More Than a Walk in the Park

We would have gotten up early if not for staying up very late the night before.  But I was glad we spent the evening the way we did, since it was in the great company of the "neighborhood" couples and a fine assortment of fabulous calories.

The trip to the Rochester Public Market was necessitated by the markups that make Wegman's supermarkets so successful.  We obtained the necessary yams and scallions and more for a fraction of what they would have cost in the warmth under the fluorescent lights.  And we had the best breakfast sandwiches ever, right off the grill at Scott's II diner shack.

I chose Canadian Bacon.

"Let's take a walk in one of the parks afterward," Mary had previously proposed, so we were properly attired.  On the spur of the moment, we decided to take in Highland Park. which is a little less crowded in December than during the May Lilac Festival.  

The reservoir at Highland Park on a day
during the Lilac Festival.

And perhaps the park is less beautiful, but Frederick Law Olmsted's engineering of the land remains appealing even in the snow-tinged cold.  But we could only imagine the fragrances.

We walked along the rolling paths below the reservoir and up through the rhododendrons to the empty space where the Children's Pavilion, pinnacle of the park, once stood.  It was removed in the 60's.  It needs to be rebuilt to bring the park back to its proper grandeur, and to restore the fabulous views that it once provided.  I wonder what material and structural changes would need to be made so that the ever-present miscreants will have difficulty destroying it.

Even without the height provided by the three-story pavilion, the views are appealing.  Shrouded with ice, the reservoir is not without charm.

As we walked back to the car, we smiled at the workmanship in the valley below the street.  A foot-trodden peace sign appeared on the floor of the gully, the result of concerted efforts by at least one unseen boot-clad artist.

My mother has always loved going to this peaceful park.  She even duplicated it in some small fashion with the numerous lilacs in her back yard.  It is difficult now, even when it is warm, since the uneven footing and changes in altitude makes the use of her walker impossible.  And the logistics of wheelchair use are not an incentive for family outings.

But she still makes some efforts to have a good quality of life, even though aid is constantly necessary.  The previous day, we had watched and listened as Mom sang Christmas carols in the choir at her residence.  She was afraid she wouldn't remember the words, and since her eyesight has failed, she has great difficulty even finding the proper page in the songbook.

After the concert, I let her know she did fine.  "I watched, Mom.  I thought you did pretty well with the words."

"Half the time I was just moving my mouth without singing."

I laughed.  "No one knew.  You did a good job."

It was a fine event, and nice to see Mom rally for her performance.  But one phrase stuck in my head. While she sang Frosty the Snowman, of all songs, I unintentionally reinterpreted the lyrics.

"...let's have some fun, before I melt away."

Indeed.

What the Maid of Honor Said

Molly has been the best friend of my daughter, Katie, since the two of them were wee lasses.  She is one of my favorite storytellers.  Here are some she told at Katie and Scott's wedding.

-------------

Molly delivering the Maid of Honor speech.
Scott!  Pay attention!

Hi, Everyone.  Thank you all so much for coming and being part of such a special day in Katie and Scott's lives.  I am Molly, and I am honored to be here as Katie's Maid of Honor.  I would like to thank Mary and Randy for hosting this wonderful event.

Katie and I have been best friends for over 25 years.  It all began one day on Ridgemont Drive, when a rambunctious, tree-climbing, speed-your-bike-down-the-street kind of girl said to another, more-cautious, reserved, I'll-stand-down-here-while-you-climb kind of girl, "Hey, want to be my best friend?"  

I said, "Sure!"  It amazes me to this day that with that one simple question, our path to a wonderful friendship began.

Waiting for the bus on the first day of first grade.

We have spent many summer days here at Keuka Lake.  Some of my best memories were spent here with Katie and the Fredlunds, and I've always viewed them as an extension of my own family.  

Katie always knew that someday she would love to get married at Esperanza, she just didn't know to who.  Or as English majors would say, "...to whom."

