Category: Life Is A Spell

Jim Mott was up early this morning. Something like four. He emailed, texted and then called to revise the suggestions he had made in the email. The warblers are migrating through and he offered to be our guide. But the cold, drawn-out spring has thrown the birders for a loop. The hot spots are not so reliable. He told told us we might have just as much luck in Durand which happened to be where we were when he called.

As we walked along the lakeshore we heard someone coming toward us before we saw him. He had earbuds in and was singing along with the Mamas and Papas’ “California Dreamin'”. Not so much singing but loudly reciting the lyrics in a flat monotone. We tried not to look. While we were down on the beach he came back by us. This time it was the Beatles’ “Michelle. “

Back home Peggi had to call the Social Security office. The woman who helped her was working from home and her young child could be heard by her side. He or she had some of the words to Old MacDonald and he or she definitely had the refrain down.

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There was hardly anyone out this morning. Must have been the low temperatures and the threat of rain. The gentle waves hitting the shoreline had me in a meditative state. I could have walked all the way to Niagara Falls where my cousins are having a closed funeral for my Aunt Ann. We perfected this state while walking the coastline of Portugal last year on our third Camino.

The waves work like a mantra because they are not perfectly timed. I take that back. They are perfectly timed but not quantized. And each wave sounds different from the last. It is nothing like a drum sample. I paid 45 dollars to learn TM when I was in college. The person who gave me my mantra told me not to time it with my breath or say it in a rhythmic way but just let it be the next thought each time. This is really tough for a drummer but I got it.

Right now I would like to just drift off with these wave and let them wash this whole thing away. This is Day 59.

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I don’t know if I ever knew what my parents were discussing when I took this picture. With seven kids there was always something going on. If I had to guess I would say someone had gotten into trouble.

The last of my mom’s siblings, my Aunt Ann, has died. Her husband is the last man standing in the generation before me. They were our favorites on that side. So easy to talk to and laugh with. Interested and interesting. Her parents, my grandparents, are both in the big family picture from 1920 that I just put up on the Tierney Market page. Although she wasn’t yet born she knew these people and that link to the past is gone.

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The owners of this house on Wisner planted a different kind of grass, something that goes brown in the Fall and only comes back when you think it never will, like the early days of Summer. And then every Spring there is this green tuft of ordinary grass right in the middle of it all.

We can’t walk to the library anymore because its closed. And we used to walk to Wegmans but we do Instacart pick-ups now. When its below forty we walk in the woods and usually work our way up to the lake at some point. Above forty we are weary of brushing up against ticks so the golf course at Durand, which is closed due to the virus, has become a great place to walk. They still haven’t put the tee markers in or the flags in the holes. If you spot someone a hundred yards away you just change course. Sometimes we’ll hug the perimiter and sometimes we’ll get right out in the middle.

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I just love this title shot. YouTube picked it for me, their AI that scans your recently uploaded video for the likely best still.

In a pandemic induced sharing mood I put the rest of my Super 8 footage online (with a Margaret Explosion soundtrack) and sent a link to our former Bloomington friends, none of whom are in Bloomington anymore. We went to school there. I dropped out but hung around. This is my favorite Bloomington footage, my friends in the trailer, the kids who lived across the street and the locals on the street downtown. One of the kids playing on the hill in the beginning of the movie flashed the peace sign at me and then while downtown with Brad Fox one of the little girls there give us the peace sign. Sarcastically, of course. This was 1970 or so.

The movie, Breaking Away, depicted the tension between the college kids and the locals, called “Cutters” in the film because of all the stone quarries around town. When we were there they were referred to as “Stonies” and it was as derogatory as it sounds. For me, the real creeps were the college kids. Like the three guys in the blue windbreakers with yellow Greek letters on them who jumped out of a car and beat the shit out of me because my hair was too long.

I bought the movie camera through my father who picked it up a the Kodak store in Kodak Park on Lake Avenue. It shot film without sound in a 4 by 3 format. When I dropped the clips into iMovie the top and bottom gets cropped off so it fits the 16 by 9 format. I nave no idea what I’m missing because it still looks great.

Here is the rest of my Super 8 footage in these video clips.

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The lake is prettier than ever. We get there most days by one route or another. A wind storm is headed our way, forecast to be as bad as the one in March 2017 when we lost power for four days. We spent the day preparing. We bought gas for our neighbors generator so we can justify running an extension cord to our refrigerator. We moved the metal chairs, which we had just put for the season, out to safer ground. I managed to make enough room in the garage to get the car in. A first. We plan to sleep in the basement, on the spare mattress on the floor where our guests usually sleep. And we talked of a tofu recipe that we could do over a fire out back. Our life is more purposeful during the pandemic.

