It is always an adventure going to the vet with Stella. For starters, she usually pees on me as I carry her toward the car. She is especially sensitive. She only comes out of the bedroom for a carefully selected group of people. A few neighbors, a few friends, a few family members. Everybody else spooks her. And it has nothing to do with being loud or quiet. She has her own criteria and I would say she has good taste.
We have had a lot of cats. Tori and Sadie and Gato came from Bloomington. Nellie, Nino, Fay and Ornette all came from Lollipop Farm. Stella came from under the porch of Rick Howk’s house in the city. Her mom was all white but mangy. Stella was the pick of the litter.
She is the first cat that we have ever had that didn’t spend most of its time outdoors. She is just too delicate. We could tell that right away so we kept her in. Curiously, she meows at the door when I wake up and goes out for just a minute while I get the paper. She nibbles on the grass near the door and she sometimes throws it up once she is back inside. We have mice in our house but she has never been interested. She is terrified of the vacuum cleaner.
She is the sweetest cat we have ever had but she is almost eighteen years old and it may be time to go. We don’t plan to do anything heroic, we just want to keep her comfortable while we can.
Tree at the end of Hoffman Road in Rochester, New York
Yes, I like putting something that looks like the subject in the middle of the frame when I take a photo. Not off to one side, right in the clumsy middle. I like emphasizing the space the so called subject occupies. I’m not so interested in drawing you in any further but it is nice when you have that option. A photo of this spot would be ordinary in the Spring or Summer. The Winter palette makes this a wonder.
Saturday evening mass on tv from St Ann’s Chapel, Rochester, NY
Things are definitely not the same at my mom’s. My father’s absence permeates every corner of her place. We picked up her mail on the way in, a stack of sympathy cards, and my mom read them all a few times. In her cousin, Suzanne’s, card was another card announcing that a mass would be be said in my father’s name on February 26th at Saint Louis Church.
My mom flicks between American Movie Classics, Turner Classic Movies and the Hallmark station but none of them was doing it for her so we watched the Saturday evening mass that was being broadcast from the chapel in the high rise next door. I guess the broadcast counts as a mass of obligation these days. The pews were filled but only a janitor remained, picking up the flower petals, when I took this shot.
The aide ordered salmon for my mom and when it was delivered we left to have dinner with our friends, Jeff and Mary Kaye. Jeff grilled tuna they bought from a fish buying club in a wasabi sauce. It’s the middle of January and we had fresh kale and brussels sprouts from their garden! Jeff drizzled that with with some fresh squeezed lemon juice. The third-rate of a perfect triangle was the potato kugel he made with last week’s NYT recipe. Mary Kaye trumped Jeff’s efforts with a homemade orange sorbet.
Of course the conversation is the best part of any meal. I’m still digesting it long after the food has passed. I made a crack about someone seeing a shrink and Jeff said the word should be “expander.” And only then did I realize my friend, the therapist, was practicing his craft, something he has perfected, as a non-billable gift to us.
I brought a short stack of my father’s cds home last night, ripped them and brought them back today. We listened while we ripped. “The Lyrical Stan Getz,” “Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers with Thelonious Monk,” Joe Williams “Having The Blues Under A European Sky,” a live Oscar Peterson Trio cd and another collection, two Duke Ellingtion compilations and three Bill Evans cds, one live, a collection and one with Stan Getz. I know I told my dad that Scott LaFaro used to play with Bill Evans. There was a poster of Scott right near the regular table that my dad’s Kodak buddies sat at for twenty four years. Scott LaFaro was in the owner, Nick Massa’s, high school class. These recordings made for an enjoyable evening.
In our local paper the other day one of the questions to the computer guy was from someone who took advantage of the free three months of Apple streaming and then forgot to cancel so they were being billed ten bucks a month by Apple. They wanted to know how to go about canceling. You wouldn’t think you had to be a computer expert to figure that out but Nick Francesco addressed it. The reason it caught my eye is that I, too, never canceled. I haven’t had time to stream but I do plan to check it out before canceling.
