Category: Life Is A Spell

The only reason I am able to identify these blossoms is the iNaturalist app that Peggi has on her phone. This Mountain Laurel was in the garden of a house on Clover Street, just across the street from a brick Don Hershey house with rounded corners at the entrance. The Landmark Society’s tour started at Mercy High School and included a stop at Bob Martin’s former home, a mid-century marvel.

Cornell’s Merlin bird identification app was made for retirees, especially those who by this age should know how to distinguish between a Yellow Warbler and a Goldfinch. At the push of a button the free app listens as it creates a waveform while spitting out pictures of the birds it hears. We stopped near the marsh on Hoffman Road and gave it a spin.

Robins, Red-Winged Blackbirds, Wrens and Cardinals all popped up in the first few seconds. Sparrows, Warbling Vireos, Morning Doves, Baltimore Orioles, Yellow Warblers, Red-bellied Woodpeckers, Cedar Waxwings, Goldfinches, White Breasted Nuthatchs and even a Rose-breasted Grosbeak were audible in the first minute.

For whatever twisted reason the first Captain Beefheart song that got under my skin was “The Blimp.” And then “China Pig.” And then every song on “Trout Mask” and any song he touched. I went backward for the whole catalog and picked up every new release in real time. Well, the blimp is in town. Last time we looked, it was the Met Life blimp. It was still the Goodyear blimp when I took this shot of it over Sparky‘s house in 2002. I thought of that song today when we spotted the blimp as we came out of the hospital where we were visiting Pete. The PGA Championship is in town.

Oak Hill, the swanky country club on the east side of Rochester, last held the PGA in 2013. We went to that one. These sporting events keep getting bigger. In 1989 when the US Open was there Peggi and I (4D Advertising) did a brochure that featured all the branded swag. We took a box of sample product to Chris Maggio’s studio on Saint Paul and he photographed the lot. We designed a commemorative book called “The Crown Jewels of Oak Hill” as well. Today the merch tents are as big as a department store and you can bet no two bit local agency was responsible for any of the action.

We’ve been sleeping with our windows open for the past week or so, falling asleep to the sound of toads singing in the creek down below. I love that sound, so primal, like a native ceremony happening in the next village. In most cases it is many toads singing at once but yesterday we witnessed a solo performance by this guy in our neighbor’s pond.

The female toads, who are usually larger than the males, answer the call. The way Jared explains it the male hops onboard, the females let a string of tiny black eggs loose in the water, the male excretes his milky sperm and in a few weeks the pond is full of tadpoles. His pond was like some kind of sex club. Toads splashing around on the floating plants in twosomes, threesomes and even foursomes. The females, having answered the siren call, seem to be trying get away, to shake the male on their back. We watched this one pair climb out of the pond and up the waterfall where they ran into a frog.

The Museo de la Cancion Yucateca in Merida was as magical and gentle as the Yucatan people. Peggi started making this video before we had even paid our 50 peso entry donation. The temperature was in the upper nineties but like most places in Merida the huge open doors, high ceilings and open air courtyard drew the warm air out of the building.

This courtyard was surrounded by rooms that featured different chapters in the history of Yucatan’s unique music. The papel picado (perforated paper or pecked paper) was plastic in this case and it made the prettiest sound as it flapped in the breeze. Shadows from the papel danced on the floor of the courtyard.

My sister-in-law told us she played with AI for suggestions on what she might say when she took the mic the night before her son’s wedding. This was day three of festivities and most of the 150 guests had arrived in town. This event was being held in an old food processing plant, now a complex that included the restaurant, a bar, an art gallery, a dance hall, a movie theater and a lounge. The AI was a bust for her and from what I could hear of her talk it could only have been generated by the groom’s proud mom.

The wedding itself took place at a hacienda outside of Merida. The guests gathered in Parque Santa Lucia and boarded two full size tour buses for the forty minute ride. The setting was gorgeous and the ceremony was wildly perfect. Our neighbor can legally marry people. I’m not sure what the term is for those that can officiate a non religious ceremony, but this one was a friend and he did a great job. Although I couldn’t help thinking about AI during his talk. We’ve known our nephew his whole life and his vows were so sweet and tender. I thought, “take that AI!” It was my favorite part of the four days.