Not Keuka Lake, but still having fun near the water.

One day, as we were catching up on the phone, Katie started to tell me of a guy named Scott that she had met through mutual friends while studying at Bowling Green.  Over the next few months, Scott's name began to come up more and more in our conversations.  I could hear in her voice that he was someone special, and had the sense that she had met her match.

Clowning around one October.

Katie has always been very strong, independent and someone who knows herself very well, which is one of the things I admire about her most.  But Katie has a soft side, too.  She is a beautiful person in and out, kind and caring.  To this day I still have the card she made for me in the 4th grade, when I was home sick from school that read, "I hope you feel better.  I missed you today."  That card still means the world to me today, and shows from a young age what a caring person she is.

A little older than 4th grade.
Cue the song, "Ya Got To Have Friends..."

Molly enthralls the crowd.

Scott may not remember this, but one night while he was telling the Fredlund family and me about a book he read, he used a word that I did not know, because I don't know as many words as Katie and Scott.  Like one of his students, I raised my hand.  He looked at me and said, "Yes?" 

"Scott, I don't know what that word means."  Without judgement, he simply explained what the word meant.  At that time, I thought, "What a patient and kind person he is"...the kind of person I have always hoped my best friend would find.

One chapter ends.  The next begins.
But always the best of friends.

What I love about Scott and Katie is that they are their true selves around each other.  They are able to be independent of one another while being supportive of their goals in life, even if that means making sacrifices.  Long distance relationships are not always easy, but I always hear of all the fun they have had...Making the time to travel to see each other, or meet up to visit friends or family.  They're always sharing in a new adventure together.  [Editor's note: Katie is a Professor of English at Indiana State University while Scott is finishing his PhD at the University of Florida.]

Well said, Molly!

Please join in as we raise a glass to Katie and Scott.

For your future together, I wish you happiness, laughter, and lots of love.  I love you both!

[Images provided by Vicky Fredlund-Feathers, John Larkin, and scans of an ancient means of chemically capturing light.  Imagine that!]

The Veteran

Mom’s dog Ginger needed to go out.  She likes it when I arrive to see Mom, because more often than not, I take her for a walk.  Ginger, not Mom.

Ginger is a very smart little Bichon Poo.  She has Mom trained really well.  I have been unable to get her to grab her leash and bring it to me, so maybe I’m well trained as well.  After 3 furtive attempts, I took the leash from its perch on the door handle of the too-full hall closet.  Ginger ran over to offer her collared neck to me.

“We’ll be back soon,” I told Mom and headed outside with Ginger leading the way.

We soon emerged from the large complex of apartments where Mom lives.  As the door closed behind us, Ginger strained against the leash to go meet the Scotty on the end of another leash held by an elderly gentleman.

“Be good, Ginger.”  The admonition was not necessary.  The Scotty was in the same life stage as his human, and clearly not in the mood for a territorial fight.

Just then, the diamond formation of Air Force jets screeched overhead on their way back to the airport-centered airshow.  Though the humans looked aloft, the canines were unimpressed.

“Impressive!” I said.  “I always enjoy seeing the military jets in flight.”

“They’re something to see,” said the man.  “Always have been.  I saw the first one, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was German.  Painted all red.  Nobody knew what it was.  And nobody could believe how fast it passed overhead.  Not the pilots, or the officers, or anyone.  It was near the end of the war.  They didn’t make many of them, but they were something.”

“That German engineering.”

“Yeah, they were pretty good.  Our guys were pretty good too.”  In the distance, we could just make out a large plane with four-props, heading away.  The airshow must be over for the day.

“I saw a lot like that,” he continued.  I noticed that he was wearing a hat that said “Veteran,” with some letters and numbers that did not stick in my mind.  “I was in England at an airfield where the B-17s were stationed.  I saw a lot of them.  And I saw a lot more leave than come back.

