely it was a beaver, but it turned out to be turtles sunning themselves.
Stephen Black screenshot of “Passion Play” 2020 in Augmented Reality space with Tony Smith sculpture, “Moses,” at Toledo Museum of Art
While Peggi and I were cleaning up a fifty-foot fallen oak tree out back, Steve Black was putting my Stations of the Cross in AR space with Tony Smith’s 1968 sculpture, Moses. Just in time for Holy Week. This is so exciting. Steve says, “spatial computing is about using the space in a way that acknowledges the absence of gravity….”
Here, in old-fashioned reality, gravity brought the dead oak down. It fell in the upward direction of the hill behind our house, and some of its roots were still embedded in the earth. I started at the top and cut log-length chunks that rolled down the hill, crashing into other trees and either ricocheting off or becoming lodged.
Peggi stood at the bottom of the hill, as crazy as that sounds, in case any of them rolled into the road. I looked both ways before rolling, and Peggi hid behind the big oak. Peggi rolled five or six out of the road. Three went zipping right across the road and landed in the creek across the street, and the others were scattered. We rounded them up and will roll them into the car tomorrow and drive them up to our woodpile.
If you are in Toledo in the next month, scan the bar code below, point your camera at Tony Smith’s sculpture and look around.
“Moses snd the Passion Play” flyer, an AR installation at the Toledo Museum of Art by Stephen Black
Is this the best winter ever? It is too early to tell but we certainly have one in the making. Up near the lake it seems we get a just enough white stuff every evening to freshen things up for the next day’s ski. The big storm ten days ago came with all sorts of bitter cold warnings and I think it has kept people inside. Peggi and I were the only ones skiing in Durand for five of six days after. And I mean the only ones.
Now that the temperature has climbed above twenty we are seeing more people out but there seems to be almost as many snowshoers as skiers. Cross-country has always attracted an older set and the showshoers all seem younger so maybe it is just a demographic shift.
I prefer it in the teens. The snow is lighter and the crisp temperature spaces you out. Peggi calls it, “the rapture of the white.”
Kodak Park was so big they had their own railroad and highway that ran through the property. They have torn down many of the buildings but these smoke stacks were still spewing something. And a sign on a building at at Ridge and Lake read, “Now Hiring.” My father worked at Hawk Eye and Elmgrove and Lee Road, all local Kodak sites, but I don’t think he ever worked at the Park. And only the execs worked at Kodak Office on Saint Paul. This was a company town at one point.
Our friend, John, worked at the Park for forty years. We took him out to Unity Hospital for an operation on his hand. Peggi drove and I was sitting in the back seat, listening to John’s stories about Grateful Dead shows when I took this shot. I wanted to get some of those classic 60’s buildings with the blue aluminum panels on the side but I couldn’t get my camera out of my pocket fast enough.
John had broken his finger and it wasn’t healing properly so his doctor wanted to reset it. Per instructions we helped him wrap his hand in clean cohesive tape before he got in the car. When we checked in at the hospital I was taken by how much the woman behind the desk reminded me of our friend, Kim. She started making sly jokes about what John had done with his middle finger but John was filling out the paperwork and wasn’t aware of her comments. I looked down at his hand and it did look like it was permanently in the “bird” position. I was laughing so hard I could barely tell John what I was laughing at. When I got it out we all laughed and John said, “It’s not my middle finger, it’s my ring finger. Says a lot about how my marriage worked out.”
It seemed like Christmas started way too early but now it’s already gone. The day itself was dreamy. We zoomed with friends in Hawaii while we looked out at the snow. My brother and his wife came up from New Jersey a few days early and the four us went out to Holy Sepulchre and found my parents. It was near dark when we got there. Peggi and I were in the back seat, it was snowing and the roads had not been plowed. I jumped out at one point and ran up a hill just to determine where we were. We parked near the pond and all four of us got out. I started feeling around with my feet and found a stone, “Fred somebody.” I moved to my left and struck gold on the fourth stone. My parents would have gotten a kick out of our adventure. It wasn’t til we got back home that I realized it had been ten years since my father passed.