We stopped by Martin’s place on New Year’s Eve and he was streaming some JB for his lady friends. He had the place hopping but he told me it was hard to create a Apple streaming dance playlist without having the albums to look at while you’re choosing.
Four bucks in woods near Durand Eastman Park in Rochester, New York
We startled this group of bucks. There were five of them sleeping in a cluster and one ran out of my picture frame. It is, of course, rutting season but these racks are all fairly small. Young bucks do not normally challenge mature large ones. They fear the more mature bucks and avoid the dominant deer’s territory. We’ve seen some epic, knock down, cinematic fights between two mature males. They’re every bit as dramatic as a Quentin Tarantino movie.
My life has felt like a movie in the last few months. Neither all good or bad but as dramatic as one of those buck battles in the woods. We saw “Carol” last night, a slow burn of a love affair but not much of a movie, at least compared to other Patricia Highsmith penned marvels like “Strangers On A Train” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley. We plan to tackle “The Hateful Eight” next.
It sometimes takes a giant interruption to crystallize your thinking. Prolonged concentration is hardly ever productive. Margaret Explosion often has its best nights when we are either exhausted or completely overwhelmed with life’s complications. You can’t force possibilities. You can only open yourself up to them.
So here I am in my studio for the first time in months. The mattress my brother slept on when he was in town is still sprawled out on the floor. A series of paintings, half of them unfinished, line the walls. A short stack of them sits on the floor. The still life of old bottles that I shot to show my father is still staged theatricly on a piece of white panel board. I could paint them for the rest of my life the way Georgio Morandi did. On my work table I have about twenty sheets of purple, hand-made paper that Roy Sowers gave me. I forget what I was going do with them.
There’s a newspaper clipping of Vladimir Putan shaking Bashar al Assad’s hand, two distinctly different body types and postures in an animated pose. There’s a small notebook with scattered thoughts, overheard snippets of conversion and abstract sketches. A good starting point for something. And of course the most recent Crimestoppers page is waiting for me. A package of black construction paper sits next to a bowl of pink ribbons that we found on trees in the woods. It occurs to me that those two things could work together. There’s the big charcoal drawing on my easel. Can I pick up where I left off? And then I’m looking at this weathered wooden end to an old lobster trap that I found along the coast in Maine. The nail holes in the barn shaped board are surrounded by rust. It’s beautiful just the way it is.
Ben Mac An Tuile singing Danny Boy at the close of Leo Dodd’s memorial service/celebration. Photo by Bob Mahoney
My cousin, a nun, drove in from Erie for my dad’s service. She was one of the first guests and she came right up to me, took both my hands, and said “Just want to let you know I’m praying for your dad.” I looked at her blankly. My mom’s words from years ago, when people were praying for peace, came back loud and clear. “I wish they would stop praying and just do something.” I love my cousin and know she meant well.
We were picking songs for the celebration and my sister, Amy, suggested we include Mel Torme’s “Brooklyn Bridge.” My father loved the song and had a lifelong fascination with the bridge. We started the service with it. Qued it up just before the final guests were seated and only then did it strike me as the perfect allegory for passage.
My uncle was next with a poignant Thomas Merton quote. I had scoured my dad’s computer for quotes that he liked or ones he had used in past Christmas cards. We included a couple of G.K. Chesterton beautys in the program and arranged for others to be read aloud.
My father left the church back in the sixties and by chance a priest, who had a reputaion for pushing the church to the left in that same period, lives in the same apartment building as my mom and dad. His Christmas tree caught on fire last year and he almost burnt the place down. My parents never met him but my dad was aware of his reputation. I asked my dad at the end of his life if he was interested in seeing Father Donnelly and he said he was so I gave him a call. I tried to get him up to speed on my dad’s small “c” Catholic thing and I think their Hospice visit went well.
When my dad passed I asked Father Donnelly if he would do the homily at the service and of course he agreed. I told my sister Amy I was uncertain as to where he would go with the thing and she suggested I tell him that nature was my father’s religion, and her’s too for that matter. I called and tried to describe what it was like to to walk in the woods with my father. His sense of wonder. And I sort of broke down trying to relay it.
