Butter is back in our diet for the holidays, mostly in the form of cookies. Cheese and dips, chocolate covered figs from Spain and even hamburgers are back too. Duane breaks his macrobiotic diet down at Vic & Irvs each year and we joined him for that debauchery last night. And Rick and Monica are bringing a picture of egg nog over later tonight.
Every time I see my former neighbor, Sparky, we talk about cooking some sausage, something we did about five years ago. He called the other day to say he had some sausage and he was coming by for lunch. He told me to have the grill hot but he got here about a half hour early so I wasn’t ready. How can you be ready for Sparky?
I put a collection of country music on and went out back to start a fire while Peggi and Sparky chatted about the old neighborhood. Sparky picked up the album cover and got on a roll. Turns out he knew most of the big stars and even played with a few. He told Peggi he was the one who gave George the “No Show” nickname. Sparky was raised in Kentucky. He knows Country. Peggi made a video of him a few years back and we put it up on YouTube this morning.
Our house came with a wrought iron railing around the stairwell. It was painted white and it had these Rococo swoops in it that just did not make it. I tried painting it but the paint wouldn’t stick. Apparently it was painted with oil on top of acrylic at one time and the new coat just lifted top layer of white off. I bought some paint remover but I never started the job because it seemed so nasty. I considered dismantling it and taking it out to my brother’s to sandblast it and then we decided to just cut out the offending curves so we borrowed Julio’s Saws-all and I bought some extra blades for the job. The saw sat next to the railing for about a month until we came up with a new idea for a wood and stainless steel railing. So we took the old railing out to the driveway where it looked even uglier in the daylight.
The time had come to head to Krieger’s with the scarp metal. They’ve been bought by Metalico but everyone still calls it Krieger’s. When we lived next door to Sparky he used to collect junk and dismantle it in his garage and take it to Kriegers for extra cash. I’ve been there with him and the place is a trip so I gave Sparky a call and arranged to pick him up at nine.
Street people pushing empty shopping carts were walking toward us in the middle of Portland Avenue as we approached the gates. We piled the scrap metal in a cart and wheeled it on to their scale while workers barked incoherent orders at us. You get the clear sense that they deal with unsavory characters on a regular basis and they have taken on many of the same characteristics as their clients.
There are cameras mounted above and bars on the cashier’s window. There was a Puerto Rican woman with a black baby in line in front of us. She had tattoos up and down her arms and her transaction was not going smoothly. There was another women in tight jeans and high heels standing off to the side. I asked Sparky what these women were doing and he said, “They’re prostitutes,” like that explains everything.
I slipped my driver’s license through a tiny opening in the bullet proof glass and signed a form that stated that the junk was mine and that I had not obtained illegally. The cashier paid me with a receipt that I had to take to an outdoor ATM machine. She asked if I had ever used the ATM before and I wasn’t sure if meant this particular ATM or any ATM so I said “No” and a worker walked with me to the outdoor machine. There was a guy with long scruffy beard hanging around near the machine and the worker told him to “beat it.” He scanned the bar code on my receipt for me and then said, “When your money comes out, take it fast.”
Back at Sparky’s he showed me the remodeling job he was doing on his bathroom. He had put in a shower enclosure in place of the tub and inadvertently sealed some of his tools in the wall between the studs. I asked him how he was getting by without a bathroom and took me to the basement where he had set up his old bathtub with a garden hose running across the floor from the laundry tub. He used an aluminum extension from a vacuum cleaner as a drain pipe and it ran out of the drain right into the open storm drain.
I was on the phone with our neighbor, Rick, when our other neighbor, Leo, rang the doorbell. Leo asked if we could show him how to use the Garmin GPS unit he bought. He assumed we were tech savvy enough to have experience with these things. We walked out to the driveway and I plugged it into our cigarette lighter.
Leo told us he was out in Webster the night before and he took a wrong turn and couldn’t figure out where he was. We stumbled through the clunky interface and pecked out his home address and removed the “untitled” entries he had set up on his own. We punched in the Wegmans location near us, his daughter’s address, his lady friend’s address and then I asked him, “Where else do you go these days?” He thought for a while and said, “Toastmaster’s, once a month”, so we typed in that address and I demonstrated how the device could give us directions from directions from our driveway to his house next door.
I stopped by our former neighbor’s place this morning to see how he was doing. I rang the doorbell and l spotted some beautiful red flowers in the backyard. I complimented Sparky on the flowers and he laughed and said he found them in box and stuck them in the ground. “They’re plastic Poinsettias.”
We were one thousand five hundred miles late for our oil change at Jerome’s but Ted didn’t seem to mind. Our Honda has been pretty damn reliable. Ted was always delivering bad news when he serviced our American cars. I should say that the window sticker said our Honda was made in Ohio so maybe it is an American car after all.
After Jerome’s I stopped by to visit our former neighbor, Sparky. He showed me pictures of his car that was recently totaled while he was sitting in it, parked in front of a friend’s house. The driver of the other car was black as is often the case with antagonists in Sparky stories. I had keys to his garage and shed when we lived next door and I still had them on my key ring so we went out back to see if they worked. They did and I surrendered them. I miss that shed and took a photo of it on the way out. Invisible Idiot named a song after it so it lives on.