Now that it has 43k views on YouTube, someone, I forget who, is re-releasing New Math’s “Die Trying” on an lp. This will be the fourth time. It has already been released on Reliable, CBS and Archive Records. Since I was only in the band long enough to record it and the B side, “Angela,” they asked if I could write a few sentences for the liner notes.

So it’s 95 degrees here, I’m sitting in an open air courtyard with a Negra Modelo and I came up with this. “I loved how Gary and Kevin arranged Die Trying. I can still see Kevin air drumming my parts.” I don’t think I ever really got what he heard.

I don’t think it is my imagination. I am getting better at going down rabbit holes. Our devices facilitate the ease, of course, but I have always preferred daydreaming to, well, just about anything. I installed the Bing app on my iPad this morning to check out its AI assisted super-powers.

I had seen the headlines about LaBron James toppling Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s record earlier and that prodded a few memories loose. Brother Tracey, my homeroom (and math teacher) at Bishop Kearney was always going on about his one of his former students, how when he was teaching at Power Memorial in NYC he suspended Lew Alcinder and that cost the basketball team their only loss in four years. Tracey was a short, wiry, little guy but mean disciplinarian. I remember him throwing a fellow student out of class for wearing cologne and I’m quite sure he was one of the Brothers who dished out the spanking that took place in the coatroom by the doors to the gym. So my first Bing search was for “Brother Tracey.”

I found an obit from 2010 and learned he left the Irish Christian Brothers order and moved to Geneva where he taught at DeSales High School. He married a woman named, Beryl, and had three children. His brothers-in-law were listed as Blaine, Bruce and Armand, the legendary House of Guitars brothers.

The Amaryllis blossom above is in a most unlikely location. I only discovered it while standing on a stool. The cool blueish-grey horizontal band is our white ceiling, the middle band is our muslin wall and the murky brown base is the dust covered top of our living room built-in cabinet. We usually tuck our Amaryllis plant behind the photo albums in the top cabinet for about a month in the winter so the bulb can go dormant but we forgot about it this year and the white stalk grew out the crack between the cabinet and wall where it found enough light to blossom.

1975 and 1999 were also Years of the Rabbit where luck, hope and good fortune are in the offing.

The number of times we’ve have walked through Durand Eastman Park and only today did I pay particular attention to the sign that reads “Picnic Grove.” It’s always been there, by the yellow gate on Log Cabin Road, the gate they swing open in the winter because the road is off limits to vehicles. In the summer months it swings closed keeping cars off the stretch that connects Log Cabin to Zoo Road. All good in my book. I like the park rules,”Dogs must be leashed,” “No bikes on trails.” The Picnic Grove sign is in this section.

My mom would often pack a picnic basket, sometimes with just peanut butter sandwiches, and we would come down here when my dad got off work. All the roads were open back then. You could drive on Horseshoe Road, which is now grown over. There was a zoo on Zoo Road and the road connected to Wisner to take you right out of the park. I remember my dad driving slowly to pick out a spot where my mother could spread the blanket on the ground and it was often right here in Picnic Grove.

The Spanish SuperCopa final was thrilling. We follow three teams and Real Madrid and Barcelona are two of them but there was never any doubt who we were pulling for. Barca almost pulled off a 3-0 shutout. They controlled the ball in midfield where Real Madrid used to be dominant. Busquets, the captain, Frankie De jong and the teenagers, Pedri and Gavi played magic triangles around Madrid’s midfielders as if teasing the champions and we loved it.

We zoomed with our friends, Matthew and Louise in Hawaii. They told us about a canal near them where they walk their dog, Tricky. That night we watched an episode of Hawaii Five-0 and a chase was filmed on the canal.

