Beautiful dark grey snowy day in Rochester, New York
I shoveled the driveway in my pajamas this morning. Not the first time I’ve done that. I go out to get the paper and if it looks like it’s over my slippers I shovel my way to the mailbox. I have always liked shoveling snow. I used to do three driveways when we lived in the city, sometimes four, as our neighbors got older. And I used to make money with my shovel when I was in my teens. The rules never change. You have to get out there right away before the snow gets too heavy, before cars drive on it. And do it two or three times in a heavy storm. My father was showing me a Ralph Avery watercolor last night, a scene of downtown Rochester, and told me Avery died shoveling snow in his driveway. Not a bad way to go.
There is nothing like a fresh snowfall. I wish we had more of them. It’s like mother nature has low Testosterone these days.
The fresh snow is either evaporating or melting. We need some more. But it is a perfect day for YouTubing. We followed a Lincoln ad to Beck’s over the top performance of Bowie’s “Sound and Vision.” Low is still one of the greatest records of all time so maybe this will recharge sales. Watched a trailer for the David Mamet Phil Spector movie with Al Pacino and Helen Mirren and we longed for the real thing, “The Agony and Ecstacy of Phil Spector.” We saw it a few years ago at the Dyrden Theater and then heard the producers were having a hard time securing the rights to all those classic Wall of Sound songs. Whether that is true or not the movie has been unavailable. I have a feeling in this BBC link is only temporary so you better watch it soon. Finally, we primed ourselves for Matt & Kim‘s Monday night Armory appearance and got back to work.
The Pope had a press conference today. He said he just wants to spend more time with his wife and kids.” –David Letterman
Peggi described today’s snowstorm as the perfect gift for her birthday. The trees were so laden with snow that we could not make out the trail. It was a little sticky especially if you stood still for a few minutes but it was exceptionally beautiful.
454 5300. Thank god today was the last day of the WXXI pledge drive. Don’t you think the local PBS station would be more successful if they kept Norm Silverstein off the air? I know he’s the president but where in the world did he pick up that affectation?
We had dinner at Rooney’s in Swillburg. The place has been around forever and if it wasn’t so expensive it would be mobbed. Maybe the economy will come back. We were some of the only diners there tonight. They had quite a few cancelations with all the “No unnecessary driving” orders. Celebrating Peggi’s Bday was a necessity and the food was fantastic.
Mattress sign on Clifford Avenue in Rochester, New York
When I think of mattresses I think big and cushy. This sign is so slight and the lettering so compact it is surprising that it’s mounted on wheels. It would be quite a sight to catch the owner wheeling this thing out in the morning.
White Swan Restaurant in South Wedge, Rochester, New York
There was an article in the Food section of the NYT’s recently on dealing with people who take photos of the food the’ve been served. High end restaurants have started provided high quality photos of their dishes and are making them available to diners at the table who are anxious to post real time shots to social media. They’re tied of people standing up on their chair to get a good overview of the meal. I’m certainly guilty of that. Mostly they’re concerned with people taking bad, i.e. flash, photos of their elegant servings. They are over-reaching to protect their designer brand. It’s food for Pete‘s sake.
My favorite Chinese place is White Swan in the South Wedge. I could tell they’re not crazy about photos either but the food is cheap and the place is popular with healthy young Asians so the atmosphere is fun. The language issue is fun too. I easily confused our server by briefly going off topic. I over-stress the “steamed not fried tofu” request when I ordered my dish and would up with fried.
I like their Bubble coffee and their fortunes. “Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.” “In the eyes of lovers, everything is beautiful.”
View of High Falls from deck of Genesee Brew House in Rochester, New York
We were served by Genny herself and were having such a good time at the Genesee Brew House that we had only minutes to spare at the Amtrak station where we dropped our nephew off. He boarded with an e-ticket on his phone and headed back for his final semester at Columbia Law School. It was a whirlwind visit although we didn’t do much. Worked on the floor in the basement and watched YouTube videos, streamed The Queen of Versailles and watched our NetFlix disc, “Shut Up and Play the Hits.”
When I got back I checked in with a nephew on the other side of the family. I don’t have twitter account but I sort of follow him and the followers of his inspirational tweets. He has twelve thousand of those now.
Sometimes I think life would be simpler if I liked football.
We have Time Warner internet service and a digital land line through the cable but not cable tv so every so often a salesperson calls to see we’d be interested in cable tv. This time they were offering a complete package for $20 a month for two years so we took it. Not sure what we’re in for. The only tv we watch is Sixty Minutes and we usually do that on our computer. Maybe I’ll find a European soccer channel.
We finished painting our ceilings today. My neck is so sore I can barely hold my head up high enough to see how it all looks.
