Category: Lopsided Observations

I know wood burning is not environmentally cool but solar heat is not gonna work around here especially because we are surrounded by trees. This is a “mature” neighborhood as they say. Not every neighbor burns wood but most do so there is a bit of competition for the downed trees. One of our neighbors has three dogs and she comes by with one and then the other two (they don’t all get along) everyday. She spotted a fallen tree on the next street and told us about it, even introduced us to the neighbors, so Peggi and I dashed over and came back with five loads of red oak. A good score. The people watched as we rolled the logs up in to our vehicle and later asked the dog walkers if we were “hippies”. They thought we were “very industrious”. I didn’t think those two things went together.

This morning while we were reading the paper a huge truck came down our street with a wood chipper trailer in tow. It was a tree service hired by the power company to clean up the branches growing within their airspace, four feet in any direction and ten feet above the power lines that weave their way through the trees. They used to clean up the lower hanging cable tv and telephone lines but now they ignore those and just concentrate on the electric lines. It apparently isn’t worth it to the cable and phone companies (one in the same in many cases) to chip in and have these guys clean up their lines too. That tells me what I already knew. Cable tv and land phone lines are on the way out. Modern developments have all this infrastructure underground. But what about our internet service that comes through those lower lines? Is a wireless connection in our future?

We asked the tree guys for the big stuff and they said, “No problem. It makes our job easier.” Since we asked and our wood burning neighbors didn’t, would it be ethical for us to take the wood that through our intervention was spared from the wood chipper, even if it was trimmed from their tree? How about if the branch was in our air space? Is it rightfully ours anyway? This might be a question for “Dear Rich.”

The sign on a giant ice cream cone along Route 31 read “Welcome LDS.” My dyslexic eye always does a double-take with those three letters. Claire and Kerry had organized an outing to the 75th annual Hill Cumorah Pageant and they only got a few takers but Peggi and I are easy. We even saw Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” in the theater.

The pageant takes place outside of Palmyra, New York, about thirty minutes from Rochester, where Joseph Smith found the golden tablets in 1838. His translations of the inscriptions on these tablets became the “Book of Mormon, Another Testament of Jesus Christ.” I learned all this in the Visitors’ Center and found the subtitle interesting. It is just “another testament.” What the heck. This one has Christ visiting America, just after his crucifixion, where he healed the sick and chose twelve more disciples, all-American disciples. As a former Catholic (I realize there is no such thing) I was surprised to find it no more whacky than any other organized religion.

This was the third time for Claire and Kerry and they told us the parking arrangement was all new this year. They used to park across the street and and a whole protest scene had grown up around the pageant where you had to walk a gauntlet to get to the outdoor theater. The protesters are still an integral part of the festivities. They shout disjointed, mostly right wing (further right wing) evangelical, messages through bullhorns and hold signs advertising AskWhyWeLeft.com. Someone was driving a truck back and forth with WhatMormonsDontTell.com painted on the side in huge letters. One angry agnostic was yelling, “You don’t need religion. Save yourself.”

It is impossible to shut out the protests so they became a part of the show. The open field parking lot is wired for sound with speakers mounted high on poles playing the Mormon Tabernacle Choir or what sounds like loud funeral home music, all in an attempt to drown out the protests. It is a surreal experience just walking to the pageant grounds. The cast members, in full meso-american biblical costume, greet you with disarming smiles. I felt like I must have something permanently wrong with my face.

This trippy, Woodstock-gone-Stepford atmosphere makes the pageant itself a bit of a letdown. The sound system and lights were state of the art and as good as Furtherfest but the play is entirely lip-synched. The parking lot was jammed on the way out so Kerry and I headed to the woods to relieve ourselves. A protesters plea rose above the din. “Time to get off your high horse Mormons!”

OK, we were earlier than we had be to line up for the French Miles Davis “Bitches Brew” era band, Mederic Collignon, so why wouldn’t a city bound golf nut choose to entertain the queue with mime golf? They were outta sight btw.

The altar in the temple, they may not even call it an altar, looks pagan to me. I know that is an absurd assessment since Jesus was a Jew but the prohibition of idols or images of god thing takes my favorite part of religion off the table. There’s a great big wooden cabinet behind the lectern, they probably don’t call it a lectern, and inside the cabinet there is a reproduction of the sacred Torah scrolls. I know this because I opened the cabinet a few years ago when my nephew made his Bar Mitzvah.

