Category: Lopsided Observations

There is not that much open space available in the town of Irondequoit. One of Rochester’s oldest bedroom communities, it is surrounded by water on three sides – the river, the lake and the bay. I remember a driving range on Titus Avenue that I used to pass on my way to the House of Guitars. People would tee off up near the road and their drives would go straight downhill.

That same hill was developed into track homes and when it would rain the water washed down the streets overwhelming a creek at the bottom of the hill, a creek that wound it’s way through the lowlands onto Spring Valley and Hoffman Road making the roads impassible. The town increased their tax base but this project was a huge blunder. They had to divert the creek, put in a retention pond and raise the elevation of the roads.

The creek now meanders through the newly minted wetlands and flows under the road through a number of culverts. The strangest stuff comes floating down from the subdivision – styrofoam coolers, stuffed animals, someone’s recycling bin and balls.

All it takes is a couple of inches of new white stuff and winter is all fresh again. And of course it helps when the temperatures don’t even make it out of single digits. The air crisp and the snow is perfect for skiing. We drove to the other side of the park, the undeveloped section on he west side of Kings Highway, and skied up along the ridge that runs almost all the way up o the fire department. We were the only human tracks, plenty of others out but no walkers, snowshoers or other cross-country nuts.

We skied in the park yesterday too. There still isn’t quite enough snow to cushion the trails in the woods so we’re going all civilized rather than bushwhacking. The Rochester Cross-Country Ski Foundation grooms trails on the golf course and we saw a few tiny signs for the “Nordic Center.” We can only image what that is or where it might be. The signs so few and far between that you might freeze trying to follow them. I should add that our style of X-Crountry skiing is worlds away from the upcoming Olympic variety of skate skiing. We trudge. They glide.

There was a police car running out in front of our house a few days ago but no one was in the car. We spotted the casually dressed cop and two other distraught guys coming out of a neighbor’s back yard. We asked what was going on and they told us there was an injured deer running around and they were trying to do the “humane thing” and put it out of its misery. We asked what had happened to the deer and they said it had been shot with an arrow as part of the bait and shoot program and it got away.

We found deer down in the creek a few years back. It was a buck with a huge rack so we called our neighbor, someone who both feeds the deer and hunts them, not the same deer of course. That would be inhumane, I think. I’m real blurry on this humane thing. Assisted suicide for people is currently inhumane but it is fine for animals. Anyway, we showed this neighbor where the dead deer was and he sawed the rack off its head so he could get both sides of the rack attached to a deer skull cap. And when he rolled the deer over he found an arrow in its side.

Back to the injured deer that is currently on the loose: The hunters signaled it out, shot an arrow at it, injured but didn’t kill the deer and now they want to do the humane thing on it.

The Eastman School of Music’s Philharmonia and the Eastman Rochester Chorus tore the roof off the sucker last night in Kodak Hall. The free concert of Mahler’s wild Symphony No. 2, commonly known as “The Resurrection” although it is not about Christ, was dedicated to the memory of Dean Douglas Lowry who passed away a few weeks ago. The place was packed and there were nearly 300 instrumentalists and choral members on stage. Eight double bass players!

It was comforting to know our neighbor was pecking away in the light filled room at the back of the house next door. I imagine a writer’s work is never done. Even while socializing you always get the sense that you just might be material for repurposing. So it was a sad day when their year lease ran out. We’re still sleeping with our bedroom windows open and it is much too quiet over there.

When the phone rings at 6 AM you know it’s going to be a strange day. My dad asked my mom to call 911 because he felt terrible. She called my sister next and then my sister called us. At a certain age it seems you have to check in at Emergency a few times a year just to keep things moving along.

Lots of tests and a host of the usual problems but no smoking gun. Could it have been the knockwurst sandwich, the German potato salad and or the vanilla milkshake that my dad had for dinner at the Highland Diner? Or maybe a general sausage buildup due to the the meal my dad had the day before at Brew & Brats outside of Naples? The doctor said, “It could be.”

The staff at Highland Hospital was just fantastic, thoroughly professional and attentive, all the things you hope for when things spin out of control, but also very friendly. The Spanish speaking maintenance man was just a delight, the technician who looked exactly like one of those tall, skinny African “inmigrantes” you see on the streets in Spain with blankets of designer contraband spread out in front of them. He had the most beautiful, charcoal black skin. The nurse who my niece, a wedding photographer, had met when she tried to liven up a really boring wedding, demonstrated the dances she did on the emergency room floor. The “Lawnmower, The Shopping Cart” and the “Lawn Sprinkler.” The doctor, who was going to medical school in the Scorgie’s days, told us he had one of our Personal Effects lps and had seen Margaret Explosion at the Little and better yet, he has a copy of my dad’s “Brighton Brick” book at home.

