Category: Life Is A Spell

Our friend, Jeff, found these mushrooms in his yard last weekend and brought them over to show us. He laid them out on the hood of his car. This has been an exceptionally good year for mushrooms or so I’ve read. Maybe it’s just that we are more tuned in to them because our friends Pete and Shelley have taken to eating wild ones. The more you walk in the woods the smaller the items of interest become. You find yourself looking at lichen and seed pods and moss and mushrooms.

Last week’s camping trip is just a memory but the photos are real. Aren’t they?

Our neighbor, Leo, was always one step ahead of us. He made us look like slackers without even trying. Up first in the morning he’d have our paper at the door and he already be involved in a project before we crawled out of bed. He shared his garden with us, his gardening skills and then the fruit from the garden, potatoes and carrots and raspberries. Leo could fix anything. He was not only a craftsman but and an equally inventive creator, an inspiration. He was non-stop until yesterday when he passed away at 94.

Our neighbors on the other side lost their grandchild yesterday. The sweetest little girl in the world developed a brain tumor that eventually got the best of her just short of her second birthday.

Deer wander in the Canadian woods looking for food just like they do here but up there they have moose too and they are a bit taller than deer. You can see how they’ve trimmed these trees along the shoreline in Algonquin with branches eaten as high as the animals can reach. They look like manicured shrubs in an Italian garden. Philip Guston painted trees like this in his “Roma” series.

We were camping with Jeff and Mary Kaye and they’ve have been up here many times. Jeff was calling this the “browse line” and I kept thinking, “That can’t be right.” I think of animals as “right down to business”. Of course Jeff was right. This has opened my eyes to the possibility of a wide range of motives in the animal kingdom.

I can’t think of a better place to spend Indian Summer than Algonquin Provincial Park up north of Toronto. We spent the last four days there, backcountry camping and living in the moment which makes it all sort of hard to describe.

There were highlights that transcended the moment like the shooting star, the beaver we followed for a half hour or so and the midnight canoe ride to the dark side of the island where the shoreline reflected on the still lake like a wild hallucination with Rorschach attributes.

The 3000 square mile park is astoundingly beautiful and pretty much the same as it was one during the first Indian Summer.

I can’t remember the last time the 5 day forecast, on the back page of the sports section, had five solid, full sun icons. So gorgeous this time of year, incredible colors and such low humidity you can see for miles. Even the deer were stunned. We came across a family in the woods and they checked us out but didn’t run. Peggi says they’re thinking, “Oh, them”.

We heard the news that Steve Jobs died while we were on break last night at the Little and we read so many obits and tributes today that it cast a melancholy spell on the day. We certainly had a soft spot for the guy that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life and then pretty much designed our lifestyle.

There was some sort rift that developed in my family years ago. Drinking was involved. Pa beat Ma. People took sides and today all is forgiven or forgotten, or most of it anyway. We had reunion in Webster Park over the weekend and Peggi I threw our tofu dogs on the grill along side of our cousins’ hot dogs. The daughter of my grandfathers’ brother showed us a scrapbook full of old family photos and I popped a photo of the one above. It shows my grandfather and his fellow workers in front of his grocery store on North Avenue. “Of course you’ve heard all these stories,” she said. But we really hadn’t and the time flew by as the stories unfolded.

Brad Fox told me he used to get depressed every year at this time when the days get cooler, shorter and grayer. He moved to California to remedy that situation. My good friend and neighbor is also affected by light deprivation. And Anne Havens goes south in the winter but thankfully always returns for productive art-making, something that she is sharing by appointment only before she hightails it out of here. You can contact her through her site.

Me, I get overwhelmed in the summer and look forward to hunkering down in the winter months.

Took our last dip in the street pool on the last day of summer and finally set aside time to watch the Western New York Flash beat the Philadelphia Freedom. Our neighbors had taped the championship game and kept it on their Tivo for us. We had our first and last (while we’re living anyway) garage sale the day they played. If this Women’s Professional soccer league survives and Marta comes back we’ll get season tickets next year. It was a sensational game.

I can’t tell new music from old any more. Is everything coming back at once or is nothing really new? Was that old disco or new disco that the staff in the Little Theater Café were playing last night? When our Netflix queue ran dry last month we asked our friends, Rich and Andrea, for some recommendations. Rich sent his list along with a request for new music recommendations. I’m still listening to sixties’ jazz so I couldn’t possibly oblige but it was nice to be reminded how out of it I am. I do know I like Matt & Kim.

Martin Scorsese’s “Public Speaking” found it’s way in to our queue and I like that.

The soundtrack to Wednesday’s ride home from our gig used to be The Maestro’s show “Dig This” but time does not stand still in college radio land. Last night in the same time slot it was “Femme Fatale” holding court with the queens of R&B. I just “liked” her page.

When I was a kid the ride down Lake Avenue to Charlotte Beach seemed to take an eternity. And that final crest where you got your first look at lake and the tall flag pole was so dramatic. It still seems like a trek even though you’re still within the city limits.

We took Pete and Shelley to see the “Subterranean Surrogates” show at RoCo and then cruised down Lake Avenue to Abbots. They have so many locations now but the Chocolate Almond custard still tastes the best down there.

This morning’s paper had an article about Bay Town Plaza in Webster going under as Walmart plans to super-size their building there. The town is so ridiculously built up it’s depressing. I was going to high school out there when they converted the old three lane (we called the middle lane the “suicide lane”) Empire Boulevard/104 in to the new 104 that plowed through farm fields to carry the burgeoning Xerox’s employees to work. The noisy 104/Irondequoit Bay Bridge was part of the package. We can hear the hum from our house on the other side.

They have been doing work on the Bay Bridge all summer so it’s been in a poor man’s Christo mode. We rode our bikes over there the other day and sat on the bench that overlooks this scene confirming that life is a spell.