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We cut across the golf course this morning on our way to the lake, taking a chance that they hadn’t opened for the season. I’m still a bit gun shy after someone yelled “Fore” and I turned in the the direction of the voice only to get beaned in the forehead. We thought we saw a sign on the Snack Shack door so we walked up close and saw that someone had rearranged the letters on the menu.

There was an old guy out on the first hole hitting chip shots into a hula hoop but none of the flags were up or tee markers. The golf course is so much prettier in the winter without the golfers. I would be happy if they never opened but I thought I read that they would be with rules about not sharing carts.

The lake was beautiful. Calm and turquoise-like. I’m hoping were on the downside of this curve.

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When we walked by this house a few days ago, before they swung the bridge open, the owners were out back overlooking the bay. They were talking to their neighbors in the next yard, laughing in the midst of a pandemic.

Our friend Steve, who lives down South and is still working, said he drove a car to a dealership in Savannah and passed Cracker Barrels still open for business.. He told us his former son-in-law was driving for Uber and then dropping his kids of at Steve’s.

I wear the same clothes everyday. I guess I always do that but at least I change it up when we go out. Our car is in the driveway right where we left it a week ago when we picked up our InstaCart groceries. We don’t go anywhere other than out for walks and people are wearing masks on the beach. There is yellow tape around the swing sets in the park. Our young neighbors are going stir crazy. Maybe its easier when you’re retired. I think about our friend in Brooklyn who has at least one other person in his apartment building with the virus. And what would life during a pandemic be like for our friends in the woods?

We still have the extra leaf in our table from our dinner party three weeks ago. The spare mattress is still out in the basement from when Steve Black was here. He told us he was pretty sure he had Sars while living in Singapore and it took him forever to shake it.

We have two friends who were planning to move to Spain. Something we have only dreamt about. That timing could not have been worse. But Spain will still be there when this over.

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Peggi is slowly regaining the use of her left arm. She helped me stack wood this afternoon when I filled a row in the middle of our wood pile. Something like painting yourself into a corner but unavoidable when you burn the oldest stack first. She has been squeezing a little lime green figure until its eyes bug out, something our yoga teacher gave her, and following online advice that suggests just letting your injured hand “join in” after the cast comes off.

The weather has no idea there is a pandemic going on. It has been gorgeous. Perfect for bird watching. The Red Wing Backbirds are back in the marsh. Pregnant Robins waddle across our yard. Blue Jays are pecking at our compost pile and the woodpeckers sounds ring clearly through the bare trees.

Cardinals are my favorite bird and that’s because I put together a plastic model of one when I was a kid. I think my brother did an Oriole. And there was a flock of chickadees in the tree above our wood pile while I was working. I’m not really a birdwatcher. I only know the common ones. I just looked up chickadees to make sure I didn’t misidentify them.

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I enjoyed reading a column in the business section of today’s paper by an old timer who had learned the hard way that you don’t sell your stocks when the market goes down. After four recessions he determined that rather than trying to buy when the market turns around he should be buying each time the market goes down ten per cent from the high. Then again at 20% and 30%. I liked how he wondered aloud if this time might be different before he pulled the plug. “Nothing relieves anxiety more than taking action.”

“Eggplant is overrated. ” This was all we caught of a woman’s cell phone conversation as we passed her on way down to the Sea Breeze. It was seventy degrees and we wanted to walk into Webster one more time before they swing the bridge open on April 1. We were surprised to see people heading in to Don’s Original. One person after the other pushing the door open. I’m surprised we haven’t seen more discussion about getting this quarantine over with. We’ve been out of circulation (other than walks) for over two weeks and some people haven’t even started. Cuomo says our apex is still three weeks away.

A shiny red pickup cut right in front of us as we walked by the boat launch. The guy, wearing his baseball cap backwards, had his window down so I said “Geez. Go right ahead.” His jacked up truck was just a few feet away. He said, “Thanks” and revved the engine. I looked back and saw his “Proud Veteran” bumper sticker.

Heading back in to our neighborhood we saw a young father guiding his daughter along on a small pink bicycle. We said hi and she looked up with a big smile and said “First day without training wheels!”

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I watched some crazy YouTube videos before trying to cut Peggi’s cast off her wrist. She didn’t really want to go to the doctor’s office and risk getting exposed. Cuomo says we won’t reach our apex in New York for three more weeks and we are just coming to the end of a 14 day near isolation streak. We had four people over for dinner on Friday two weeks ago and we toasted to this thing before hunkering down.

This one guy took his son’s cast off while they were camping somewhere in a trailer. He was wearing a Superman t-shirt and it looked like his sone was terrified of him. The video had thousands of views but he had turned comments off and was selling real estate ads in the about section. Doctors would use a Dremel and vibrate a score line down both sides. I borrowed this Makita oscillator from my neighbor and tried to score the cast with it but the wire cutters did the job.

A few weeks back I replaced the florescent lights in our garage with led bulbs and it made the perfect operating room.