We keep an eye on this witch hazel tree. It’s right at the top of the hill on Zoo Road so we pass it often. It is one of the first witch hazels to blossom and it is also the most fragrant, like butterscotch or, more accurately, those butter rum suckers they used to sell at Charlotte Beach when we were kids. These blossoms usually come in February and we read them as the first sign of spring. We already moved the first day of spring up to Saint Patty’s and now we have the first sign on New Year’s Day.

My brother Mark and his wife, Amy, had a rough trip up to Rochester. They shared their location and every time we checked on their progress their ETA had moved to an hour later. They brought their little dog with them and snuck her up to their room at the top of the Hyatt. We had reservations downtown at 6:30 and I moved the reservations three times before we met them there at 10. The temperature was 6 degrees.

We took a long walk on Christmas Eve and moved several fallen branches off the road before deciding to bring a large pine branch back to serve as our Christmas tree. We had my brother, his wife and their three grown children, my sister Ann and my brother Fran over for dinner. Peggi made manicotti that was out of this world and we had a grand time.

In the morning we found a gift under the tree from Mark and Amy, Ada Calhoun’s book, “Also A Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me,” about her difficult relationship with her father, Peter Schjeldahl and his difficult relationship with the poet, Frank O’Hara. Meaty material. Peggi’s sister sent us some bowls from Bauer in LA and Duane sent up an incredible book of June Leaf’s rough and tumble multi disciplined artwork. We devoured large portions of both. We bought the New York: 1962-1964 book for ourselves. The show at the Jewish Museum was on our short list of things to do the last time we were in the city but we ran out of time. The book is jam packed with snapshots of American culture in this narrowly focused tipping point.

Our niece, Nicole Zabelny, died thirty years ago. Her heart was enlarged. I babysat for her and her two sisters on Wednesday nights for almost three years while my sister, Ann, was working as a hostess at Waldron’s in Webster. I would leave work early and ride my bike out there, down the big hill on Browncroft or the even more dangerous one on Empire Boulevard. I’d play with the kids, feed them, struggle to get them wound down and in bed and then put a baked potato in the oven for my sister to have when she got home. I’d have a beer with my sister and Peggi would come out to take me home in the car. I loved every minute of it. Nicole was always a delight. She was very creative, talked of becoming a writer, and had big plans for her life but it was cut short. Way too short.

Just before she got sick, she asked me to paint her portrait. I said I’d bring my camera out the next Wednesday and take a photo to work from. Nicole made a big deal of the 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. She was twelve. 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. I had the film developed when the roll was finished but Nicole was already gone by then. She was such a positive force. She will never be forgotten.

Shortly before our niece, Nicole Zabelny, passed she created a children’s book in her sixth grade art class. Her book, “Counting At The Circus” is available here as a free download.

Download eBook of “Counting At The Circus“”

The tall invasive weeds have died back enough for us to take the paths though the park that parallel the golf course. We’re still waiting for that tick vaccine. Yesterday it seemed they had closed the golf course too early. Today, that decision looks prescient.

I never get much reading in before falling asleep. And I know I’m getting tired when I don’t want to turn the page. Often I’ll realize I have no idea what I just read but sometimes I just don’t want to turn the page. What I have just read is just too good. I need to savor it and drift off with fresh ideas swirling in my head.

We woke up to snow this morning. The autumn that went on so long it exhausted our plants had finally produced a frost. The gorgeous fall palette will be drained of all but brown and grey. It is up to us to provide the color in these winter months. We can’t be lazy.

All summer I swam with ear plugs. I forgot to bring them to Costa Rica and sure enough, I got water trapped behind the wax in my ear. I couldn’t hear out of my left ear at all. I went to my doctor when I returned but she was not able to flush it out. She recommended an ENT doctor and I made an appointment but in the meantime the water dried up and my hearing came back. I kept the appointment anyway but I had reservations.

The doctor has three locations and the first appointment was out in Greece. I don’t like Greece. Google maps plotted two routes, one on the expressway and the other along the lake. Both were 21 minutes. I chose the lake route and made it there in plenty of time.

