Ahhh, spring!
A little sun
A little rain
Grass is first to wake –
The landscape no longer plain!
Standing tall daffodils
Hyacinth
And tulips –
“Okay, it’s time to DO this!”
So why am I in here tapping these keys?
It’s warm
It’s transformed
And I have to pull up a million little trees…
These are everywhere. Pull ‘em before the roots take hold!
Posted in Inspiration, Poetry
Both fit me perfectly.
A few years ago when I went to Boston to visit one of my oldest and craziest (and best) college friends, I came off the plane wearing my usual traveling headgear – a Yankees ball cap. My friend, knowing that I’m not a rabid fan, just a lifetime resident of New York State, raised an eyebrow and said, “I’m not so sure about that.”
I shrugged and said, “It’s just a hat. Who cares?”
The next morning as we walked her dog, a guy actually stopped cold to stare at me over the roof of his car. Point taken. We went out later that day so I could buy a Red Sox cap.
Full Disclosure: I don’t stray far from the house while wearing my unmistakable “B” emblazoned cap. Around my hometown, it is not uncommon to see a Hummer roll by with a decal of Calvin whizzing on two little red socks. Case in point: I once wore my Yankees cap while wearing a Boston hoodie (just the word ‘Boston’, not Red Sox!), and a mouthy guy yelled at me that I was cross dressing. Nice.
Now, I just don’t endorse sports rivalries (as if we need more division), and personally think that the whole Yankees-Red Sox rabid-fan-thing can get tiresome. Both teams are legends. And I love that both cities have rich history, singular energy, and incomparable people. I suppose such deeply ingrained identities can fuel a long rivalry, the Curse of the Bambino notwithstanding.
In reality, I’m not so sure that any two other iconic world cities could be closer together in history and sensibility. Boston roots are deep and tenacious, as are New York roots.
I think, way down, far below New York’s 191st Street station and Boston’s Big Dig, those roots are tightly intertwined.
Posted in Inspiration, Storytelling
Tagged Boston Red Sox, Boston Strong, New York Yankees
There’s a lot to see in the woods.
My nephews love the woods. Past hiking trips last summer and fall were highly successful outings – and, being outdoors kills time that I would otherwise spend tuning out SpongeBob or getting trounced at the Wii game of the day. Also, I hope the boys are developing their appreciation for nature, which will serve them for a lifetime.
It must be working.
When I agreed to take them for an afternoon during their recent spring break, they had one request: hiking in the woods. Binoculars from Grandma and new hiking boots from Mommy sealed the deal – all I needed was some cooperation from Mother Nature (who has been a bit testy this spring.) The weather was raw, but dry, so I dressed in layers and picked them up from daycare, where the buzz was all about K. & D.’s aunt taking them to the woods.
There were a few raised eyebrows. “You’re taking both of them?” Honestly, I feel safer taking them to the woods than I would to the mall (which my sister probably wouldn’t allow anyway). The trails at Tinker Park are flat, mulched paths that are raised above and buffered against the natural wetland of the area. It’s quite literally a walk in the park, but to K. & D. it is “The Woods.” They are allowed to run, touch just about anything, and can make noise as long as they don’t sound like banshees. I guess, for little boys, that’s pretty close to heaven.
At ages 6 and 8 they are no longer so high maintenance, so when they decide in the car that they don’t want to carry their water bottles, I say, “Well, take a long drink now, because I’m not carrying them.” (If it were summer and we had backpacks, I would have insisted that everyone carry their own water. Compliance seems to follow if I tell them, in anything related to hiking, “That’s how it’s done.”)
We spend TWO HOURS hiking a 1.5 mile loop. We see deer tracks and poo, a nesting Great Horned Owl (I do, not sure if they really do), hear courting robins and territorial woodpeckers, and then scoop mud and leaf muck out of the swamp with a stick. We’re out there so long that I have to administer an inhaler (scheduled), and dodge the stream of, uh, the same boy’s “relief.” (AGAINST THE TREE, D.!!)
K. and D. are becoming nature lovers. They choose and discard downed branches looking for good walking sticks, that they then leave at the trailhead for the next hiker to use. They learn that a Canadian Goose needs a wide berth and does not want to be fed a weed (“I told you so that they hiss and chase!”)
All they did was walk continuously through an admittedly gray, early spring wood. No flowers, no green leaves, and very few birds. They did not once complain that they were bored or ask to leave. In fact, it was me who wrapped up the trek, not being equipped for outdoor “relief.”
I tell them about hiking in the Adirondacks, where their Uncle and I will hike all day, eat lunch on the trail, continuously climb over boulders, and reach a mountaintop where we can see for miles. I tell them that, someday, we will take them with us.
“We’ll go to the top of a mountain?” asks K., while D. just stares into space, trying to process it.
“Yes,” I say, “we’ll hike all day, and we’ll probably get tired, but we will get to the top of a mountain.”
Maybe they will carry my water for me.
Posted in Adirondacks, Babysitting Nephews
Tagged family, Hiking, nephews, Tinker Park
Have faith in dog.
Our dog is old. She is an eleven-year-old greyhound, with a very gray face. No, she is not fast – not anymore. Valentina did race, but retired before age 2 because she wasn’t a winner. She just was not interested in racing. Running when she felt like it was enough.
But she did love to run. Now, she putters around the yard sniffing everything, then flops over on her side to soak in the sun. Not so long ago, our fenced-in backyard had a dirt path worn into the grass from her daily sprints – two minutes of 40 mile per hour tears around the yard, then back to the couch. A few minutes a day was enough.