“Model From Local Crime Page” charcoal drawing by Paul Dodd 2012
Peggi is getting pretty good at reading the obituaries. I usually glance at the pictures but she spotted my old boss’s obit after I had finished with that section. I was amazed he was still around. He smoked Lucky Strikes and drank a couple of Genny Cream Ales at lunch time when I was working for him. Framing houses is like playing football. You swing a long handle 20 ounce hammer and get so you can sink a 16 penny nail with a set and one shot home. When someone ran to the deli for lunch he’d order “Capicola, the Butt Capicola, not that cheep kind and no mayonnaise.” He was the hardest worker and he taught me how to work. You just go for it with all you have.
Both my parents have the flu. I took my dad to the doctor and his doctor swabbed his nose and sent away the sample to confirm it. They were too sick to attend the wake of their long time friend so my mom asked if we’d stop by and say hello to his wife. Turns out we know their son-in-law, the artist Craig Wilson. He told us his father-in-law was in a barbershop quartet for over fifty years and and by all accounts was the nicest guy. I asked Craig if his father-in-law had a brother named Tom and Craig said, “he’s sitting right over there.” I worked for Tom at Maracle Industrial Finishing in Webster right after I dropped out of school. Tom was the wild one in his family, got good at painting cars and started this business and quickly landed a contract from Xerox to strip and refinish the metal panels on their, at that time, huge copiers. Guess who dunked the panels down into a boiling vat of of paint stripper. When I introduced myself to Tom he said, “I’m glad you got out of there.”
Crooked house on Webster side of Irondequoit Bay outlet bridge
If I open my Tumblr feed I lose a few hours so I try to space out my visits. I follow Will Prouty’s Roc City site and that’s always nice. How do you suppose he get such dramatic light in his Rochester shots?
Remember the funny house at Sea Breeze in the old days? They had a room with all those funny mirrors and a rotating barrel that you used to have to walk through and a room where everything was crooked. This house is just around the corner from the amusement park on the little strip of land that runs between Lake Ontario and Irondequoit Bay. It’s right next door to the seven homes that were destroyed by that Spangler dude but it was not harmed. This has always been a funky part of town.
Dick Tosti performing at Gigi’s Italian Restaurant in Rochester, New York
We usually put our skis on at the front door and ski through our neighbor’s yard and down into the woods up to the lake but we never got around to sawing up the big oak that fell across our path last Fall. And the snow is so deep we would surely have to cut the trail all the way to the golf course so got in the car and drove down to the lake and skied around the ponds. The sun went down while we out there but we hardly noticed because it was a full moon and there is so much of the white stuff out there.
We worked up a good appetite so we drove right past our house on the way home and cruised down East Ridge Road looking for a spot to eat. We hadn’t been in in Gigi’s Italian Kitchen yet and used to like it a lot when it was La Trattoria so we gave it a shot. It’s still funky, the food is great and on Fridays and Saturdays they have Dick Tosti playing live music in the dining room. We were there kinda early but the place filled up fast. Dick had a really light touch, a great sense of rhythm and a really cool voice. He was doing a sensational job with “This Guy’s in Love With You” when we left. We had him pegged as a Continental who played in local bands in the sixties and he might have but he goes way back. We did a little research and found this video when we got back home. Somehow this video led us to a string of Abba videos. You know how it goes with YouTube.
The Little Theater Café had already let two employees go home by the time we showed up to play. The forecast for twelve inches kept all but the die-hard home and their dinner hour was the slowest in months. Does the band care? Hardly. We play for ourselves and reliably sound best when hardly anyone is there. There is more room for dynamics and space to let thing get to the brink of falling apart. But somehow the place filled up and by the end of the night Sandy told us we were only a dollar fifty short of the bonus so Peggi and I bought a peanut butter cup brownie and cashed in.
We shoveled for a good bit of the day today and were still out there when our neighbors walked by with their three Jack Russell terriers. One was wearing a sweater and anther had four little booties on. They told us they had been skiing in Durand on the newly groomed trails. They started grooming last year but we never got any snow. We prefer the un-groomed trails that run through the woods and snake around the ponds. When the driveway was clear we skied until dark. The conditions were perfect. I fell four times, twice while I was just standing there, and it was a soft landing each time.
We found it impossible to keep a candle lit in the cold wind behind Holy Trinity Church in Webster so we put the candles in our pocket and brought them home. We’ll probably burn ours later tonight. Our niece died twenty years ago from an infected heart and her two sisters organized a remembrance at her grave. Nicole was twelve when she died and three of her friends from back then, some with their own children now, were also there to share memories. I babysat for Nicole and her sisters on Wednesday nights for three years and I couldn’t decide which memory to share. She was so full of life and ready to go on all fronts.