An advantage of the demise of downtown, starting with the urban renewal efforts, the white flight and the crush of the suburban malls, is the really amazing loft style living arrangements that are now available in the heart of the city. We took the Landmark Society’s weekend tour of exciting spaces to live and work. A loft in the old, 1959 orange striped, Central Trust building on Exchange Street with a birds eye view of the Wings of Progress atop the Art Deco inspired Times Square building was our favorite sweet spot.

We recently upped our Time Warner exposure by signing a contract for cable tv in addition to our internet access and digital phone. So this has been a new experience for us watching Breaking Bad in real time. But on Sunday night we sat down for episode three in the final season and we could not get our box to work. I tried unplugging it to reboot it and but it wouldn’t budge from the “b109” error message. I called TW and the message said the wait time was approximately forty-five minutes. I hung in there. The operator was not able to reboot through the cable either so she offered to set up a service call on Wednesday afternoon, three days away.

I had a sneaking suspicion that our cat had melted the circuitry. She is fifteen and looks for the warmest spot in the house to roost. So I took the box out to East Rochester and got in line with all the other hopelessly addicted users. The line grew out the door, literally, and just as it did one of the two clerks slid this big blue sign over her window and announced that she was gong to lunch. It was very theatrical.

I hung in there and when I got to the front of the line I found the clerk to be quite friendly and helpful, not at all what I expected. I came home, rebooted, watched a few rather unseemly messages, and then sat there with the sound off watching Manchester United play Chelsea to a 0-0 tie in their English Premier League game.

Ever feel like starting over?

I have been a fan of these guys for a long time. Their outdoor advertising is pure pop Americana but their radio spots are painful. There’s a $2000 purse in their Jingle Contest if you can help them out.

Pretty soon you will be able to follow the river on bike from its source in the hills of Pennsylvania northward to Lake Ontario. And when you reach Rochester you will be able to take your choice as to which side of the river you would like to travel on. The city keeps expanding its bike paths and we arranged a weekend tour for a most spectacular ride.

We started by putting our bikes in the car and driving to the zoo in Frederick Law Olmsted’s Seneca Park. We parked and rode out of the zoo entrance and across Saint Paul Boulevard to Collingwood where we found the newest section of the city’s ever expanding bike paths, “El Camino,” on a repurposed old rail bed. We rode north past the former Ridge Lumber (Home of Lanky Planky) and across 104 on a foot bridge with a graffiti carpet past the open air drug markets of Avenue D, C, B and A, stopping frequently to marvel at the new murals painted by the Wall Therapy Project on the backs of abandoned industrial buildings.

We lost the path north of Clifford Avenue and wound up on the Bausch Street Bridge where we crossed the river looking for the west side path to take us back to Seneca Park. Traveling north on Lake Avenue to Driving Park we spotted the illusive trail. Determined to find out where we went wrong we took the path back south down along the river where I took this shot. The big art Deco building is Kodak’s Hawk Eye plant where they made bomb sites for the military. My father worked here and was sworn to secrecy. I love the name of the bridge, “Driving Park!”

If we had gotten off El Camino when we got to Clifford we could have crossed Saint Paul and gotten on the northbound trail that crosses the river on an old RG&E power plant and then travels along the west side of the river gorge into Maplewood Park where you have the option to continue north to the lake or cross back over the river on a foot bridge that leads into Seneca Park and the zoo where our car was parked.

It never fails to happen. We’ll dart in and out of galleries in Chelsea just as most folks do, carrying on conversations while taking the art in, and the lines between the art, the people and the gallery setting all get blurred. Maybe it’s just the act of discerning the good from the bad that alters your perception skills but I always come back home with some pretty cool photos that I shot between galleries.

Back at Duane‘s in Brooklyn I insisted on listening to the entire “On The Beach.” Phrases connected to insidious melodies were lodged in my head and I thought I might be able to shake them by feeding my fix. The title song is killer but “Ambulance Blues” had its hooks in me big time. At first it was “Walk On” and then “Motion Pictures.” Back home it’s been the line, “It doesn’t matter,” from “For The Turnstiles” so I decided to fight fire with fire and buy a remastered digital copy from iTunes. I’ll report back.