PopWars

The park was especially quiet today. Odd for Labor Day weekend but then the forecast was for rain later in the day. Only one of the picnic pavilions was occupied. 

We headed for the beach and found a holiday’s worth of vehicles parked along the lake. A woman’s arm was hanging out of the first car window. She had a long cigarette between her fingers and the second hand smoke was nice. I noticed quite a few people just sitting in their car looking out at the lake. A young guy in a t-shirt was starting a fire in one of the metal barbecues. He was using Briquettes, lighter fluid and one of those long, slim, gun-like lighters. His girlfriend was taking hits off a vaping device. A guy with beard got out of a car with Maryland plates, dropped his skateboard on the path, and took off with perfectly silent bearings.

We watched some kids playing in the water while their young mothers were eating sandwiches on the beach. There was more sand than we had seen all summer so we tried walking down the beach and we made it all the way to where the big private homes of Rochester’s Gold Coast start.

We passed a goth couple sitting at a picnic table. The woman had bright red hair and she was wearing a long black skirt. A group of Indians or Pakistanis were shaking sand out of their clothes. A guy who looked like a classic hippie was sitting on one of those tree trunks of driftwood. He was all alone, long hair and beard, shorts and no shirt. We passed a large woman in a bathing suit sitting alone in one of those really low beach chairs. She looked up from the book she was reading and said hello. A man in a wet suit was in the water, up to his waist with a metal detector and net in his hands. And at end of the public beach this couple sitting on either side of their cooler. He was drinking Genny from the can and she was sipping wine.

Chimney Bluffs, just beyond Sodus Point, is a one of the minor league wonders of the world. We hadn’t been here since a Personal Effects photo shoot back in the eighties. We met friends yesterday for a picnic and we walked the trail along the ridge where I took this photo.

I don’t now if my mother even subscribed to House & Garden. We certainly don’t subscribe but we’ve been getting it for the last couple of years. We had my parents mail redirected to our house at the end and we’ve been getting it ever since. The cover story promises to help you “Find Your Creative Spark.”

Our garden, for the past six or seven years, has been down at our neighbors’. They converted their old tennis court into a garden and it comes with a fence to keep the deer out. They get a lot more sun than we do too. The new born fawns found a way in through the gate so Jared spent the afternoon rebuilding it.

We came back with a bounty of lettuce, kale,  jalapeños, basil, tomatoes and cilantro. Tonight we watch “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.”

I updated the PopWars architecture months ago. My default template wasn’t mobile compliant and I was in the habit of posting small cropped versions of my photos, ones that would link to a larger version. After the update, my old posts looked awkward so I began chipping my way through them, going backwards in time, inserting the full sized photo into each post. I was determined to get through August 2009, ten years, and I made it last night. I read the entry from the last day of July 2009 and was struck by how familiar it seemed.

The gauzy reminiscing, the Catholic baggage, another opportunity to mention Buñuel. It is all there. Peggi just finished “My Last Sigh,” the autobiography of Luis Buñuel. She read parts aloud and we dove into another Buñuel movie binge. Just watched Exterminating Angel” and “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” should be in our mailbox later today. Duane read the book as well and told us, “Buñuel may be a better writer than he is director.” “I’m still an atheist. Thank God.”

I’m realizing my life is like one big loop.

Peggi and I brought a beer down to the pool and put the umbrella up. I was reading my Chillida book and Peggi was reading “The Collector” by John Fowles. Time slipped away and the pool was entirely in shade. We swam and and were drying off when our neighbors came in with their two grandkids. The little girl asked if I wanted to see her do a cannonball and I said I did. She is so tiny it wasn’t much of a splash. I told her, “Us skinny people have to can openers to get good splash.” I toyed with demonstrating one for her but wasn’t sure I could still do one.

Her grandfather had just come back from chemo treatment. He had a small portion of his colon removed and they found some cancer in his lymph nodes. He was wearing a bag that distributes the chemo though a port that he had put in his chest a few weeks back. He is scheduled for twelve treatments, one every other week and he already has two down.

He goes to an office and they give him a few drugs through the port. Something to jack up the red cell production and anti-nausea drugs and there may be a steroid involved. I did not follow it all and Peggi was talking to his wife at the same time so I missed some of the details. None of it sounded good but he was in good spirits. He spends a little over two hours at the place and then comes home with the bag which continues to distribute the poison for two more days. As he talked I thought I could smell the stuff. When it is empty a visiting nurse comes out to pick up the bag. I was trying to imagine sleeping with the thing on. I’m back and forth from stomach to back all night long. He said if you knock it on the floor and the tube comes out you have to call them immediately because the chemical is too toxic to clean up yourself.

I turned to Peggi and she said, “Sue (his wife) has Lyme disease. She checks herself regularly and never saw a tick, just a red rash on her knee which spread. Her doctor looked at it and sent her home. At a friend’s house she started losing feeling in the right side of her face and then found that the rash had spread. She went to a dermatologist and he started her on antibiotics right away saying you don’t want to mess around with Lyme.. He did a Lyme biopsy and it came back positive.

This luscious painting, by Julianna Furlong Williams, presented itself to us as we stepped off the elevator at MCC. We met with our financial advisor there while stocks were having their worst day of 2019 because of Trump’s escalating trade war. Our advisor teaches Economics here and he told us “If that nut case was in my Economics 101 class I would fail him.”