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It wasn’t even two years ago when we learned of Janet Williams‘ passing. And now, Ted Williams, who I didn’t know was even sick. I posted the same picture then, one I took at a Margaret Explosion gig in the Bug Jar.

We first met Ted in 1988. His parents were members of Oak Hill Country Club and friends with Jeanne Westerfeld, another member who we were doing a lot of commercial art work for. Ted’s parents were trying to find a job for Ted and they told him he should meet us.

He came up to our attic office at 55 Hall Street and introduced himself as a poet. We made it clear we were lucky to have work ourselves but we hit it off. We were deep into shooting products for the 1989 US Open merchandise brochure and we had them all spread out in the attic. Ted told us he had an idea for a product that would sit inside a golf hole and and make a noise if a ball landed in it, something you could hear from a long distance, in case you got a hole-in-one for example. He probably left us a copy of his book and we probably bummed a Winston off him before he left

The next significant meeting was in our dining room where we hatched plans for an alternative broadsheet, something we decided to call the Refrigerator. Martin Edic, Peggi Fournier, Robert Meyerowitz and Chuck Cuminale were all involved but we decided to publish anonymously, something Ted was never on board with. He was a real writer. We were not. He left after issue 14 and started the Freezer.

Peggi and I played music with Ted as members of his Stage Poetry Group, later renamed the Media Assassins. We’d hang out in Ted’s attic until morning, talking or looking at his slides. He was a poetic photographer. I will miss him.

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They will be closing the swing bridge in another two weeks so time is running short if you want walk into Webster. In the past we’d meet friends for lunch on St. Patty’s, at Shamrock Jack’s for many years but then they got so busy they started charging admission. We moved on to the Bayside and tried to get there before noon to grab a table overlooking the bay. It’s not an Irish joint but their food is better and every place has a good beer selection these days.

Today it was just Peggi and me. We made peanut butter sandwiches and we put those and two cans of beer into my backpack. We walked through the park, down Culver to the lake and across the bridge into Webster where we found a picnic table between the lake and the bay.

There are more people than ever out in the park. We ran into Bri from the Little and Brenda from Atlas Eats. But it was so sad to see all the Sea Breeze hot spots closed or doing take out only. Shamrock Jack’s had a tent out front strewn with Guinness banners but the park lot was completely empty.

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The photo above, taken this afternoon as we walked along the lake, goes well with Todd Beer’s painting from yesterday’s post. These days I spend quite a bit of time thinking about painting. I’ve been getting my digital house in order, scanning old photographs, tucking things away on PopWars and keeping the Margaret Explosion site up to date. And I’ve become addicted to walking. I’m wearing out my third pair of Merrill hiking shoes since we walked the Camino. Those activities, along with reading the paper, can fill up a day. I’m hanging on to the idea that you can become a better painter just by thinking about it.

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I’ve been scanning photos I want to hang on to knowing someday I’ll want to downsize further. Old photos take up very little space in the cloud and they are so much easier to find.

I’m guessing my mom took the photo on the left and Peggi’s mom probably took the one on the right. Both of us in our father’s arms, both photos taken the same summer twenty two years before we met.

Peggi’s father’s birthday was on March 3rd and my father’s is today, the 5th. They both had a huge impact of our lives. We continue to be influenced the experience.

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That’s Catalan for “More than a club.” And indeed FC Barcelona is more than a futbol club. It is Lionel Messi! We watched him score four goals against Eibar this weekend. And then watched Real Madrid lose to Levante 0-1.

We love both these teams and will be hard pressed to root for one over the other in the upcoming “El Clasico.. “Because Barcelona just regained the top position in La Liga, dethroning Madrid, we will probably start out cheering loudest for Los Blancos, the underdogs. Since Renaldo left they are only a club.

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It was a perfect night for gallery openings. A real Rochester winter night. A fair amount of fresh snow and cold enough to not be sloppy. Peggi and I both have pieces in a show at Studio 402 in Anderson Arts Building but we saved that stop for later. We started with Aaron Winters show at the pop-up gallery near the Little. He’s out every night shooting bands and he’s up first thing in the morning shooting birds but he showed neither of those here. These were large, gorgeous, Nat Geo-like photos from a safari he took toTanzania.

The RoCo opening, “Makers and Mentors,“ was great. All three artists were no-shows for the opening because of the weather and there was plenty of space to study the paintings. A real painting show and something we will return to in the next few weeks.

On the forth floor of the Anderson Arts building we found a something like an open jam going on in Studio 402. The show, “Sight & Sound: Art by Musicians – Music by Artists” was asking for it so I can’t complain. Peggi and I just pictured an event with this name a little differently.

We finished the evening listening to the glorious sounds of Nod at Skylark over on Union Street where we toasted to Peggi’s birthday. A big one.

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