men plus king power tea

photo: Mark Devlin

Rarely am I invited for a holiday celebration these days. Yesterday was the exception, where my friend Mark asked me to drink to the new season. We sat in his garden and enjoyed the end of a wonderful sunny day. His dog Oz is wonderful. His bark is more a howl and he's showing his age, and what a lovely being!

Kent Falls

Late spring is my favorite time here. When I lived in California, on those rare moments I nostalgically thought of Connecticut, it would be of this time of year and Litchfield County in particular. Not that Connecticut really has counties anymore. They are only considered for judicial or more popularly for real estate purposes. One of the riches that Connecticut possesses is water. It runs everywhere and sprouts forth from rock, earth, and sky. Kent Falls is one of the places that epitomizes this sense. I went there yesterday and I am still wrapped in its sounds and smells.

Friday, May 28

A beautiful warm day with puffy clouds and lots of sun. A hike up Kent Falls, Campbell Falls and a drive through Norfolk and all its Victorian splendour, where Yale has its summer art school and chamber music festival, Haystack Mountain Music festival and Infinity Hall. The hand painted road sign is back from its winter retreat.

May 27, 2110

Childe Hassam painted this church. He was an American Impressionist. And across the road, on the Green are anti war protestors every Sunday. Across from them is Ziggy, the crazy Albanian man dressed in US of A flags and waving the biggest one he can. He's an illegal alien I'm told. He likes to wave flags

This is also the town that has a jail attached to a bank.

The grass is always greener...

The weather in New England right now is crazy, like I am in grief: one week freezing, the next a heat wave; one minute insane, the next lucid. White Memorial Conservatory in Litchfield. When I lived in the Bay Area I dreamt of viewing such an expanse. Now one has to be careful of ticks and Lyme Disease, rabid raccoons, coyote and bear.

You can click on the photo twice to enlarge.

how to tell a trout from a salmon

the many faces of monkey

As obnoxious as he is, he can be very cute too. He's puffy in these photos because he doesn't like my iPhone now and wants to attack it, but then he liked where he was placed so the conflict of what to do overwhelmed him and he had to remain where his comfort level is highest. Sami doesn't care. She's happy wherever she can preen a human.

Hier/yesterday

another day flies by without an entry. I guess I was busy preparing to go into my kitchen for the first time. Everything is organized, a few questions need to be answered and I'm ready for a baking.

Beware of the Asian longhorned beetle

I missed another day. Be careful what you miss

a day at the dentist

They fill your mouth with peppermint flavored plastic plaster and make you bite down on the plastic container. Then you wait for a few minutes looking horrifically stupid. Then they pry the whole thing out of your mouth, scraping your gums with their plastic gloved fingers. Then you pay an enormous amount of money. And you get a bite guard so you don't have to pay a thousand dollars for two more root canals where they drill down your teeth to posts while you gag on the bone powder and drool.

pimple solution tea

at a crossroad

Cowboy Bob

a piece of commercial art I saw in a window on Charles Street in Boston

a view of Collinsville

Monkeyshirt

Monkey and Sami were happy to see me upon my return from Providence. I brought them out of their room and changed into my Monkey shirt. Monkey crawls through the collar and hangs inside, on to the shirt and chews holes. Poor neurotic beast. But his feathers are soft and he is warm, unlike the hair shirts the pope has against his skin. This is a part of my collection of Monkeywear, which I wear exclusively for them.

Towards Providence

Another lost day on the blog, but not really. Yesterday I drove to Providence, Rhode Island, that is. Providence is the birthplace of the Baptist Church. I went to visit my friend Helena. She wanted to see a film up in Cambridge, Mass. and asked me if I would be interested. I said "yes." We drove an hour and caught the film just in time. It was titled "Fish out of Water," about how the Protestant clergy viewed the bible's verses that are used against homosexuality and an understanding of those verses. Very informative. We then walked around Cambridge and Boston. I took this self portrait in a bank. It was wonderful to be in a city again and see non-angry people on the streets. We then drove back to Providence. We may not have been saved, but we slept well and I had a grand time.

Talking Trash

Yesterday my friend Scott and I parked the car on the side of the highway and walked along the Farmington River. He had not been there before. We walked about a mile and a half, over an old railway bridge into the village of Collinsville. Actually, the legal identification would be "town," not "village," since Connecticut is divided into 169 towns or cities and the separate entities in the towns are also called towns. Like the town of Winsted is in the Town of Winchester, and the city of Willimantic is in the Town of Windham, but the city of Waterbury is the City of Waterbury, and Waterville is in Waterbury, and Oakville is in Watertown, but the Borough of Naugatuck is a borough. Confused? Welcome to Connecticut.