My brother converted from Catholicism and we’ve been to three of these coming of age rituals now. Our niece had just turned thirteen the day before and that is such a pivotal period, it’s fun to just look at her on this cusp. Serious on one hand and childlike on the other, the rabbi scolded her when she made eye contact with her friends who were sitting right behind us.

Peggi and I were asked to play music during the event so we were sitting right by the piano. The canter had a beautiful voice and she was backed by the keyboardist for the Yankees. Peggi and I jumped in on sax and hand drum. The minor key modal thing is right up the Margaret Explosion alley.

Our neice’s lesson (upon being called to Torah as a Bat Mitzvah she is now a “teacher”), one she picked from a story in the book of Numbers, was how she learned and will continue to learn how to stop complaining and be happy with what she has. She said, “I know Apple will always introduce new products that are better than what I now have.”

The front page story in our local paper Sunday opened with a bang as reporter Gary Craig retold the story of a staff member at the Christian residential ministry, Freedom Village USA, who shot out a television set with a .12-gauge shotgun because the kids were watching a banned show. We’ve driven by this place many times because it is right next to my aunt and uncle’s farm on the shores of Seneca Lake. They were freaked out by this place when it sprang up in middle of farm country thirty years ago. Fueled by PTL (Praise the Lord) donations until the Jim Baker scandal broke, the complex dwarfed Dundee’s tiny parish church and the Mennonite worship house. The flamboyant, evangelical founder, Pastor Fletcher Brothers, commuted by helicopter rattling their community and fueling wild speculation.

He had built up a Gates congregation in the 70’s with strident anti-abortion and anti-pornography stands before running it into bankruptcy by misusing church funds. Now in the middle of a bitter divorce (his fourth) and another bankruptcy at Freedom Village, his own staff is ratting him out over his misuse of the organization’s money. Meanwhile Pastor Fletcher Brothers is still raising money from donors through his weekly show on Rochester’s Christian station. Meanwhile the deacon at Freedom Village USA has quit and started a blog entitled “The Stench Of Spiritual Abuse.”

My favorite artist/philosopher, Robert Irwin, is deep into the ponies. Peggi and I usually tune into the Kentucky Derby because it marks the anniversary of our first date when we traveled to Louisville in the back of Steve Hoy‘s van and watched Secretariat win. The derby is one of my favorite sporting events because it only lasts two minutes.

Yesterday’s winner, “I’ll Have Another”, is owned by the former philosophy teacher, Paul Reddam. In the winners’ circle he was asked to quote one of his favorite philosophers and he chose this one form Ludwig Wittgenstein. “After all the philosophical problems have been solved, nothing of importance will have been accomplished.”

I check the temperature in seven locations with my iPod weather app. Rochester (where we live), Madrid, Barcelona, Sevilla (where we traveled), New York, LA, San Francisco, Paradox NY (where we have friends) and Huntsville, Canada (where we camped last year). It is not often the case that Rochester is the warmest but today it is. So there.

Police find eye witness information some of the least reliable. People see what they want to see or what they have been taught to see rather than what is there. We lose our ability to see at a very early age. The peak period for most kids’ art is around age five. Relearning to see is huge project but worth pursuing.

One of our neighbors still has their Irish flag up from Saint Patricks Day and some others fly a Puerto Rican flag but I had never seen a 9-11 flag until I spotted this one flying under an American flag on Culver Road yesterday. I googled “9-11 flag” online and didn’t see anything like it so maybe it’s homemade. The towers are kind of short. My mom made a peace flag back in the sixties and we flew it out front until someone stole it. We always suspected it was the youngest son of one of the neighbors. His mom had called my mom and asked “How dare you fly a peace flag when my (oldest) son is fighting in Viet Nam?” Patriotism comes in all stripes.

Peggi was telling me she stopped at a light behind a pickup with two NRA stickers in the window and a bumper sticker that read, “If the earth is your mother I walk on your mother.” That goes beyond patriotism’s borders. As the light turned he blew smoke from his cigarette out the window.

Coming back from the Margaret Explosion gig at High Falls last night we pulled up next to a car that was cranking’ the tunes. I looked over and it was white haired dude with a baseball cap on and he was bobbing his whole body with the music. I rolled down my window to hear what he was playing and it was Ozzie “goin’ off the rails on the crazy train.”

You spelled “is” wrong.