Day to day

    I went home yesterday although home is defined by a number of places none of which are the one I have to live in now. Part of the ritual of going back is stopping off at Peggy's grave where I had left a blue teddy bear a few months ago, blown off to someone else's grave but put back a number of times, still surviving the weather. She, of course had, wanted a Paddington Bear and complained about the one that was stolen -- this in between her rants about the New York Giants I pinned in New York Giants pin onto the lapels of the blue bear, repositioned it in front of her grave and then moved on, aware that next St Valentine's Day Eve will be the 25th anniversary of her suicide. Our world is full of such sad moments, especially when I return again and again to find change. My ritual is to go to the old laundromat, have a cup of coffee, write some and then wander the neighborhood. But the rain made it impossible to walk far. So, I drove passed the old apartment o

Technically Indian summer doesn't come until after the first freeze. But we had a deep chill and then near 90 over the last few days. So, this may well have been Indian summer as a new string of showers brings us into the cold. -- not yet snow like that Halloween in 2011 when still leaf laden trees in our back yard cracked and fell leaving a brutal landscape I could not clear till the following spring -- eye surgery leaving me half blind and prohibited from any heavy labor. it was a vulnerable time, too, partly because I had to travel to surgery alone in the back of a bumpy cab which got lost on the way to the hospital. I held the resentment against my wife as deeply into spring as the broken tree limbs. The death of Uncle Pete in early 2012 added to this sense of my mortality and perhaps made me vulnerable to what later happened. I was 59 going into 60, an age I always thought of as old and suddenly someone admired me, and I went ahead over heels. Now, after other s

    My morning ritual of exercise got disrupted when I accidentally locked myself out of the house this morning, attempting to feed some of the outside cats. I usually wake up around 6 a.m., make coffee, feed the inside cats, then if I see any cats in the yard put out a dish or two for them before hopping onto the inside bicycle, hand weights, bands and such. This morning, I got through most of it when another one of our wandering outside cats made its appearance and I grabbed a bag of hard food and went out to fill the dish, only to find that the screen door had locked behind me. I might have gone to the front door to push the doorbell to get help, only because several people have wandering unwanted into our yard over the last few weeks, I had installed a padlock on the gate, the key for which was in my pants inside the house. The inside cats looked at me through the screen, puzzled by my situation, as did the outside cats, who ate and made their way off for their own daily

  Some memories reemerge when we something similar later that resembles them. and from the new experience we get the same emotions we had as a result of the first experience and this happened to me while looking at one of her cut up videos, which she posted today or maybe yesterday, harkening back a decade to when she invited me up to her apartments for a meal where she promptly began to cut up vegetables – a moment I wrote about in a poem at the time, and which her video today brought back in full vivid color, scaring me because I had assumed I was beyond any emotional reaction after so long a period. Even though the cutting up the melon yesterday seems far less ruthless than when she sliced up the vegetables both bore the terrifying concept of being gutted or more precisely back then a kind of castration in my mind at least the total control she wielded with her sharp knife, literally and also metaphorically though I'm not sure she meant it then and certainly did not have

    Heavy rain this morning, although the temperature remains the same. I stare out the window at the yard, at the bird feeders, at the dog/cat houses, and the slowly changing leaves from our walls of ivy. These are the mornings I crave most all the way back to when I was a kid, this feeling of security inside, dry, warm, while still getting a gander at the real world weather, Pauly – had he lived – would be pontificating on the imminent demise of the world, after having kept track of all possible natural disasters, perhaps even setting a time clock as to when the volcanos in Iceland would go off. He’s always been a bit of a chicken little, believing all the silly conspiracy theories that are being spread by people obsessed with the idea of death, and insisting not to go alone. It’s sort of how I felt back when working in the cosmetics company, hoping that the company might fold so I would not have to resign. I would modify Woody Allen’s statement about not wanting to be

    She corrected me in her latest video, intentionally or not, making it clear that she had not purchased a new camera, but rather and app for her phone which basically keeps track of her movements, something akin to the more old fashioned dolly used in movies and tv to pan along with a character in a scene. She apparently planned to use this visual toy before this, but a forecast of rain dissuaded her. Her video blog has replaced the print blog I followed for several years, and she clearly has a talent for it, and she is so photogenic, she can’t help but attract viewers. She is also growing into the medium, having learned how to speak to the camera, not a hard lesson for her who has spent so much time on stage and as a performer – although the earliest efforts on this blog were basically a series of long shots, of her walking her dog or a study of nature in an urban environment, followed by a few videos narrated via text. So, by the time her of current video, she seems uninti

    I saw the pigeon after I had put out stale bread for the birds to feed on. He looked healthy, although he clearly had troubles since when the other pigeons flew off when I came into the yard, she did not. She was either injured or young, but she could not fly, walking around on the concrete in search of food while the others later congregated under the feeder where small birds dumped seed on the ground where they could feed. I spread some seed near the crippled bird only to have the flock of healthier birds swarm down on it, stealing whatever seed it could reach. Worse still, the two young cats that come and go from our yard took notice of the pigeon and began to stalk it. I had seen these cats hunting smaller birds a few days earlier, managing to catch one, which they tortured (played with) for some time before mercifully murdering it. I did not want them to do this to an even more helpless bird. I shooed the cats away. Eventually, I took up the bird, put it inside a c