Father Donnelly found a perfect theme. Being observant and fully present and being creative, especially, is enough. The subtext being you don’t have to spout scripture or swallow dogma. Living a meaningful life is enough for god.
People shared thoughts and stories about Leo. I was so proud of my six siblings. Each one spoke eloquently, a fitting tribute from their own experience and from the heart. I did have a favorite summation though and that was Peggi’s.
About six months ago my father heard someone sing Danny Boy at one of his Kodak luncheons. He loved it and said the guy who sang it told him he knew Peggi and me. I figured it was Ben and asked my father if he would like me to ask him to sing that song at his funeral. My father said, “That would be nice.” Bob Mahoney took this picture of Ben Mac An Tuile singing Danny Boy” at the close of the ceremony. Peggi and I are sitting on the altar to the left of the lectern. It was a perfect send off.
My dad used to read bedtime stories to us and at some point I noticed he didn’t have a book in front of him. He was making the stories up. And they were better than the ones in the books. As kids we watched in awe as he painted Disney characters on the heat ducts in our basement. Weekend outings were walks down Atlantic Avenue to look at the trains, real adventures.
He saved some money on our new house in Webster by paneling the family room and the bedroom above it himself. He involved us in the whole process, by betting candy bars on whether the pieces would fit. He dragged a dead tree home and planted it in our backyard. It was beautiful but he took some heat from the neighbors. He hand-dug a built-in swimming pool in our backyard. I don’t remember being much help. He hung four Rouault prints in our living room, a vivid early art influence for me.
My dad embraced technology and was an early adapter. He let me borrow a half megapixel, digital camera, one that Kodak was developing. It was the size of a lunch bucket. He had a Mac II before we did.
We never knew what my dad did for a living because most of his work at Kodak was classified. He did some freelance work at night and I had the opportunity to work with him on slideshows for a computer chip maker. This high-tech company would bring their top scientists into the conference room and they’d describe the advantages of their newest technology while my dad sketched. He had an amazing ability to visually simplify complicated processes. I could sense the respect others had for him. These were high pressure jobs with insane deadlines and Leo was having fun!
His favorite saying was, “I can’t talk without a pencil” Flow charts were his way of organizing the world. He made one on his iPad a couple of weeks ago in Highland Hospital where he laid out the chain of command for the doctors in charge of his care.
Leo was incredibly active in retirement. He was always doing a research project, presentations or websites. I was his tech support and I got drawn into his many projects. We took a painting class together for twenty years. He called it “therapy.” Getting to know Leo in all these situations, not just as my dad but as an interesting and unique human being, was a real treat. It was a privilege to be able to help him near the end of his life.
Leo’s computer is at our place now because he asked us to finish a few projects. He is still getting email. LeoDodd.com is still online and there are plenty of new paintings to post. The wildflowers in Edmunds Woods will still come up again this year. But as Leo would say, you’ll have to get there early in the Spring, well before the leaves fill in.
Leo Dodd 2015 watercolor of downtown Rochester, NY
My father disappeared from this earth this morning. I took a painting class with him for twenty years or so and this old time view of downtown Rochester was one of his last paintings. He was an inspiration to me. I’m dedicating the song below to him.
Margaret Explosion plays our last show of 2015 tonight. The band returns to the Little Theater Café in March of 2016. Curiously, “Disappear,” the title song of Margaret Explosion’s “Disappear” cd, is not on the cd. It was recorded after the cd was released.
“Disappear” by Margaret Explosion. Recorded live at the Little Theatre on 10.22.14. Peggi Fournier – sax, Ken Frank – bass, Bob Martin – guitar, Jack Schaefer – bass clarinet. Paul Dodd – drums.
Listen to Margaret Explosion – Disappear7 Comments
Fallen white birch on ridge in Durand Eastman Park in Rochester, New York
Hadn’t had a chance to walk in a few days so yesterday’s jaunt through the woods felt like recess back in Holy Trinity. Our most travelled route even felt brand new, especially so when we discovered Peggi’s favorite white birch had fallen.
Peggi did a few paintings of the eye-like knots in the bark and we’d marvel at the tree, the biggest in this birch stand on top of a ridge, each time we passed. They are funny trees. The bark is impervious to rot, perfect for lining Native American canoes. Thet look fine one day and then fall over the next.
