PopWars

In the summer of 1980 Peggi and I drove down to Steve Hoy’s house in Gulfport Mississippi and got in his pickup truck which was newly outfitted with a camper. It sat three across with the option of crawling through the back window into the camper itself. Peggi practiced her sax back there as we drove through New Orleans, Texas and Arizona where temps were over 100 and there was no AC. We slept in the back, three across in the middle of a heat wave. We stopped in New Mexico where my father was working, on loan from Eastman Kodak, and from there we headed up to the Grand Canyon where Steve Hoy entertained the tourists with his daredevil antics. People standing next to us were wildly exclaiming, “Look at that man down there,” while we acted like we didn’t know him.

We drove into LA and stayed with Peggi’s sister and then got on Highway 1 up to San Francisco where our friends Dave and Kim, Brad, Rich and Andrea lived. We stayed there for a few days and drove back on a more northerly route. We drove through Las Vegas in the middle of the night and limited ourselves to ten bucks in the slot machines. That went fast and we camped in a parking lot near Lake Mead. Eventually we headed south to pick up our car and then back up here.

This summer’s heat has slowed the pace around here and I might be delusional but maybe it’s time to drive across the country again.

We were down at the lake, standing in front of Don’s Original down at Sea Breeze, eating chocolate almond custard when this guy cruised by. I fumbled for my camera and he patiently waited for the shot.

If I was going to open a business and my name was Dick Ide I would probably change it but he is the number one Honda dealership in Rochester. I had a Harry Ball on my paper route. I wonder what happened to him? Is it just me or does the heat sap your meager allotment of creativity?

We devoted a week’s worth of time and energy to ridding our backyard of wisteria. I posted a picture about ten days back of the mother plant. It had wrapped around an oak tree and grown to the top of it where blossomed each Spring, so high up we couldn’t even appreciate it. And then it would grow those big brown seed pods that would fall, pop open and sprout new plants all over including our neighbor’s yard. That was the real motivator here. The plant is invasive and it had invaded his yard.

We cut the towering plant at the base and then started tearing out the runners (shown above) which were thirty feet long in some cases. They would send down roots every sixteen inches or so and maybe very other time they would send up more shoots as well so they were really tough to pull out of the ground. We are sore all over.

I spent quite a bit of time at Strong Memorial Hospital recently while my father was having an operation. I don’t have a cell phone so I rely on wifi for keeping in touch and they have a free wifi conection there, just the way it should be everywhere. The hospital is huge and the buildings have just been piled on top of one another over the years so you follow color coded signs to get around. They are Rochester’s largest employer now have their own mini-city infrastructure just the way Kodak Park used to.

In the waiting room I sat next to a handicapped person who held his iPhone right up to one of his eyes so he could read it. I mean his eye was pressed against the retina display. He was using Siri to dictate emails to relatives so I heard commands like, “Thank you very much for kind thoughts period.” and “Have a great day exclamation point.”

I used to think wisteria was beautiful, the bubblegum sweet purple flowers that used to burst open near Memorial Day but pop a few weeks earlier now, but not any more. I’m done with it. Our house came with this mother of all wisteria plants climbing up a giant oak tree out back. It appeared to be strangling the tree but it still has green leaves. The real problem is we have hundreds of other baby wisteria plants all over our property and I suspect they are all connected to this mother plant. I started with a hand saw and then got out the chainsaw to finish it off.