    Our former temporary boss was right about her writing; she really was the best in our office while she worked there. The unfortunate part is that the new ownership in destroying the paper completely gutted the Archives and so to the general public her work is no longer available. An inspiration to me since then I had kept all of her stories in my own archive and downloaded into my Kindle in order to reread hem the way I used to do another great writer for office years earlier, and the way I reread Orwell, Joseph Mitchell, Mark Twain and EB White. More than once I've been tempted to post all of her stories on my blog but that's not my prerogative and the best I could do is simply read and reread the work she did while she was employed with us. (though I still cringe over the story she once wrote called Pizza man). This is one of the great tragedies of modern media that the Legacy that you build online can sometimes vanish as if it never existed As with her poetry

    The rain comes slowly at first, a few drops splattering on the concrete in my back yard, then as a steady drizzle, and finally a downpour. This is not the warm spring rain that we welcome as a final relief to the chill of winter, but the introduction of the new season and the threat of cold we can expect. Columbus Day weekend and our visit to Cape May marks the change, one marker Mollenkott, my literary professor at college used to dread, telling me how when I reached her age, I would dread it as well, Autumn signally the end of life, while I admired the change of leaves. I’m less a fan of summer than she was, or for that matter spring, all symbolic of the dreariness of life, while dramatic autumn puts obstacles in front of us, a challenge to survive the cold, we lasting out the worst life can offer in order to see the spring again. There is beauty in this transition, a meloncoly that I’ve felt almost from the day I first opened my eyes, craving those days when I could lo

    She apparently didn’t intend to post a video about chopping up a pineapple – even though she previously posted one about a watermelon. She had intended to do a video about horses. She seems to have three different general categories for her videos: food, travel and horses. Sometimes these overlap or she has other animals such as her dog or cat that get a bit part in these videos. Problems at her apartment (yes, she says, she rents) forced her to change her plan and do a food video in place of a horse video, but not before she indulged in a rant against her landlord, who allegedly made a repair, but flooding still occurred. She lives in the poor side of town, an area that you might get a glimpse of by watching the old TV show, “The Wire,” although she clearly has no fear of that urban nightmare, walking her dog through some of questionable landscape. She claims she’s losing her mind because of the leak. She apparently took the landlord’s word on the repair until a se

    When I said  she had been posting her video blog for about a year, it wasn't always under the blogger title she is running with. The oldest videos seem to be dealing with waking up in the morning and walking her dog. Her first three videos posted on this youtube site were basic images and music, she did not appear as a character. The fourth appears to be another mostly silent film with captions about her making a certain korean food for the first time and another about tacos. She speaks in a film about her hometown, but it's not the same as when she launches herself into the videos at a character, which seems to have occurred when she started video blogging about her horse riding. Rather than go all the way back in time, I picked one of her more recent posts from a month ago intrigued me. This involved her cutting up of a watermelon. She apparently had a 25 percent discount, and an opposite account to the mismeasurement of Spinal Tap, she would up with a monster of a wa

    With the threat of rain still hanging over Cape May on Saturday morning, we decided to play it safe and visit the indoor exhibit at the Physik Estate – the main building of which is the most historic of all buildings there with the possible exception of Congress Hall. The tour guide from MAC had informed us about an outdoor exhibit there, and I secretly hoped that the actors would be on the great lawn, dressed up in Victorian garb the way they used to do prior to the COVID pandemic. Indeed, many visitors also dressed up in period costumes, and I had seen several people on the mall on Friday night, though I’m not sure if they were tourists or actors. Unfortunately, neither actors nor dressed up tourists were on the law when we arrived, no doubt put off by the threat of rain, and so we wandered into the exhibit on quack cures of the 18th century – which included patent medicines. Strange medicines that strongly resemble the supplement and health food industry of today in th

    How she wound up where she is and what she's doing will remain one of the great unresolved mysteries of my life time although she clearly has landed on her feet. The last time I heard she was living on the Upper West Side in New York City somewhere near Columbia University But since she had not posted anything on any venue that I had access to it is hard to fill in the gaps over several years and so she mysteriously pops up in my mind to where she is now. But her video blog is very enlightening for a number of reasons. Unlike her poetry blogs of the past, it is not a great puzzle to be solved and her presence on that side of the camera clearly is impressive. It's doing something I could not do What is really interesting to me is the background of her, the world she lives in and how I recognize a few of the icons that remain left from the world in which I knew her so many years ago. paintings and such filled in with all new things that are unfamiliar and yet se

  Asbury or bust?   Oct. 10, 2023   I finally got to see the whole video about her trip with her parents to Asbury Park and came to realize that it's part of a series of video blogs part travel part food part horse training dog walking and whatever else she deems interesting and hopes other people will find interesting too she is using sophisticated video editing software and recently apparently purchased a new camera as she embarks on what she hopes will be a new career. Video blogs can be very difficult for a number of reasons not the least the fact that the subject matter and the visuals must be attractive not to mention the principal character herself being one her dog and other and for the Asbury trip her parents Asbury does not lack visuals iconic places such as the wonder bar and the stone pony Asbury lanes now partly a diner as well as two main seaside buildings and of course the boardwalk she has always had a good eye for photography so images are pretty

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  Day to Day menu email to Al Sullivan