My siblings, Peggi and I found a new home for my mom today. Peggi and I plan to drop off the application, the PRI and POA forms in the morning. The admissions assistant, who gave us a tour this afternoon, was perfectly professional until she went off the rails in answer to a question about the food. Something about the chef serving peas and pimentos that she found very odd.
Meanwhile my dad is spending his last days in a different nursing home, one that doesn’t separate their hospice and dementia clients. There’s a woman in a wheelchair who does laps of the hallways while talking a blue streak. She is absolutely delightful, David Greenberger material, but she tried opening the door to the stairs last night and set off a painfully loud alarm that no one seemed to know how to turn off. She told us she “was the only man in her family.” And there’s a man who wanders the halls while pulling his shirt up over his head. He went down the elevator with some visitors the other night and wound up in the basement. He was perfectly happy but the staff freaked out.
Note my father left on my mother’s chair as we left for his last doctor’s appointment
We were cc’d in on an email from the people at the end of the street. Their dog had been missing since yesterday and they were asking the neighbors to keep an eye out for it. Earlier we had noticed a dog’s bark that sounded like it was coming from the woods behind Rick and Monica’s house. It wasn’t Rick and Monica’s dog because they are out of town. And it wasn’t the sharp, shrill, shriek of the next door neighbor’s dog. It must have been the missing German Shepherd.
We called the owners and told them their dog might be down in the woods. We were heading out for a walk anyway so we met the neighbors out front before we headed down the path into the woods. A dog was barking. Sounds bounce around down there and it is often hard to tell where they are coming from. The neighbors found their dog inside the dog pen behind Rick and Monica’s house. The dog had somehow gone through the gate and then managed to close it behind him. He spent the night in the pen.
Jeanne Perri and her father working in the Ice Cream Shop at St. John’s Home in Rochester, New York
Our friend, Jeanne Perri, moved to Nashville years ago but she still comes up over the holidays to visit her dad. He volunteers at St, Johns where his wife once spent some time. Sometimes he works in the gift shop but most of the time he works behind the counter in the ice cream shop. We found Jean assisting her dad as we walked by.
My dad was upstairs, flat on his back. He had just asked if we could take a ride and I suggested he close his eyes and take a ride.
We stopped in Rubino’s this afternoon looking for something special for Christmas Eve dinner. We usually have a group over, my brother and his family up from New Jersey and our friend, Duane, from Brooklyn and whatever family members we can round up. Rubino’s was mobbed so we just took in the scene and left, but not before pausing before a “Pray for Me. My Wife is Italian” t-shirt.
For the last few days we had lunch at McCann’s Local Meats on South Clinton. It is close to Saint John’s. They have a lot more than meat but meat certainly takes center stage. It could be the best deli in town. We were there in the off hours and the owner was sitting at the counter, a big guy in a blood splattered apron. I told him my grandfather was a butcher and owned a store further down the street, where the Indian grocery store is today. I said I couldn’t get over how much the the tools of the trade have stayed exactly the same, the conical roll of string, the big roll of paper to wrap the meat cuts in, the hooks for the sides of beef, the band saw, the hanging sausages, the white enamel display case that my grandfather stood behind when he handed me a thick slice of liverwurst.
A hospice aide came up to sit with my father for an hour so we took a walk in Highland Park. As beautiful as the clear blue high sixty degree day was I worry about all the flowering fruit trees. Will they blossom again when Spring really comes? We walked through the Poet’s Garden and found a bench from 1916 with “To live in the hearts that know love is not to die.” It’s from the Scottish poet, Thomas Campbell, and it really hit the sweet spot.
Photos on table in rec room at St. John’s Nursing Home
Circumstances led my father to St. John’s Nursing Home. His room overlooks Frederick Olmstead’s Highland Park. The glass conservatory is a stone’s throw from his window. I opened that window to let the bird sounds in but all I got was traffic so I found a website with loon and wood duck sound samples and played them for my dad. I left the window open all night in hopes the traffic would die down. It’s been so warm here that next year’s cherry blossoms are already in bloom.