Amy, my brother’s wife, reminded me that it was the same four of us who rented a boat in Maine and got lost near dark. We had a paper map with us and thought we might be offshore of one of the islands. We spotted someone on shore and yelled, “What island is this.” They couldn’t make out what we were shouting so we kept trying. Finally, the person on shore yelled back, “This is not an island.”
When Peggi’s parents retired they took a lot of trips, some by car, some by train and some by sea. In 2003, as the US was starting the disastorous war in Iraq, they invited us on a cruise through the Panama Canal. I brought our cassette recorder along and came back with some great tapes of manic Panamanian music and djs. The ship left from Miami. We ran into Norm and Pam in the airport.
Passengers awaiting boarding of cruise ship in Miami
The cruise ship made stops in Playa del Carmen (Peggi and I went snorkeling while the other passengers went shopping) and Honduras where we took a long bus ride to the Mayan ruins of Copán, the highlight of the whole trip. The canal was sort of dingy, my favorite photos from the trip were the ones I took from the bus on the way to Copán. They made a good spread in my homemade scrapbook.
Photos from bus in Honduras on the road to the Mayan ruins at Copán, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Photos from bus in Honduras on the road to the Mayan ruins at Copán, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Leo Dodd drawing of my accident with Sammy G” Gingello in Webster, New York
There lots of links in the post. Let’s give it up for that guy invented the hyperlink.
I linked to my father’s website in my last post and then poked around the site for a bit. Many of the presentations that he had linked to no longer work in Safari. Some wouldn’t work in Chrome either so Peggi and I tracked down the original Keynote files from 2012 and generated new html pages. We started with the slides from the talk my father gave to the New Jersey Engineering Society in Montclair New Jersey, something my brother, Mark, had arranged. The presentation tracks his engineering work for Kodak and UR. The work he did at the Art Deco Hawkeye plant was top secret.
By chance this morning’s paper had an article about the city securing the site due to increasing criminal activity. Kodak is bankrupt and the current owner, Phoenix Investors, a Milwaukee-based real estate investment firm, acquired the property through a bankruptcy auction after the previous owner, WBS Capital, defaulted and the lender foreclosed.
I worked B trick in Hawkeye one summer as a janitor. We were assigned a route and then found a place to play cards until it was time to punch out. My father was working on a top-secret aerial reconnaissance mission for the U.S. government during the Cold War. The project, known as “Bridgehead” produced lenses and film for cameras that flew over Russia to see where they might have tanks, bombs, munition plants, planes and troops.
While looking for my father’s original files I came across the drawing above that my father sent to my brother, Mark, in 1970 when he was in prison for smoking a joint. I had cracked up, totaled it turn out, the family VW Bug while he was sitting in jail. I wrote about the accident back in 2013. I never saw this drawing above until my brother gave it to me to put in the display case of an art show. I am amazed at how my father was able to visually present a story he heard about from me (the accident). One detail my father left out though was that the guy I hit was a famous mobster, Sammy G. Gingillo. He was killed in 1978 when a bomb was detonated as he sat down in his car parked outside Ben’s Cafe Society downtown. I read a great book about the Rochester mob written by Georgia Durante, Sammy’s girlfriend.
The temperature dropped into the mid twenties last night and ushered in our first snow. And when the thermometer rose above 32 this morning all the leaves dropped from our red maple. At the same time the witch hazel in our backyard is in full bloom. We just picked a batch of Padrón peppers yesterday but I’ll bet the plants have shriveled up today. The kale and collards can handle it and the Mache lettuce seems to love this weather. We will pick another batch of that over the weekend when the temperature climbs back into the fifties.