I filled out a few forms and studied the watercolors on the wall, small landscapes in awkward frames. I was thinking they might have been done by someone who works there or maybe a relative. An older couple came in behind me. He was outfitted in LL Bean gear. The assistant took me back to an empty room and I sat there in this chair. At one point someone opened the door and went right to a cabinet to get something. I said hi but she didn’t say anything. I was hoping to god that she wouldn’t be the one attending to my ears.

I sat there for about a half hour, long enough to study the room and take these photos. The same woman came back. Not interested in small talk, she barely heard me out and said “As long as you are here we might as well remove your wax.” She pulled a white plastic hose out of the drawer, stuck in my ear and turned on the vacuum. I squirmed as she worked the hose in and I pictured my eardrum popping if it went in any further. She acted annoyed and said, “Let’s try the other ear.” I squirmed again and she said, “I can’t do it if you keep moving. It’s too dangerous” and she put the equipment away. She walked out in a huff and said, “Have a nice day.”

We are having a most unusual autumn in New York. On the day we left for Costa Rica it was as warm here as it was down there. Social media posts confirmed that it was beautiful weather while we were gone and almost two weeks later it still is. We picked more tomatoes on our first day back, and a big bag of arugula, swiss chard and peppers. Our marigolds out front have more blossoms than they had all summer.

Every other year the maples have fallen first and then the oaks but this year the maple leaves are still up there, red and yellow, while the oak leaves are a foot deep. We did one rake before we left, just so the house didn’t look abandoned, and we’ve spent the better part of our three days back raking and chewing up the piles with our mower. My watch says I walked five and half miles today and I never left home.

I know this yellow. It has to be Rustoleum Sunburst Yellow. I used this paint on the metal chairs that sit outside our house, the ones that were white when my grandmother gave them to us. And I used this paint on my bike. Far from melancholy, the color looks especially good on this red garage and the blue trash containers makes the whole thing sing.

We were scheduled to have dinner at Jeff and Mary Kaye’s house yesterday. We planned to watch El Classico live (4:15 Madrid time) and then had out there but then Matthew and Louise suggested getting together for the big match (twice annual meeting of Barcelona and Real Madrid). So we invited Jeff and Mary Kaye over here. Peggi made mushroom pizza, Jeff baked an apple pie and Matthew and Louise brought grapes and champagne. The two teams were were tied for first place in La Liga before the match and as expected Real Madrid came out on top. We love both the teams but usually find ourselves rooting for the underdog

A melancholy mood permeated the midday gathering. I tried not to focus on it but came awake thing about it. Matthew has taken a managing editor’s position in Honolulu, a report to the office sort of job and this will surely be one of our last get-togethers. They moved in next door to us eight years ago and we have had so much fun over the years. We’re happy for them but will miss them. We had the intro to a Hawaii Five 0 episode cued up for them and we played that after the game.

Playground 2022 was in Buffalo’s Riverworks this year. Twenty or so artists were selected to do an installation in the old grain silos on the Niagara River. The silos have just sat here since the St. Lawerence Seaway opened. Before that Midwest grain was milled and processed and loaded on trains bound for New York City. Our favorite stop was Number 6 where Shawn Chiki had installed his ” Interactive Womp Womp Machine.” Peggi made this short video of my performance.

Even though it is only an hour away we planned to stay overnight in Buffalo. The Bills were playing the nearby Steelers at home so it was impossible to find a hotel room. We usually come back via Route 18, along the lake, and that would have taken us to Niagara Falls anyway so we booked a room there at the Giacomo.

We had stayed there once before and fell in love with the funkiness. While we were there we learned the hotel was owned by Carl Paladino, an unsavory character to say the least. We saw that the hotel was listed as an Elliott Property and assumed it had been sold but learned while we there that Carl is sill in charge. The view from our room, across the falls to the Canadian side was spectacular. My uncle and cousin live eight minutes away so we stopped in for a visit before getting on the Parkway.