The home is sort of open plan. People on hospice are next door to multi-year residents. Dementia patients wander the halls and some of them do so many laps of the halls each day they are bound to live forever. The staff leads groups of people to the tv room so one person can keep an eye on the lot. They call the floor a “neighborhood” and there are common areas for eating or playing cards. These photos are under a clear plexiglass clipboard in the game room. They were arranged just so one day, scattered on the table top the next, and then right back in place today. They creep me out and I plan to ask the staff about them.
Antique bottles found in the earth near the Brickyard Trail in Brighton, New York
Up in the hospital last week my dad reminded me that he had a Morandi book that I should take. I had recently emailed him a few photos that I took in Chelsea of some Georgio Morandi paintings in the Zwirner Gallery. He had mentioned this book a few times and I was pretty sure I had already borrowed it and never returned it. I told him as much.
A few posts back I mentioned this new trail in Brighton that runs from the town hall on Elmwood through the woods and meadows to Westfall Road. A big sign at each end identifies it as the Brickyard Trail. This piece of land was saved from over-development because there is standing water on the property. It is not a real wetland. There is only standing water here because the brick makers of yore removed layers of clay leaving big depressions of unporous soil.
My father has long championed Brighton’s vanished brickyards. In fact he has been somewhat of a lone wolf on this subject. He was unable to attend the groundbreaking ceremony for the trail and the last time I took him over to the trail he couldn’t get out of the car. But he had me get out to talk to the surveyors to make sure they let someone in the town know if they came across a trolley track or any remnants of the old brick making facility, the one he had been reconstructing in his architectural drawing program.
I was coming home from Saint John’s where my father in in hospice, and I decided to stop and look at the trail. It is as wide as a road now and covered with stone. There is even a bridge over the small creek. I tried to find the old junkyard that I had spotted in my last visit and off to the side of the road I saw a small cluster of antique bottles. The workers had set these aside for my father. I cleaned them up and posed them for a Morandi-like photo and showed it to my dad this morning. He was thrilled.
Peggi and I went to our first yoga class in a month. It has been busy. The Yacht Club, overlooking the lake at the mouth of the river, is the perfect setting in any season and Jeffery, who ad-libs his classes, decided to do a restorative class. Man, did that hit the spot.
We took my mom up to see Leo today. They had been apart for the last week and their reunion was really sweet. Not a dry eye in the house. They held hands for a few hours.
Peggi spotted Father Donnelly outside the door to my mom’s apartment and we asked him if he could stop up and see my dad. My parents left the church in the late sixties, back when they turned the altar around and dropped the ancient Latin nonsense. My parents left because those meager Vatican II changes were not nearly enough. They started their own inter-denominational church called the Servant of God Community and when that fizzled they looked to nature.
My father remains a Thomas Merton, small “c” catholic and there is a newspaper with the pope’s picture on it on my dad’s drawing table at this moment so he is optimistic. As my mom left he told her they would be together some day.
Leo Dodd gets his last haircut from Bob the Barber at Highland Hospital, Rochester, New York
Handel’s “Il Pastor Fido: Incidental Music” was playing on the radio station that my father found on the hospital tv last night. The sound was coming out of the tiny speaker in the telephone-sized hospital remote that was sitting on his bed. This device not only changes the channel it cranks the bed up and allows you to page the nurse. The music was just perfect. Dreamy and moving at the same time. My dad was sleeping but surely absorbing it on some level.
I took this photo last night. My brother in law, Howie, arranged to have Bob, my father’s regular barber, pay a house call to the hospital. We had been up there all day but my father was encouraging us to stick around so we could meet Bob. Bob refurbishes pool tables on the side and keeps some in his barber shop on Monroe Avenue. Bob knew “the Deacon,” the local pool legend, Irving Crane. “He’s got some great stories and some of them are true” is how my father introduced Bob.
Leo is beginning to let his engineering side go. The first few days up here were an onslaught of doctors and to make sense of it all my dad constructed a flow chart on his iPad so he could keep the players straight.
