Category: Life Is A Spell

Just about any day is a good day to walk around the old water tanks in Washington Grove up on Cobbs Hill. They are constantly evolving. In fact we interrupted a guy who was painting over an already densely covered section when we stopped by last week. Bill Jones did a short movie while walking around one of the tanks about ten years ago and the work shown in it is long gone.

For weeks we’ve been speculating about what the new building at Culver and Norton might be. They tore down the tuxedo shop and dry cleaners and threw up a wooden building in matter of weeks. I figured it had to be a chain store of some sort because the various crews have been in and out of here so fast. They were putting a brick knee wall around the front sides on Sunday when we stopped in at the QuikFill across the street. Peggi asked the gas attendent what the new building was going to be and found out it will be a Dunkin’ Donuts. That will probably be a good thing for Palermo’s across the street, better than the new smoke-shop that opened next door.

While I was taking this photo one of the brick masons shouted, “What are you doing?’ I kept my eye on my camera and said, “I’m taking a photo.” He didn’t hear me and shouted again, “What are you doing?” I turned my head toward him and yelled, “What does it look like? I’m taking a photo” and I hurried back to our car.

Our nephew is taking the train up to hang out for the weekend. He asked if we needed anything from NYC and I emailed back, “more culture.” As if the city has a lock on that sort of hint. It does have more people.

This morning’s paper had an article about the newly proposed Rochester train station. The architects drawing shows a building that looks quite a bit like the old station, the one the city tore down in 1965 in middle of a destructive urban renewal rampage. That old one was actually the third Rochester train station. It was designed by Claude Bragdon and it was a showpiece of art and culture.

When I was in Indiana playing in a C&W band we did this gig on a flatbed truck by a big barn way out in the country. It was a coon hunting convention where hunters partied til dark and then followed their dogs into the woods to “tree” raccoons. Last weekend Margaret Explosion played a a “Chili Cook-Off” at the Genesee Center for the Arts and it was almost as strange. We set up in the pottery room and Ken stood in a doorway with his stand up bass. The sound was great though and I think we got a good recording.

After our set we sampled some vegetarian white chiIi from Mex Restaurant and some homemade beer from Three Heads Brewery and then bought a two dollar raffle ticket which proved to be the winning ticket for a pound of Starbucks Antigua coffee. Photographer David Johnson has a great show in the Community Darkroom Space. He studied with Ansel Adams and took this picture of a bass player on his back at the Primalon Ballroom on Fillmore Street in the 1950. I’ve always been partial to 1950 for some reason, something to do with a wide eyed departure from a warm and cozy spot.

We helped Leo’s relatives clean out his old place over the weekend. Another neighbor pitched in as well and he described the scene as something from the show, “Hoarders.” Leo used to pick junk up from the curb and squirrel it away. He picked stuff out of our trash and we laughed as we threw the same stuff away again this weekend. Our neighbors on the other side did a little dumpster diving this morning and we joined in. I found a few choice pieces of scrap metal for Sparky and then this afternoon WM hauled the dumpster away.

Note to self: Start divesting while you still have your marbles.

Our neighbor collects our leaves and uses them as mulch for his garden and the we use his garden so it all works like a charm. He was telling us that when they get together with their son’s in-laws about the only thing they can talk about is the weather. They are sort of opposites especially when it comes to politics and everything is political so the weather is a pretty safe topic as long as you don’t wander into global warming territory.

This Fall has been especially beautiful, unusually warm and sunny. That is probably all about to change but that’s why we live here.

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.