I organized a setlist to shuffle on our iPod at tomorrow night’s Margaret Explosion Abilene gig. I threw some Edith Piaf, Last Poets, Duke Ellington, George Jones and cumbia in there. In the old days, in other bands, we would have had a setlist for the band performance but Margaret Explosion doesn’t work that way. I stopped by Nino’s Pizzeria and prepared them for a big order. And we confirmed that Glen, the tech savy bartender at Abilene, has the right cord to go from our laptop to the VGA in on Abilene’s projector. Bob Martin rounded up some June Taylor like visuals and we plan to go into full screen mode with the Quicktime files. I’d be happy with iTunes “Visualizer” but I can do that at home.
When Duane was up here last he told us that humus made with bean other than chick peas was all the rage in NYC. So I tried black bean humus a few weeks ago and it came out more Mexican than Greek. Last night I made a batch and mistakenly opened a can of kidney beans along with a can of Garbonzos so I went with it. I put some roasted peppers in there too and a jalapeno and some Spanish paprika so it is very red. It is sensational. I plan to serve that at out T-day bash.
Tonight is the last painting class. I have resigned myself to the fact that I will be a lifelong student and plan to return in the new year.
Sparky Doll purchased at Small Word Books on North Street in Rochester, NY
Sparky Doll purchased at Small Word Books on North Street in Rochester, NY
It wasn’t even a close call to pick our favorite Sparky doll from the fourteen on display at Small World Books on North Street. Peggi picked this one up for two bucks. The owner, Rocco, let me photograph all fourteen while we hung around talking. He told me these things are pretty common in New England.
Sparky Dolls found at Small World Books in Rochester, New York
I had to call Sparky this morning to check in on him. We were neighbors for twenty some years and I kept track of him when we lived in the city. We even developed a mythological site devoted to him and I’m sorry to report I don’t have any new episodes for it.
Peggi, Ornette, Stella and racks in the back yardv
I checked the link in Andrea’s comment to my “demand destruction” post (below) and found the grizzly pope talking the same thread. “Pope Benedict XVI says insatiable consumption scarring planet”. So I guess I’ll give that a rest and let him bang his head against the wall.
We kind of played hooky today and didn’t do all that much 4D activity. We worked on our stone wall project out back and then went down to the pool for a dip.
It is Peggi’s mom’s birthday so we scooped her up and brought her over to our house for dinner. Sparky stopped by and we sat on the deck for while. We sang Happy Birthday and Sparky launched right into a second verse that none of us had ever heard before. It had something to do with a thousand good cheers, a thousand beers, getting plastered and a line where he would have said bastard but he didn’t and everyone laughed instead. I had marinated chicken all afternoon and we cooked it in the backyard. Peggi made an angel food cake and put fresh strawberries on it with three candles and three little plastic ballerinas.
This all sounds pretty mundane and that’s the way we like it. In fact we were talking about tying to slow the summer down even more.
I brought my laptop to Jerome’s over on Atlantic Avenue but can’t find a wireless signal here. I’m sitting in the waiting room reading old Newsweeks while they put new brakes on our car. They are the best car shop in town. I used to just walk home while they worked on our car but we moved out of the neighborhood. Alan, who retired a while back but still checks in, is smoking at the desk. It smells fantastic. I miss small does of secondhand smaoke. Alan talks to himself these days. I find myself doing that more too as I get older. Igor, a mechanic who has been here for years, has his own stable of Russian customers. One couple just stopped in to pick up their car and they looked like something right out of Diane Arbus photo.
I drove by Sparky‘s house on way here. His lawn needs mowing. I used to do that when I lived over here. Maybe I’ll check in on him on my way home. He stops by our new place often and keeps us up to date with our old neighbors. Some of the people who lived on our street when we first moved into this neighborhood are still here but just barely. Their spouses have died and now they are struggling to stay in their homes.
Elite Bakery used to be next door to Jerome’s but it’s gone and Leo’s Bakery is too. They merged and moved out to East Rochester. PCI Studios used to be right next door. They started as a chemical company but morphed into a recording studio somehow. We recorded a version of “Love Never Thinks” and Rich Stim’s “So Hard” in there back in the eighties. The windows are all boarded shut now.
Alan keeps mumbling, “What the hell is goin’ on here”.
I caught the snowmen before their heads fell off this morning. Five minutes after I took this shot the one on the right was headless. Actually they were already headless. These are their midsections looking like heads.
Snowmen melting
Our old neighbor, Sparky, played out at Peggi’s mom’s home last night. We were planning on stopping out there but didn’t make it. Jeanne was in town from Nashville and she hooked up with Patty and they both stopped by. Jeanne brought over a bottle of Korbel champagne that had been sitting on her father’s shelf for a few years. It was warm but we popped it open anyway. It was sort of dark and it tasted like vinegar so we didn’t drink it. We made a fire and sat around talking. We hooked our laptop up to the stereo and streamed music from the other room. “Betty Davis Eyes” sounded good. Patty’s family sold the LDR Char Pit when her father in law retired and she told us about her new job at the local guitar cord factory, Whirlwind.