Just before she got sick she asked me to paint her portrait so I said I’d bring my camera out the next Wednesday and take a photo. Nicole made a big deal of this sitting, picking the white chair on the porch as the location and wearing her favorite t-shirt and then spending over an hour in the bathroom putting on make-up. By the time she was ready to sit down it was getting dark and there was barely enough light for the film in our old Canon FTb. She died before I got around to doing the painting.
We headed back out to Webster last night for calling hours for Brad Fox’s mom. Brad flew in from Oakland, just in time for the first snow fall and the whole Mahoney family, who lived a few doors down on the same street, was there when we arrived. Brad’s mom was the sweetest person in the world. Years ago I made her a cd of old country songs and she told me how much she liked it every time I saw her. My favorite memory of her was from way back. The Who’s “Substitute”was out and Brad was singing “I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth” at the top of his lungs when his mom laid into him. “What do mean you were born with a plastic spoon?”
Youngblood Disposal dumpster behind Village Gate in Rochester, New York
We don’t have a dumpster out front but we have managed to fill our green Waste Management trash containers to the brim every week for the last few months. With the project creep our little home improvement task is surely helping the economy. We did a Home Depot run this afternoon and Peggi and I each a had cart over there. Peggi had electrical outlets, paint, drywall screws, and Ploy Foam CaulkSaver in hers. I had backing board and a bag of Thinset in mine. I noticed the guys who did our drywall drink those 24 ounce Mega Monster energy drinks. We count on coffee and are so tired we may just watch Alfred Hitchcock Presents reruns tonight.
View from outside the smoking trailer at Nick’s Seabreeze Restaurant in Rochester, New York
My father told us he received an email from Apple about the one terabyte Seagate internal drive in his iMac. Apparently two many of these drives had failed and Apple was replacing them for free. We encouraged my father to do it before his drive fails so we made sure he had an up to date backup and as an extra measure he tidied up his desktop by dragging all the clutter to his documents folder.
Apple replaced the drive the next day and he restored from the most recent backup but something was amiss. His documents folder was empty. He called me and I had him go into his Time Machine preference panel, click on the options button and read me what he saw in the list of “Items to be excluded from backups”. Along with the names of external drives he read “applications” and “Documents.” My heart sank. My father has been a heavy user since the eighties. How could these items ever have been selected for exclusion?
We called the Apple Store back, they gave us a Genius appointment and told us to bring the computer and BU drive out there. The store was jammed with fans ogling the iPad minis and the genius bar was a hotbed of people troubleshooting problems with their mobile devices. As far as I could tell we were the only old-timers with a clunky desktop machine. We begged them to give us the old drive back so we could rescue the docs but we were told the drive had already been destroyed for security reasons.
One Apple genius told another, “These guys have an interesting problem here.” Interesting! This was is a disaster! I franticly rummaged through the backup folders and found a documents folder from a few months back and then a month before that I found a folder with his apps. The geniuses were at loss as to how this could have happened. And then in the backup from the day before the drive was replaced we found the hundreds of files that were on his backup before he cleaned house for the Apple guys.
For our efforts in bailing him out my father took us to Nick’s Seabreeze Inn for dinner. Nick smokes cigars and keeps a heated trailer parked out back for smokers to hang out in. There is a little tv in there and the place looks pretty cozy.
Peggi Fournier watercolor in Rochester Contemporary Members Show 2012
Some years ago our friend, Duane, met Charlie Watts at a book signing in a Manhattan. Duane bought a copy of Charlie’s book, “From One Charlie To Another,” for us and had Mr. Watts autograph it. The illustrated book was a tribute to Charlie Parker and I think I still have it but I just spent twenty minutes trying to find it. Anyway, Duane nervously snuck a picture of Charlie Watts, shooting from the belt, and it looks like Charlie spotted the camera because he is looking right at it. The photo is awkwardly cropped but that became a quality and Peggi did a watercolor based on the photo and submitted it the 22nd Annual Members Show at Rochester Contemporary.
The opening was last night and the place was mobbed, so crowded we couldn’t find Peggi’s art on the walls. Each time we took a few steps we would be sort of trapped in conversation and we were way in the back when director, Bleu Cease, made the big announcement about RoCo having bought the building. Someone had already spilled the beans on that one so we were just sort of stuck in the crowd. When the festivities ended I worked my way to the front and spotted Peggi’s piece on the front wall next to Lorraine Bohonos’s, Heather Irwin’s and Anne Haven’s work.