To continue the story, we were in Collinsville. Unlike other municipalities in the state, Collinsville has not only kept its industrial past, its mid 19th century factories, but has renovated them into antique stores, workshops, galleries, studios, stores, restaurants and housing. This is not a large scale endeavor, in fact some buildings are still unoccupied, but enough has been created to enrich the "village" and create enough tourism to ensure its livelihood without it losing its integrity as a place to live. How different than the other 168 towns in the state. People here jog. There are yoga classes and funky cafes. The architecture is Victorian and it looks like Pollyanna lives here, after a hiatus in Berkeley. People smile. That may not seem much to you but for residents here in this state it is the antithesis of our upbringing. When my guests visit Collinsville, they all enjoy it and feel better than the rest of their time in Connecticut, in any other town.

Under the lilacs

My mother loved lilacs and if I could pick a single representation of her in the universe it would be that flower and its heady fragrance. In her garden she had many, however the deep color and smell of this particular variety was her favorite. She owned two, on either side of the walk framing our neighbor’s house across the road. It was in that house that Louisa May Alcott’s father was born. Alcott wrote a book titled Under the Lilacs, and I think of the flower as old fashioned, perhaps because of this connection. Both trees produced an abundance of flowers and one year each grew an offshoot. One I transported to Caryl for her property in Maryland and the other to my neighbor who transplanted it where I view it from my front porch. This is a photograph of it.

I moved back to Connecticut to care for my mom in her final decade. This move had and has been challenging for many reasons. My mother was not nice and in fact she was often mean and hurtful. The saving grace to her attitude, watching her health fail and all that transpired was meeting and marrying Steve. His support, love and humor kept me sane and happy. We moved to our present house to extricate ourselves from the continual harassment we experienced in our old neighborhood. We were happy here and worked diligently to restore the house in order to sell it, after my mom would be gone and Steve would retire. My mom did pass on, but so did Steve. And after settling both estates, I am ready to leave. The house is on the market however there has been no interest. In the last eighteen months it has devalued 60 percent, 25 in the last two months. Yesterday my next-door-neighbor informed me she plans to abandon her house by the end of the month. I am reeling from this information. After Steve passed away I felt anytime I left my house I was walking over a precipice, into a void. But that was a personal perception. I now look at my neighborhood deep in chaos, swirling before me into an economic vortex, while I remain here, in stasis. But the perfume of lilac hits me as I look over my porch railing and see the flower from my mother's garden.

refreshment in CT

May 11, 2010

I went shopping at Stop and Shop

and found this

Pollywoggle doodle all the day

Once again the day escaped me. My friend Scott and I went hiking in Litchfield at the White Memorial Reserve, a sprawling park across many roads, streams, bogs and forests. Sunny, with a perfect breeze to keep the mosquitoes at bay. We saw two young women take their dog on a kayak. His life preserver has a handle on top, like a suitcase, to grab him in the water. We viewed rare Jack-in-the-pulpits, heard bull frogs and saw iridescent green frogs and pollywogs swimming in vernal pools. Flowers were abundant and pines as high as 60 feet. A perfect day in a perfect (wealthy) town.

The Nauga, its hyde and the river

In the city's museum there is a writing desk made of vulcanized rubber that was displayed at the Crystal Palace in London. As well, and above the desk is a portrait of Charles Goodyear, painted on vulcanized rubber. One of his companies was situated directly south of Waterbury, in Naugatuck, home to Peter Paul (Mounds and Almond Joy), and Uniroyal headquarters. During my childhood we would drive down the highway along the river past the rubber company and marvel over what color the river would be, the dye from manufacturing Keds sneakers, dumped directly into the Naugatuck River and coloring it. At the same location Uniroyal also manufactured its brand of pleather, Naugahyde, in honor of its locale. A substitute for leather, the polyvinyl chloride product is still made but now elsewhere. Polyvinyl chloride has been linked to cancer, partially due to its unstable consistency, continually emitting toxic gasses. Most houses here are covered with polyvinyl siding. My doctor recently told me "the (Naugatuck) Valley" has the highest incident of testicular cancer in the world. Above is their cute branding idea of what a Nauga looks like before its "hyde" is taken. You can still purchase a Nauga for 40 dollars plus shipping.

she's a hunka hunka burning call me madam

This evening I went out to have dinner with my friend Mark. He lives in Bethlehem and is an avid gardener, beekeeper, diver and architect. We try to visit each other every few weeks and catch up on our lives. Sometimes we go on hikes with his hound, Oz. Once we walked around the block of his house. He lives in the country. The block is four miles up and down hillsides. It was strenuous and fun. Tonight we drove to Bantam and ate at a Connecticut version of Mexican food. It’s also a rib joint, Connecticut style. The food is clean. There is not much spice and flavor, but it’s what we have and it’s Cinco de Mayo and we celebrate the defeat of French imperialism in Mexico. Besides, it’s Mark’s company that makes the evening, not the food.