It was cold, windy and rainy on Halloween so we didn’t have a single trick or treater. We were ready. I bought a sixteen dollar bag of mini Snickers, M&Ms and Twixt candies at Walgreen that afternoon. The candy was already 25% off.
Today, All Saints Day, is a day of obligation for Catholics. I have a tiny twinge of longing for those rituals.
Autumn is wrapped in melancholy. We haven’t put on our storms but we’ve already had a few fires. We’re watching a little more tv too. Criterion had a Scorsese thing going and we had just finished “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” when along comes the Apple documentary on him. Each episode is so jam packed we could only do one a day.
Jumping from the kid who seemed so real in “Alice” to the kid in Netflix’s “Adolescence” illustrates how times have changed. The series is fabulous until the very end where the dad tries to explain himself. Adolescence looked even more brilliant coming after “Black Rabbit” which had every reason to be good but instead felt empty. A big budget, big actors and directors (Jude Law, Jason Bateman, Laura Linney) and a dramatic thriller of a story but no soul. They manufactured an intense pace with quick cuts and twist while Adolescence got real with hardly any cuts.
We’ve walked by these red maples for years and never noticed the ones sharing a branch. It is hard to tell which tree is growing into which. The shared branch is about fifteen feet up and we’re usually distracted by the invasive Angelica growing below. Now that we have spotted it we stop and stare for a while. Still wondering which tree initiated the contact.
We ran into Steve Piotrowski in the park this morning. He was looking for Trott Lake. He must have spotted it on a map to the side of Log Cabin Road but the road is closed to cars for that stretch so we suggested he park by the cops that were hanging out. We guessed correctly that he might be about to do some plein-air painting. But not plein-air painting, plein-air “drawing.” Steve told us he had often wondered why his paintings, most done from photos, didn’t really look like the locations and he figured out that the photos were distorting the depth in the settings. So he now does the sketches en plein-air and then paints at home.
Finally, this Sunday we found ourselves in a situation where we could listen to WAYO’s “Up On The Roof” and “Fantastic Voyage.” Heard “Bull Fight” by Cappy Lewis for the first time in our lives!
Matthew’s text read, “Wow. Crazy Madrid Derby!” He knows not to give away too much. We usually watch La Liga matches from ESPN’s “On Demand” section, hours or days after they were played live. We follow the two big Madrid clubs and when they meet – our allegiance is solidly in Atletico’s camp. Matthew knows this so how should we have read Matthew’s text?
I took it to mean there were a few goals and the match went back and forth and maybe it ended in a draw. We were overjoyed to see Atletico win 4-2, Real’s first loss of the season. The following day we watched Barcelona beat San Sebastian’s team and move ahead of Madrid into first place. Following that we watched Barca and PSG meet early in the Champions League and we reacquainted ourselves with the idea that Paris is still the best team in the world.
We were reading how octopus, a favorite dish in Spain and Portugal. is now in abundance off the coast of England, a consequence of global warming. Lyme disease didn’t used to be in the Adirondacks either. Our friend got that this summer. We spent the afternoon pulling invasive plants on our property. Garlic mustard, wisteria, black swallowwort, euonymus (burning bush) and the poisonous snakeroot. We suit up for that. And we took our last swim of the year to wash the ticks off. Temperatures are expected to reach into the eighties this weekend.
I have always marveled the way our friends choose to live – for the past thirty years or so, off the grid. I would not choose to live that way but I admire it, not just the small footprint but its purity, a minimalism that opens your senses to overwhelming beauty.
Maybe it was a just a confluence of annoying appointments this summer, doctors etc. – it seems anything would be an intrusion in this idyllic setting – but not all years in the woods are the same. Maybe it is Father Time rattling his scythe. We are close in age and that is top of mind. Maybe it the outside stepping on their toes. Tech advances do not lift all boats.
For now, the local libraries are still stocked with the classics of literature. Infinite Jest is still on their shelf at home and mushroom reference books are at the ready. There is plenty of wood for winter.