“It was amazing that some of them made it back.  Some of them were so shot up that you couldn’t believe they could fly.  One time, I saw a plane come in that only had two working engines.  The other two were stopped dead.  You could see the pilot struggling to control the plane.

“There was a field next to the runway, and there had been a lot of rain, so it was all muddy.  You could see the pilot change course just before he came in, and he set it down, without landing gear, right in the muddy field.  I swear, that plane must have plowed at least 3 football fields before it came to a stop.  It left a deep groove where it slid.  But every one of those guys walked away from it.  That was the best piece of flying I ever saw.”

“Wow,” I said.  “It’s great they made it.”

“Yeah, it was.  And a few days later, they were off in another B-17.  That’s just the way it was.”  I didn’t want to know if they made it back again.  I hoped so.

The dogs had completed their tasks, and the air overhead was quiet.  Mom was going to wonder where we were.  “I’ll see you later.”

“Yep,” he said, and turned away with Scotty leading him in the opposite direction.

One of the German planes that didn't make it.
The man observing is my Grandfather, who is also in the picture above,
since there was no available shot of the Veteran I spoke with.

This is what they should always see,
regardless of the campaign.

Thanks, and Welcome Home!

The Saddest Day of the Year

It is always the saddest day of the year.

The sky over the water will be set afire no more.

From the water, watching the sun set is always fabulous.  But that's over for this year.

The Smores are history.

But I want some more!

There is no place to sit by the fire pit.
Fire mound, really...it needs to be cleaned out.

The lawn chairs a stacked by the cooler, with care.

The kayaks and collector's-item-canoe are tucked away
where the snow and ice will barely touch them.

No longer needed, 
the paddles have been disassembled according to Bob's instructions,
and are hidden in their corner.

Bob says that one must disassemble paddles from time to time, lest they lose their two part nature.  Sounds reasonable, and I always follow good advice.  And yes, sometimes bad advice as well.  I've made up my mind to never again reply in the affirmative when someone suggests that a chainsaw is a better alternative.  

Silence.

Drained and blown out, the pipes are empty all the way back to the pump house.
On this sad day, one can't help but feel like the pipes...
blown out and empty.

The pink stuff is in the traps.

Essential equipment has been rendered inoperative,
and is prepared for hiatus.

And on the electrical panel...

The main breaker is off.

Sigh.

But...

There is a distinct possibility that this sadness, this malaise, this emptiness may become a thing of the past.  With greater occupancy, there is less impetus driving shutdown.  So...

The variance application has been filed with the Adirondack Park Agency.  All true and in earnest, of course, but if you find yourself in need of hooey in painful minutia, I am quite willing to share the mind-numbing supply created in completing this application.

If you're going to create something more habitable, you want the basement floor to be above the flood plain, don't you?  And since the shallow pitched roof of the garage succumbed to the weight of snow in 2003, you'd kinda want to be sure the new roof is steep enough to shed that weight, right?  So we're asking for 2 more feet of height than the regulations allow.  And a couple hundred more square feet, so that we'll only feel inconvenienced, not cramped, when everyone arrives for the holidays.

Our Architect, in addition to throwing parties at the existing camp, has provided us with renderings of options for rebuilding.  What do you think?  Where would you prefer to swat blackflies?  On which deck would you rather sip your cocktail when you come to visit?

Option 1:  Nouveau Adirondack Lean-to
Mary's silhouette is enjoying the view.

Option 2:  Roofines similar to the original,
with lovely scissor-trusses.

Get your votes in now!

Stewart's Landing Epic

Mary went off to do some shopping

While I prepared to go kayaking

And the sky above was absolutely blue

But our plans were changed abruptly

when a storm came in quite swiftly

soon after we had bid a fond adieu.

Her task was almost through

When the manager boo-hooed,

"Leave your carts, folks. 
We have been hit"

The man found it very frightening

to be the target of the lightning 

and he didn't want any further part of it.