We have always tried to feed her a good diet, with frequent chicken and rice supplements, and have never given her food from the dinner table to discourage begging and “theft” (greyhounds are tall – snoot level is table height!) When we sit down to eat, she goes to her bed to wait for her big biscuit. After, she gets a sip of water, then heads back to her bed without bothering anyone at the table. Her biscuit is enough.
Walks were once drawn out affairs circling the surrounding neighborhood for her daily territory sweep. At 50+lbs of solid muscle, it was a true wrangling during the first years before obedience training and leash practice made walking easy. The corns on the pads of her feet have slowed the pace, and shrank the territory, considerably. A trip up and down our street, staying on the soft grass, is now enough.
Valentina’s demands are minimal. She seems to be satisfied with however much or little attention, or indulgence, she gets. It is all enough.
I had the opportunity to hear a Rabbi speak last week after church as part of our “Faith Neighbors” series, which also included speakers from Mormon, Catholic and Muslim traditions, all from within our own town. More than the obvious “how we are different” aspects to each visit was the strong thread of how we are alike.
The Rabbi had this to say about trying to account for God’s intervention (or not) during the undeniable ups and downs of life:
It’s enough.
No matter how much or how little we think God is “doing” for us, it’s always enough.
My old dog doesn’t expect the favor of yummy dinners, then curse her aging bones. She takes it all in, no matter what she gets.
It’s enough.
If I had the time, resources, and inclination, I’d open a tiny bar and name it Dive Bar. It would be poorly lit, serve mostly bottled beer and well drinks, and the restrooms – clean and serviceable – would be graffiti temples filled with genius insults, beat poetry and psychedelic cartooning.
To have visited a dive bar is to have loved a dive bar – and all of you, I’m guessing, are already time-warped to That Dive Bar You Loved: You can feel the beer bottle or ridged plastic cup freezing your hand. If the music is live, you are head-bobbing toward a six inch high “stage” in the corner. And if you didn’t snag a barstool, you at least found a heavily varnished wooden ledge to set your drink on.
Kingsbury’s in Elmira was my first dive bar. Townies and the crunchier flannel-wearers from campus harmoniously swilled the house drink – Red Stripe from the bottle. I had rejected the dance clubs (or, rather, they had rejected me) of my high school and early college years and King’s to me was as much a revelation as Kurt Cobain murmuring “Come, as you are, as you were, as I want you to be.”
A revisit there for a college reunion was a letdown – King’s was actually now named “King’s” and I hazily remember it as a caricature of itself. Or maybe the caricature was me. I guess you really can’t go back.
The Husband and I went to Mohawk Place, a legendary live music dive bar in downtown Buffalo, only once, about four years ago. We went to see Maria Taylor of Azure Ray. Whispertown 2000 and Bela’s Shadow opened. We wondered if the former band was “for real” — for reasons I’ll leave to your imagination — and the latter was a local indie/shoegaze/post-rock outfit whose album I would have bought to keep company my Explosions in the Sky disc, had they an album to sell.
Sadly, we never made it back to this now-closed Buffalo institution where the bartender, a young Grizzly Adams, didn’t know how to work a waiter’s corkscrew and a side conversation in the ladies room netted me a “wow, you look young for your age”-backhanded compliment. That’s a dive bar for you. RIP, Mohawk Place.
I’ve visited dive bars in more exotic locales, too. There is the open-air joint a bumpy one hour pickup truck ride from where our off-shore-anchored cruise ship’s tender boat ported in the Dominican Republic. The beach was gorgeous and I remember drinking something cold and pleasant. The sensation of the experience came back recently when I watched the movie The Rum Diary.
Open-air dive bar in the Dominican Republic.
There is a scene where Johnny Depp’s Hunter S. Thompson-esque Kemp and sidekick Sala get lost in a Puerto Rican jungle in the middle of the night and end up at a backwater open-air dive bar. A car chase ensues, they almost die, they get arrested… and, yes, this scene reminded me of the dive bar in the DR. I have a vivid memory, er, imagination.
The Raquette Lake Tap Room in the Adirondacks is a bit more genteel with Friday night fish specials like escargot and Crab Gruyere. I doubt the place is rated by the fire marshal for more than 50 people, but I guarantee you that it is the best party for miles (okay, it’s the only party for miles, but it’s still pretty great).
All the local color is here. In one corner is a group of summer camp counselors playing Jenga. In another corner is an assortment of lumberjack locals and downstate millionaire summer-locals – and you can’t tell who’s who.
There are politics, sports and great storytelling over hard and soft drinks. Make no mistake – the Tap Room is a dive bar and the kind of place where two women who just met will switch t-shirts in the ladies room so that one can gift her shirt about loving Jesus and drinking to the other, just because. (True story).
Our hometown dive bar is Marge’s Lakeside Inn. A prohibition-era converted house right on the beach of Lake Ontario, Marge’s is quite possibly the orgy love child of all the other dive bars I’ve mentioned. The newcomer entering through the front porch might pause at the door worried that they’re about to stagger into someone’s living room. Mother and daughter proprietresses Fran and Francine Beth are the nicest people you will meet, and Fran will make sure you check out the vintage jukebox playing vintage tunes at a vintage price.
There’s free popcorn, an enclosed back porch, a back deck, and then…the beach. Really. The Husband and I have brought take out from hot dog row across the street (a story for another day) and eaten dinner with our toes in the sand and sipping a cold brew. At 80 years and counting, Marge’s is the grandmamma of dive bars, and anyone who’s been there *loves* it. Really, what I love about a dive bar has nothing to do with the drinks.
On second thought, I wouldn’t try to open a dive bar. A dive bar “becomes,” like the aging of fine wine or whiskey. With every birthday, my tolerance for alcohol wanes a little more and so I have become a cheap date. But I will never, ever pass up the chance to have one at a dive bar.
