PopWars

Like the chipmunk above, we really don’t know what to do with ourselves as the snow melts other than watch the ice slide off the roof. We walked through the neighborhood yesterday and found the mail truck (with a substitute driver) wedged up against a band of four mailboxes. A woman from one of those four houses was out there with a small throw rug that she had put under one of the wheels, and she had a bucket filled with white pellets of some sort. We offered to push and gave it three or four good tries, but the one wheel that was engaged just kept spinning on the ice. The mail truck passed us about a half hour later, and he stopped to thank us. He told us his boss had pulled him out, but in the process they wrecked all four of the mailboxes.

While we were still reading the paper, we noticed our neighbor Jared shoveling his driveway. He injured his shoulder playing tennis and normally clears his driveway with his tractor, so something was up. We offered to help. He told us his wife was having her coffee group (“the gals”) over and the battery on his tractor was dead. This was heart-attack snow, with heavy water and ice content.

We took a short break, and I asked if he would have some time later in the day to help me with a project I had been meaning to get to since we moved in. One of the copper pipes from our radiant heat setup was visible in a corner of our living room. It came out of a brick ledge below our window and went down through an opening in the floorboards — a small visual irritant that took endless speculation before we came up with a solution.

I hollowed out a white PVC board, leaving only an eighth of an inch to hide the pipe, and used that as floor molding. I had never used a router. Jared had one, and he guided me. A retired chemical engineer, he likes to think projects out completely before going ahead — just the opposite of my approach. And because this piece went around a corner, I needed to use his radial arm saw to cut the forty-fives. He has one of those. The plastic shavings went everywhere in his garage, and the tiny pieces had enough static electricity to stick to every object in sight. The longest part of this project was spent with his shop-vac roaring away.

 I had a whole other idea for a post and I was going to use this photo with it but I found myself staring at the photo for so long it became the subject.

I took the photo in December just before Christmas. We were in the city for a few days and the newly re-opened Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan was the centerpiece of our visit. This woman was standing outside as we walked by. As I moved closer to take the photo she pointed and yelled something. I had the feeling she might have been yelling at me. I didn’t even see the ironing board she was standing behind.

I put my caption under the photo and then googled “Pigeon woman Metropolitan“ NYC. “I found a recent story from the New Yorker by Ian Frazier with this description:

“She has a folding table; an ironing board; a cart with handles at both ends that contains a dozen or more orange-and-green Fresh Direct shopping bags; a broom; some pet-size water bowls; a pair of hockey sticks; and various bread knives. She has told me that she comes from Poland and now lives in her car, which is parked nearby. Her conversation can devolve into a kind of radio-static recitation of terrible things that happened in Poland in the previous century.”

Irondequoit canceled this weekend’s Winterfest due to extreme cold. Kathy called us to warn us that you can get frostbite in single digits. We stopped out to see my brother, Fran, who had just had a shoulder operation. His pain blockers hadn’t worn off yet so he was in good spirits. He used to work outside year round and he said, “I tell people there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.” It is Peggi’s birthday today and we went skiing.

This is good weather for diagramming sentences. Not sure how we got off on that tangent but we did. I wonder if they still teach diagraming. I loved how it made sentence structure concrete and fun.

One woman bought six Margaret Explosion cds after our gig on Thursday. She paid with PayPal. Someone who I used to play soccer with came to the gig with his wife and he gave me this picture. He is shown kneeling in front of me in the center of the photo. He was a year ahead of me and I hadn’t seen him since junior year. I reminded him we used to sled on the tiny hill in his backyard and my brother Tim got his tongue stuck to the front of his sled and he walked all the way home with it stuck. Since I have mentioned both my brother Tim and my brother Fran I’ll post a link to my first Super 8 movie. They star in it along with my brother, John.

But I should regret that I don’t stop to proofread my entries before posting. I just read through the last five or six and found whole passages unintelligible. Distracted, I remain determined to keep track of things here.

Even little kids know mittens keep you warmer than gloves yet you rarely see adults wearing mittens. That’s their loss. Back when I was riding a bike downtown everyday for work (even in weather like this) Peggi bought me a pair of big snowmobile mittens. They look like something a hockey goalie would wear. The temperature has been in the single digits and my thumbs were getting numb while skiing so today I wore the big mittens. They are one of the secrets of the universe.

We bought new skis at REI, French skis, made by Rossignol. We had worn our others out trekking through woods and at times over pavement. I could only think of two other things we own from France. The miniature toast crackers, Petits Toast, we buy from Wegmans and my Edith Piaf 45, “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.”

A hawk crashed into our big window in the living room. We’ve had other, much smaller birds fly into the window but this hawk rattled the house. We’re lucky it didn’t shatter the glass. The birds usually stand, stunned for a few minutes and then fly off. The hawk stood up, a bit dazed, and then moved toward a Red-bellied Woodpecker that was laying upside down near our house. The hawk stood there with one foot on the prey and after a few minutes it flew off with the woodpecker in its talons.

A few weeks back we saw the hind quarter of a deer laying in the road down near the marsh, fresh from nature’s butcher. So fresh there were no turkey vultures swarming. And on our walk today we came across this spinal column, completely stripped of its meat.

“You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” — Stephen Miller

When we shop at the co-op we take advantage of the parking spot while we walk downtown, have coffee at Fuego and stroll along the river to the Ford Street Bridge where we cross back into Pete and Gloria’s neighborhood in the South Wedge. Pete is usually at his drawing table in the front of the house and Gloria is usually in the kitchen, at her computer or making noise with the pots and pans. We visit and laugh and move on. This time we added a stop at Axom where we chatted with both owners, Rick and Robin. We were standing in the front of the store while we talked, looking at the buildings across the street. The one to the right in my photo (above) used to be Bobby Moore’s hair salon. Everyone loved Bobby. I pointed to the low lying building to the left, with the datestone reading 1926, it was my grandfather’s grocery store in the thirties. And we all marveled at the brick building in the center.

Robin said some of the shop-owners in the Wedge were working on a history of that section of the city and I promised her I would send a link to photos my father collected on my grandfather’s three stores. The one on South Avenue was short -lived but it was a big enough deal that Jack Dempsey did an in-store appearance.

My grandfather, Raymond Tierney, was born number eight in a family of eleven. He liked to quote what he called his mother, Winifred Maloney’s poem. Whether she wrote it or just had it memorized was never made clear.

“Life is like a mighty river,
flowing from day to day. 
Men are vessels launched upon it,
sometimes wrecked and tossed away.
Some succeed at every turning,
fortune favors every scheme.
Others who are quite deserving,
have to puli against the stream.
Do your best for one another,
making life a brighter dream.
Help the tired and worn out brother,
pulling hard against the stream.”