Meanwhile, I heard the thunder rumble

saw the dark clouds in a jumble

and thought, 
“Maybe I should turn my boat around."

I paddled like the devil

atop the water level

and still dry, arrived upon the solid ground.

I sat on the porch of my chateau

enjoyed the crash and lightning show

and absolutely missed the urgent ringing phone

So Mary called the neighbors

and asked them for a favor

to make sure that I had made it safely home.

They arrived, knocked, and entered,

found no one and then departed

since I was soaping up, hidden in the shower.

Reporting back to Mary

they found it somewhat scary

that I might be a recent victim of wind power.

When I was fully dried

and the howling winds had died

And I was, post-shower, feeling really great

I’d heard the last of thunder

but I began to wonder

So I called to see why Mary was so late

Then I got the story

heard of lightning strikes and worry

And of kind concern for me, on this occasion,

So I called the folks next door

“Be very careful!” I implored,

“There have been nearby reports, of home invasion!"

Mist rising after the storm.

Damned Flat Roof

Ye damned roof,
as viewed from the bathroom window.
Or is it a dammed roof?

I hate flat roofs.  I like to work in concert with gravity, rather than against it.  A flat roof, or nearly flat roof, is a crime against physics.  The downhill flow of fluids is inevitable, so why tempt fate?  Yes, I know, if properly engineered and installed, a flat roof is just fine.  For a while...until it leaks...and they always do.

Perhaps my distaste for horizontal roofing is as much experiential as logical.  In my late teens, I was hired for a job where I was to perform surveys on flat roofs for a company that promised to provide a cost saving to the poor business owner who happened to have dripping ceilings.  Just as I was hired, a major contract was inked with a large plant in Tonawanda, NY, an hour away from where I lived.  But that would not be factor, since the job foreman would be driving, and I could snooze as necessary on the way.

Not so.  Ted, the foreman and only other crew member, took it upon himself to save my wretched soul from all the mistakes he had made, and from all those I would obviously make unless I followed his advice.  So we travelled back and forth with a constant drone of morality lessons.  And because he was averse to driving on the Thomas E. Dewey Thruway, we had the pleasure of 90 minutes or more of companionship on Routes 33 or 31 instead of the normal hour.  Both ways.

I never asked the question.  I was too kind, I suppose.  But I had to wonder...If you know everything that I will need to live a successful life, why is it that you're messing around in the summer sun on nearly melting industrial roofs with a kid who is obviously destined for no good?

The company provided these little capacitance measuring machines that we secured to wheeled carts. The needle would swing along the scaled arc, detecting the moisture content within the tar and felt below.  Then we'd jot the result onto the clipboard and move a few feet to the next site for another reading.  But before we took any readings, Ted insisted that we measure and paint a spot at 3 foot intervals to make sure we provided an accurate grid for our measurements.  

The roofs we measured would easily hold a regulation football field.  And the Tonawanda job also provided close proximity to a metal foundry (and a sentence with plural redundancies in the same sentence!).  So we got to enjoy soot falling upon us as we moved across the roof not once, but twice.  Ted preferred this over my suggestion that we get a long rope, paint it once at the correct intervals, and then move the rope to give us our reference points.    And because of the extra marking time, we needed to make additional journeys to Tonawanda to complete the job.  I suspect Ted was also paid on an hourly basis.

The pay was slightly more than minimum wage, which was good for me at the time, so I might have toughed it out for the summer, even with the cruel and unusual punishment.  But after a number of jobs, all on roofs within spitting distance of Lake Erie, I realized that the meters really did not do a good job of determining the water in the roof.  "You need to have the computer analyze the data," said the boss, but I could not see how any computer application of logic could make real sense out of the mostly random measurements I was taking.  Particularly after I noted that the crushed stone usually found on these roofs was not always distributed evenly, and distance from the tarred surface made the readings vary significantly.