We had margaritas in stemmed glassware with a cactus motif, corny and disingenuous in its cultural intent. The flavor was fine and the alcohol sufficient. Mark told me it was his third anniversary in moving to Bethlehem. I told him yesterday was my twelfth year anniversary in moving to Connecticut. (8:30 AM). We toasted. There was a moment of silence. We were eating. I looked up and saw standing right behind Mark someone or thing I did not expect to ever experience again. It was Sally. Of course that’s not her real name. Hers is even more old-fashioned, but we’ll go with Sally. Sally is a mythomaniac. I never knew what was true and what wasn't.

I do know Sally was an interim director for a Puerto Rican organization in Hartford. She is white. Not that this would matter. She was just that, white. She was not Puerto Rican yet represented the Puerto Rican enclave in the city. I don’t think Sally spoke Spanish either. For Carnival she was invited to come with a group of Connecticut representatives from various governmental and non-governmental organizations to Trinidad to learn “how to celebrate,” as the executive director of my center phrased it. He wanted us to bring back the Trinidadian groove to Hartford, something I felt was most likely off-putting to the Puerto Rican, Jamaican and African American representatives on the trip. But then again Sally was the Puerto Rican rep and she grew up in Bristol, a white enclave until ESPN headquarters moved there. She claimed a city councilman on the trip while drunk accosted her by telling her to sit on his lap "and let's discuss the first thing that pops up." Sally claimed she was Eva Braun’s great niece and a former member of UP WITH PEOPLE. She also told me she witnessed the Mianus Bridge collapse of the Connecticut Turnpike. (Her car conveniently stopped right before they were to ascend it). She also wore cut off dungaree hot pants and sang as Ethel Merman imitating Elvis Presley. She would cry with glee and state aloud how funny she considered herself as she delicately wiped the tears from her eyes and the snot from her nose with her Michelin-like fingers. I can still hear her loud guffaws echoing off the walls of the office and building. It reverberates in my head, like tinnitus.

In Trinidad Sally and I were at the beach when she told me she had met her “soul mate,” one of many men she encountered on the island. She also claimed she was a lesbian. While in the water she informed me she was hired by my boss to be my assistant. Coincidentally a wave hit me in the face at the same moment, perhaps to awaken me to my beginning plight. Because Sally never did what she was told or what her position required yet she claimed all kudos for those projects that were of my doing. I'd tell her to write and send press releases for a particular show. When the audience would consist of three people she'd confess of having been too busy to have done it. She undermined me at every opportunity while acting as my support. I was a slow learner at such office politics and too exhausted by my boss’ narcolepsy and control demands. By the time I realized her motivation she had seized my position with the blessings of the director. By the end of the year he who never completed anything ran out of funding money. It was not the first time this occurred. But it didn’t matter to my boss because he would fund the center from one of his own family trusts. The new board of directors disagreed with his tactics and forced him to drastically reduce the suspected budget for the center. Budget, Hah! in the18 months I was in the organization's employ he couldn't make one. In fact he and his assistant spent months trying to figure out how but still could not accomplish even a projection. Reduction included staff which included me, since Sally’s machinations had made her the most important. Thus she was the only person allowed to stay and it gave me great pleasure as I told her how lovely she had played this out, because now she would be the only one to deal with his whims. I smiled, her face froze and I walked away.

It was twelve years ago this had occurred and the porcine face of Sally comes into my sight again however brief a moment, to recall another dark time. Tonight she does not sing. she does not talk. She is still visually and historically unsettling. Time is going backwards for me. Does it mean I’ll be out of this cyclone soon?

Allah nagila

Gate post of the Albanian Islam Center in the heart of a new Orthodox Jewish neighborhood.

Saturn

Saturn has been in whatever house in my astrological chart for 12 years. Today at 8:30 this morning was the twelfth anniversary of my moving to Connecticut. I had just separated from my 25-year relationship with Caryl and had left California with my two cats, Fred and Eek! I moved into my mother's house to help care for her. Soon after Fred escaped from the house and was killed by a rabid raccoon at night. My life drastically fell since then. However I did meet Steve and married him. Unfortunately it was for only a brief time. Saturn, I've been told is karma and a planet that rules patience, commitment and discernment. I've had much to learn. I still do. Supposedly I'll be done with this Saturn return in a few months. I cannot wait. It's been very challenging.

Where I wanted to be yesterday

Missed a day. Don't know where I or it went, but my mind was here

What you see depends on your direction

May Day

My parents told me when they were young and working in Paris that on the first of May people would go out of the city on their bicycles and gather bachelor's buttons, daisies and poppies for bouquets at home. None of them grow wild in our continually diminishing fields, so here's my version. Happy Worker's Day.