Outnumbered

   Back in the days when everything was different, our parish had two priests living in the rectory in Schaghticoke. Father Monte was gregarious, friendly, outgoing. What I recall most about him was that he used to stop down and pick my mother up for daily morning Masses when he found the Valley Falls church empty, as priests were not permitted to say Mass in an empty church. 

      Father Bondi appeared younger, was classically handsome,  had a more serious  demeanor and possessed a very pleasant singing voice. At one child's Baptism, I had told Dave to give the priest an envelope containing a check, probably about $25, in appreciation for his time and services. Father B. refused to take any money, said it was part of his job. Kind of astounding, even for a priest, I thought. Priests are traditionally not allowed to stay in one parish for too long. They need to be free of personal attachment, so it was no surprise when he announced he was leaving.  But he stated he was not going to transfer to another parish, but he was going back to the seminary to devote his time to prayer. He had found that the world contained "more of them than there are of us,"  and he felt prayer would be more productive than ministry. He did not disclose what he meant by "them" and "us."  I thought he might have meant  people of faith and heathens. Even lacking that particular distinction, I think he was correct.

The Bet, the Challenge, The Sacrifice, Or Whatever

    Chekhov wrote a story about a lawyer and a banker. To greatly simplify, the lawyer accepted a bet that he could not stay confined to a house for 15 years. He accepted the bet, but on the day before the 15 years were up, he climbed out the window, thus forfeiting the bet. What he had come to realize during his solitary and lengthy confinement extinguished his desire to win the bet.  It's complicated; it's Russian literature.

   This year I have abided by my longstanding observance of giving up candy for Lent. I've done this since I was about 7 years old, when I felt it was something God would have wanted me to do. Later it may have been an attempt at dieting or a test of will power, and then maybe just a tradition.  I have candy in the house, a few pieces of leftover Valentine's Day candy and even a recently opened bag of Reeses's Peanut Butter Cups  readily available in a candy dish in the living room. I haven't eaten candy since  the day before Ash Wednesday, about a week and a half ago. I don't feel any holier, I'm not any thinner, but as far as will power goes, I know I can resist the temptation. Like Chekhov's lawyer, in my solitude and retrospection, I realize there are things far more important than winning a bet, even against myself. So perhaps in early April, a day before the end of Lent, I'll grab some candy and crawl out a window, and disappear.

The other night, as I lay sleeping...

 ...I heard a very loud crash sounding as if from either downstairs or against the side of the house. I thought it might have emanated from the furnace---maybe it's ready to blow up. It turns out it was a very large and thick ice shelf that had formed in the gutter on the back of the house. The warming weather allowed it to separate and it fell to the ground, breaking into large and heavy blocks of ice.

Driven Out...

 Another day, I was trying to get to the family I worked with in Watervliet. As I approached their street, I entered a potential war zone. A helicopter was hovering as it was leaving  the area. The street was blocked with tank and SWAT team. The streets were lined with people watching the action, and among them the woman whose house I was going to called out to me. It was her house that was the center of the investigation, or invasion, if you will. She asked me to drive her to the Police Station where they had taken her boy friend. She said he was innocent. And s it went...

From the Archives---Get out.

    I read the account of a landlord "evicting" his tenants at gunpoint, binding them, and dropping them off miles away in a cemetery. That's harsh.

   There are other ways to do it.  Going back a dozen or more years in my work history, I learned of a less violent way to get rid of unwanted tenants. I regularly visited the children of a family who worked on a farm and so lived in the farmer's tenant house. The children were good students and very well behaved. But for whatever reason, the farmer did not want the services of the father any longer. It was winter; the family, low on resources,  was in no hurry to find another place to live. Legal eviction was not an option for the farm owner, due to their being young children and cold weather.   One day I drove to their house, and as usual walked up the steps of the old house to knock on the door. 

   To my surprise, there was no front door, just an open space into the living room. The mother appeared in the doorway and told me that was the way that the farmers in that county used to "encourage" tenants to leave. And they did leave shortly after. