Category: Dear Diary

My mom passed away this morning. Her death was a relief. She suffered from dementia the last few years and she wanted no part of it. For most of her life she expressed herself very clearly and you always knew where she stood on an issue. I was very proud of her.

I just cruised through a folder of old photos of her. I went through them a few times. She was so pretty and by all rights I should have a photo of her alone up here. But today, especially, I was struck by how the ones of the two of us affected me. The connection you feel to your mom, in ideal circumstances, and I feel like my childhood was close to idyllic, is something words can not describe. I felt this long before I could speak and I still feel it. That’s why they call it a feeling. It is deep and that’s what I wanted to write about.

I was the first of seven so she was my role model. I felt on top of the world in her arms and completely independent when she put me down. She loved kids but was never overbearing. As I grew older she’d say, “Go out and play.” The best advice I was ever given.

On Friday, as we sat with her in the main room at the Friendly Home my mom spotted a baby doll across the room and muttered something about it. I brought it over to her and put it on her lap. She picked the doll up and kissed it. It was so sweet. She was so sweet.

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Peggi found three little Chinese Maples in our yard. She transplanted them and gave them a good watering. Our neighbor said they do good in the shade. Their leaves are a dark rusty red all season and then they go a brilliant red in the Fall.

I spent the afternoon rebuilding our wood pile. A few of our stacks came down in the wind storm and a few more are are leaning precariously. I considered rebuilding those but then decided only a maniac would knock a pile over to rebuild it. I’ll wait until it falls and hope that it doesn’t.

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Sixty seven years ago today my mom and I were up in the natal section of Saint Mary’s Hospital on Genesee Street, across from Bull’s Head Plaza. That would be where and when I touched down. I can’t say I remember it but I can say my childhood felt like a dream.

When my father brought home his first car we’d come up here to Cobb’s Hill overlooking the city. He’d pull off to the the side of the road that rings the reservoir and my mom would spread out a blanket. We would wolf down our sandwiches and run around the park. At this marker, April 28, formerly the feast day of Saint Paul of the Cross, I can say it has been fantastic ride.

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Near record high today and we were inside the Media Arts Watch gallery at the Memorial Art Gallery. Three short experimental films are running in a continual loop over there and went for the full ride. Our favorite was
Terence Gower’s “Ciudad Moderna,” a com­pos­ite of clips taken from “De­s­pe­dida de Casada,” a swinging 1966 Mexican film, that animates the architecture of the modern city. Last time Peggi and I were in Mexico City someone swiped our 35mm Canon camera. It was clunky. I like my pocket Sony digital. I want to go back.

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Andy Warhol was sitting on a bench off to the side of the outdoor stage. He was sitting with one of the musicians. In my dream I knew the musician but it was the first time I had seen Andy in person. I said, “How are you doin’ today?” and then felt like that was a really awkward thing to say. Warhol stood up and I noticed he had a small portable tape player in his hand, a reel to reel player with a clear plastic window. He turned the tape player on and I woke up.

We had toasted Warhol yesterday at dinner so it was understandable that I would be dreaming about him. The “Myths” portfolio that we bought for 6000 in 1979 was going to be auctioned at Christies in the afternoon. When I say “we bought,” I mean Peggi and I owned 3/10s, my brother and his wife owned 5/10s and Kim (and Dave Mahoney’s kids) owned 2/10s. We were all at the auction this afternoon when the hammmer came down.

Steve Hoy, a good friend of all three parties was also in town to celebrate. Four of us were staying in one room overlooking Central Park. Duane joined us for three days straight and we whooped it up. The ten silk teen prints numbered 135/200 are now in someone else’s hands.

Steve was heading down for coffee this morning and he asked how I liked my coffee. I said “black” because it sounded good but then I switched to “latte.” Steve said, “a black latte?”

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There are two stalls in the men’s room near the lobby of the Friendly Home. I was in one and this conversation, between an old and a much younger voice, was happening in the other.

“Whoever thought it would come to this?”

“It does for everybody, Pop.”

“You hit a lot of walls and you work through them but this one is a mountain!”

“There are upsides. You can stay up as late as you want. You can have ice cream whenever you want.”

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You may have noticed people all over the city working on abstract pink and black crochet projects. Although some people are so adept at crocheting they can carry on a conversation while working and you don’t even notice. I’m thinking of Gloria Monacelli but she knits rather than crochets. Martha O’Conner got Peggi involved in this project and we stopped by the SewGreen shop on West Main in the Susan B. Anthony district to pick the supplies.

Peggi was given a grid that laid out the stitches for her 2 foot by 2 foot portion of the pink and black yarn mural that will eventually go up on the side of the building as part of the Wall Therapy Project. The squares are all abstract but the motif will be very recognizable when they are all stitched together. That’s all I can say about this now other than there may still be some portions that need to done.

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We’re having us a real disaster. Electric utility trucks from all over the northeast are restoring power to the 100,000 or so that lost it in the wind storm. Our power came back over the weekend and then our cable went out and with that 3-in-1 plan, that means no internet, tv, or phone. And on the heels of that we’ve received about half of the expected 18 inches of snow. I shoveled three times today.

We skied down Hoffman Road and into the woods. These deer were all clustered together and the woods was beautiful. This amount of snow disorients you and even when we found the path, we couldn’t take it because there were so many trees down.

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Our refrigerator is plugged into our neighbor’s generator. They are down south somewhere at a camp site and they called us while we were on break at the Little. I took the call on my watch but I couldn’t hear a damn thing. We had winds up near eighty miles an hour today and 100,000 people are without power. Our part of the city, up near the lake, is in a state of emergency and we’re downtown playing music.

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There used to be a bike jump, a ramp made out of dirt that had been dug from the trail and piled up in front of the hole it came out of. It was up where the undeveloped part of Durand Eastman comes close to that sub-division at the end of Spring Valley. We never saw the kids that used it but I pictured those small bikes that ten year olds ride until they either outgrow them or graduate to a 26 inch. The kids would leave empty pop bottles and candy bar wrappers there and I think they even had a board that they rode up on before the big jump over the pit. You hardly ever see kids in the woods anymore so we think of those kids every time we take that trail.

Off road biking is now an adult phenomena. Just like dogs they have their own parks. Thankfully Durand isn’t one of them. There sporadic signs that say “No Biking on Trails” but we occasionally see a big guy zoom by us on a bike. It just seems kind of rude.

These fat tire bikes though are kind of intriguing. They’re ugly like a monster truck but I would like to ride along the beach on one sometime.

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Democrat & Chronicle contributor, Missy Rosenberry, had an interesting article in today’s paper about visiting 100 parks on the east side of Rochester in the last calendar year, many parks that we had never heard of. She’s posted a photo of a sign from every park on her blog so it isn’t the most interesting thing to look at but she has a brief description of each. We choose 1000 Acre Swamp in Penfield, a gorgeous place even in the middle of January. We walked every trail, most on boardwalks, a total of four miles and I froze my hands taking photos. We stopped at Schutt’s Cider Mill on the way back and picked up a bag of apples for applesauce, another for eating and a gallon of cider.

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Our power went out this morning, a quick outage due to the wind. Peggi’s computer restarted on its own, mine needed to be rebooted. I was in the middle of editing songs for our new cd. Guitar tracks have been coming in fast and furiously, delivered by Dropbox. We took a walk after the blackout but stayed out of the woods because of the wind. There were some good sized branches in the street and the barricade on Zoo Road had been blown over. Peggi and I uprighted that. This snowman had a head that fell off a few days ago. It has completely melted body is in good form.

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“Fifty Years of Frank” fans filled the parking behind Sticky Lips on Culver Road. It was a celebration for Frank’s fiftieth birthday and his girlfriend, Deb, made sure all his friends were there. Jack Allen’s Big Band was on the bandstand when we arrived and Frank and Deb were out on the dance floor. They set the perfect party mood. Because this was a Frank affair a dancer, above, did her thing when the big band finished while Bob Henrie and the Goners set up behind the curtain, a surprise appearance by Rochester’s best band. It was a swell party.

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Peggi and I waited until the end of the season last year to look for new cross-country boots. Thought we could get something on sale. Our old boots were cracked and had a generous amount of duct tape on them but they still leaked. We learned the binding mechanism had changed and new boots would not fit our old skis so looked at skis and they were all so ugly we gave up. This year we bought boots and skis, ordinary, nice looking things, although Peggi did try on some white Space Oddity boots that looked like something Abba would have worn in the day. We’re still using our old poles. I don’t imagine they’ve made any breakthroughs in pole technology.

The ski package was our Christmas gift to each other but there was another we received, a red and yellow jar of Vegemite. Our friends, Matthew and Louise, gave it to us with instructions to spread a very thin layer onto of your toast in the morning. I looked at the jar every morning and then went ahead and poured olive oil on my toast. When we saw Louise again the first thing she asked was, “How did you like the Vegemite?”

She showed us a set of wooden plates that her family used when she was growing up. Small, rectangular plates that had two recessed areas in them, one for the bottom of your the cup and the other for a piece of bread with Vegemite spread on it. She was going to send the plates out to her brother as a house-warming gift. We promised to give it a try.

This morning Peggi spread it on some toasted Italian bread that we had left over from my family Christmas dinner. It is most unusual. We plan to report back but I am still trying to figure out what to say about it.

We’re happy little Vegemites
As bright as bright can be.
We all enjoy our Vegemite
For breakfast, lunch, and tea.
Our mummies say we’re growing stronger
Every single week,
Because we love our Vegemite
We all adore our Vegemite
It puts a rose in every cheek.

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My father had some money in an Oppenheimer account that was involved in some sort of class-action suit so he got a check in the mail a year after his death so we took it to our bank. We signed in electronically and were called into a cubicle by a young woman with ruby red painted nails. In fact her nail shade matched exactly the stone on her ring and her lipstick. We spent about a half hour with her filling out forms that would allow us to deposit the money, about forty-five dollars, in my mom’s account. It was the day before Christmas and the calendar on her wall, one with a big white block for each day of the month, had only a magic-marker diagonal line drawn exactly in the same manner through 23 blocks. The 24th had not yet been killed.

She called a screen that had a picture of my father smiling and I asked, “You have that in you files?” She said, “No, I just called up his obituary from the funeral home.” She took the paperwork that I had up to the front office for approval and left us us in her cubicle for about ten minutes. We studied the two pictures of her son and daughter. Both were were wearing a Lancer sports uniform. There were two middle-aged guys outside her office waiting to meet with her and one of them was talking loudly about a woman he had “the hots for.” We had just come from Wegmans and we talked about how we had forgotten to buy Brussels sprouts. The bank employee finally came back with the approval and wished us a Merry Christmas.

We took a chance and decided to stop at Aman’s Farm Market for the Brussels sprouts. They had them and I filled up a big bag wile Peggi waited in the car. The guy in front of me had a cart full of craft beer. He let me go ahead of him and told the cashier, “I only let him go ahead because I can’t stand looking at those things. We roasted them for our family Christmas party and every last one went.

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We visited our garden this afternoon and brought back a couple of eggplants, some lettuce and cilantro, a big bag of kale and one small tomato which we cut in half and had with our dinner. Not bad for a mid November harvest. Seventy five degrees tomorrow and then the snow will fly.

Our friends, Pete and Shelley, wrote us that they spotted an American Eagle up in the mountains. It was off to the side of the road picking at a bag of McDonalds trash. We sold an Invisible Idiot cd this week. I just put it in the mail. Pete played bass in that band with Peggi and me and Jack Schaefer played guitar. We recorded it about twenty years ago. It may be time for a follow-up.

Listen to “Kudzoo” by Invisible Idiot

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I pointed to a spot at the end of Hoffman Road where I have found quite a few drug bags. We were out walking with Pete and Shelley and there were none to be found here that day. I have made it a practice to round up the inorganic material that I find on our hikes. Golf balls, pink, blue and orange plastic tied to branches to mark trails in the woods, Budweiser cans and now drug bags. We continued down the road and turned at Jared and Sue’s to cut through their property and return home. Right there, near the edge of the road, Pete spotted a drug bag. That makes about fifty in the last few months. I keep them in my Elvis Presley ash tray and I brought them outside to take this photo.

They are usually right next to plastic packages for flavored cigars so I have always thought kids were hollowing out the cigars and filling them with this tiny amount of weed but I really have no idea what was in the bags. Some of them are so tiny they could only hold one capsule of something. I’m beginning to wonder if they might have something to do with the recent burglaries in our neighborhood.

We walked down Hoffman to a neighbor’s place this afternoon. It was Danelle’s 60th birthday and coincidentally Damnika’s, another neighbor, 65th birthday. The Bills were on the tube. The sound was off so we didn’t hear any of the crowds’ USA protest against San Francisco’s quarterback, Kapernick. It was in the seventies so we spent the whole party out on the back porch. When Olga came I went in to say hello and I put some Brie cheese on a cracker while we talked. I was thinking, “this is is some funky Brie cheese.” And it dawned on me. I blurted, “These crackers are bad.” Turned out they were Olga’s crackers, organic with no preservatives, and they had gone rancid. She was embarrassed but I can still taste the damn things.

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