So I quit.  This action required a long discussion with my father regarding the value of work and persistence, but after hearing all the whining, he finally acquiesced when I told him that it was extremely questionable that the service we provided had any value.  And, of course, I added quickly that I did not want to be involved with an organization that was fleecing its customers.  I noted for later consideration that moral and ethical grounds had carried much more weight with my father than any degree of personal discomfort.

The experience instilled a deep and reasonable loathing of flat roofs.  So when I heard that a section of roof in Indiana was suspected of leaking, I snarled knowingly, "Damned flat roof."

Really?
You can't be serious.

Thankfully, Scott was on the scene.  He assessed the situation, sent pictures, and plotted strategy.  And he found a big hole.  Unfortunately, what first appeared to be the culprit turned out to be a very unconventional drain design.  

Who drains a roof with a hole in the middle when it would have been just as easy to build the roof with an outside drain?  The guy must have been a desert dweller.

The one true path.

Scott also determined that the bulk of the water ending up on the flat roof actually came from the normally pitched roof on the story above.  The downspout from that level dumped all the water from a large rain collection area onto the flat roof where it could really make a difference should anything be the least bit leaky.

So he configured a new path for the major flow that took the bulk of the water to the ground without the scenic and circuitous path across the flat roof and into the mysterious hole-drain.

Then the educational future of America called, and Scott was not able to do anything more.  Lucky me!  I would be able to contribute to the project.  

The bundle.

Unwilling (Oh, all right. "Unable.") to access the roof via the tiny bathroom window as Scott had done, a ladder was procured to provide an elevating experience.  I took my little bundle of tools up with me, and was nearly overwhelmed by a dose of flat roof revulsion.  But I fought down the panic and began to go about my business.  At least I didn't have to paint a grid.

Scott's new ladder.

The bottom line?  I replaced a vent cover that shouldn't need to be there at all, and went with a nautical theme by turning the vents 180 so no water could possibly enter that way.  Did I mention that the ceiling light in the bathroom below is not used because the globe fills up with water?  My first inclination was goldfish, but that solution was not met with the proper enthusiasm.  So I sought additional solutions.

Which meant applying Oobleck.  You know, that wonderful stuff manufactured by Magicians of Didd that sticks to everything and seems to multiply itself as it does so.  It has been rebranded as Leak Stopper, and the color has been changed, but it is clearly Oobleck.

I gooped up a seam and a small slice in the roof and anything anywhere that looked suspiciously like a possible water entry point.  You are always guessing when trying to stop leaks.  So I applied the Oobleck to anything that looked remotely like a gap.  Gaps between my fingers, gaps in my clothing, and a few gaps on the roof.  I'm glad that I found some paint thinner in the basement. 

Declaring victory, I returned to the roof one more time to capture this image of my fine workmanship.

My eye beholds beauty.
Oobleckian beauty.
But the truth is that Scott's downspout diversion
probably makes more difference than anything I accomplished.

But that's not what I wanted to tell you about.

As I was stepping down the ladder for the final time and dreaming of well deserved beverages, something flashed across my view.  A bird?  A plane?  No...it was Superfrog!  And there I was, camera in hand.  Though he had not made an appointment, this guy had come for a portrait setting.

Faster than a speeding bullet.
Earlier...not at this moment.

The nearest tree was more than 10 feet away.  Although I'm sure he didn't fly, the leap he made was nearly as impressive as his sudden stop and adherence to the metal of the ladder.

Why, Hello!

I rarely go outdoors to see animals of any kind, so this was my first encounter with a tree frog.  What a cute little guy.

I know hunters who would kill to have camo this good.

I was thoroughly impressed by his staying power.  Unbelievable how well he could hang onto the brushed metal surface.  Clearly a miracle performed by this tiny Ladder Day Saint.

Humans?  Opposable thumbs?
Maybe so, but you gotta hand it to this little guy...
He's got gripping nailed.

He stayed long enough for our session, and then we both went off in search of rewards for our performances.