Above a solid line he drew ovals for the three doctors responsible for his health before he entered the hospital. Below that line he drew the team he thought was running the show here. The Palliative Care doctor, nurse practitioner and intern were placed in these spots. Their role has been so outsized that my dad put them above his so called “chief hospital doctor.” I gently corrected him and he scrubbed the names out, placed the head doctor up top and put the palliative team on the next tier along side the oncologist, physical therapist, occupational therapist and social worker.
The way it was explained to us this crew was to collect their data and report back to the head doctor who would then inform us of the game plan. The thing is, my dad had it right the first time. At some point the Palliative Care team were the only ones that mattered. the only sane ones.
From my dad’s position, propped up in bed on the fourth floor of Highland Hospital, he can just see the top of the new library going up across South Avenue. A team of construction workers started scurrying about at 8AM. My dad figures the guy with the white hat is the foreman and the blue hats are the carpenters and the green are the plumbers. The red hard hats are the electricians. In better days this would be the formative stage of a painting.
Leo was adjusting to the idea of hospice. A prescription would be ordered soon and we were discussing the location. The prognosis was a longer window than the qualifications for the Leo Center allowed. The appropriately named Palliative Care Center in the St Ann’s complex, near my parent’s apartment, is considered the Cadillac of hospice facilities. Fred Lipp, the painting teacher my dad and I had for twenty years, spent his last days there earlier this year. Fred was lucid til the end and telling me in his last days, “Your father is a trip.”
My dad was talking about the Chinese burial items that we had seen in a case at the Metropolitan when we went down to the Van Gogh show. He was working on some paintings of them. I found some pictures of those items on my iPad and he thumbed through them. He has an insatiable art appetite, something he passed onto me.
I remember arriving early at that Met show. We took the train in from Montclair with my brother, Mark. We studied the Van Goghs, ate lunch in the cafeteria and returned to the show for more. We took a break for dinner in the dining room and went back up to the show until closing. Somewhere along the line we saw the Chinese burial objects. Holy Sepulchre’s green burial, which has already been arranged, probably precludes artifacts in the grave.
My dad didn’t care for the lunch that was delivered and the nurse said we could call down and order whatever he wants. He was thinking about a peanut butter sandwich so I placed the order. Light on the jelly and whole wheat bread, preferably without the crust. The person on the other end said she couldn’t do that at this hour so I explained that it was all my dad wanted. She thought for a bit and said, “OK but you’re gonna have to cut the crust off yourself.” I described the route that Jack Nicholson took in “Five Easy Pieces” to successfully order toast. And that produced a hearty laugh from my father.
Leo Dodd taking measurements in old barn on Westfall Road
I took this photo of my dad a few weeks ago. We were out at a doctor’s appointment and I noticed he had his camera, tape measurer and a pile of paperwork with him. I asked if he wanted to stop somewhere on the way home and he said he’d like to go to the barn.
I’d been to the barn on Westfall Road with him before. It’s falling apart and my dad is pushing the town to restore it. In fact he is drawing architectural renderings of what the restored barn could look like. I helped him take some measurements and he took some photos.
We visited the barn today but this time my dad was having a hard time walking. The doctor had told him he should be “putting his things in order.” I drove through the field and right up to the barn door. I supported him as we slowly walked to the center of the barn. We laughed at some spray-painted graffiti that read “Kill Your Friends.”
Something was off in his computer model and he was looking for the error so we retook some measurements. He sheepishly said “I probably shouldn’t be out here” but he was clearly loving it.
We stopped down to the garden and picked a big batch of cilantro and some spinach. A bounty for mid December in Rochester! The temperature was near seventy and Jared’s goldfish had come out of hibernation. They were hungry and scurried to the side of the pond when they heard us.
Peggi put the freshly picked cilantro into a plastic bag and I set it down on a burner that had just been turned off. The bag melted immediately and stunk to high heaven. I threw the bag out and then opened the doors to clear out the stink.
We wanted to use the burner tonight so I turned on the overhead exhaust fan, put the burner on high and left the room. The melting plastic odor filled the house. I opened the doors again and lit some pine incense. In hindsight I suspect Jared, a former Kodak chemist, would have had a better solution for removing the plastic from the burner.