1968 R.L. Thomas High School volleyball team with Kit Bower and Paul Dodd
A few weeks ago my girlfriend from high school sent me a message on fb saying she was downsizing and had come across some old soccer clippings that I might be interested in. She sent them along with this picture of the volleyball team. I looked at it for a while trying to recall who these people were and then dreaming about old friends. On Saturday another classmate, Jeff Munson, emailed to invite us over for dinner. He was making homemade pasta with kale and his old buddy, number 13 in the photo above, in town for the weekend, was also going to be there. Looking back, Kit Bower probably picked the number 13. He is that kinda guy. But would he still be wearing those fashionably clunky, horn rimmed glasses? I hadn’t seen him in forty years.
No, he was not wearing any glasses. Funny that number 5 doesn’t have his glasses on in this photo. I have worn them non stop since fifth grade. Kit is little heavier than he was back then and I am a little lighter but then he’s the head chef at a fancy country club in the Hamptons and my family can’t gain weight. He brought some fresh Long Island Bay scallops and sautéed them as an appetizer and reminded me that we were both dancers in the high school musical. I had forgotten about that but I was stuck by how much our personalities and goofy interactions were exactly the same as they were back then.
It was a simple remodeling sort of idea but it has turned into a full scale daily Home Depot run. Home owners call it “project creep.” Contractors have different terms for it but the sound effect is the same. Ca-ching! Our spare time, every minute of it, has been devoted to bringing the cost of these improvements down so we’ve been setting the alarm and working like dogs until we collapse.
Our home was built in the late forties but we found a newspaper from July 18th, 1964 in one of the walls, a sign of a previous owner’s improvement efforts. This issue of Rochester’s evening paper, “The Times Union,” was so brittle it came out in tiny fragments. We got pieces of a story about some fellow who won the bid to paint all 2000 of the City’s fire hydrants. He was quoted as saying it’s really like painting 4000 hydrants because he had to do two coats. From Ruth Chamberlain’s society column, “Around the Town,” It’s a Merry “Marry-Go-Round For Miss Dunn. Pretty Gaylord Allen Dunn, daughter of Mrs. Arthur S. Van Brocklin of South Main Street, Pittsford, and Howard M. Dunn of Ambassador Drive is on a gay, happy merry-go-round for the remaining days before her marriage to Navy Ensign Stuart Dudley Hallagan Jr. on Friday next.”
Midtown Plaza, the nations first indoor shopping mall (pictured today as a pit, above), had just opened. A human interest story on 1B talks of the friendly competition between Nick Sarantis’s Soda Spa Restaurant and George Slathes General Sweet Shoppe, which sat next door to one another at 492 and 494 W. Main for thirty years.
“Armory Floor “Fix” Up Again. State officials are trying to get funds to fix the sagging floor of Rochester’s Main Street Armory. The 40,000 square foot floor has been condemned for public purposes since 1960.” Apparently they got the money because my nephew recently saw Slayer perform there. “Fire Damages Schaller’s Drive-In.” “Bicyclist Grabs $27. A teenager riding a bicycle snatched $27 form a man as the latter was about to buy a newspaper at State Street and Main Street East about 12:30 AM today. Police said the victim was Aaron Jacob, 23, of 70 Troup Street.
And from page 10B, “He’s Not Sorry He Got Involved”.” A Rochester truck driver who fatally shot a man while going to the aid of a woman in distress said today that the fear of ‘getting involved’ is mostly unjustified. ‘My experience should show people in New York City that you can get involved and feel good about it later,’ Roy Coffey, 32, of 62 Sullivan Street said. Coffey said it isn’t just a case of fear that that prevents many people form giving assistance to others. ‘A lot of people are are simply concerned about the legal technicalities,’ he said.”
I feel it is our duty to leave a newspaper from 2012 in this wall before we seal it up.
It was gorgeous Fall afternoon, the perfect temperature to be outside. The leaves underfoot were about a foot deep and we were trying to keep the grizzly thoughts at bay while we searched the grounds for our neighbor’s Autumn colored cat. They had emailed in the morning that Sammy had not been seen since the plumber started making a racket yesterday afternoon. Sammy is pretty street savvy. She’d wandered the streets of New York and had travelled all the way from New Zealand in a box. She is big enough to defend herself but certainly not quick enough to outfox a coyote.
A few hours went by and then I spotted our neighbor loading a ladder into his car. Sammy had been found up a tree in another neighbor’s yard. These people have two white dogs who probably cornered Sammy. I put my neighborhood reporter hat on and went down the street to take a photo. Sammy was about about twenty feet up, out of reach with that ladder, so I went home to get ours, the one I used when we painted our city house five times. As I tried to nestle my ladder in the tree I scared Sammy and she came down a few limbs. I was able to throw a rope over the limb and we pulled it toward the earth. Sammy jumped about ten feet and landed softly.
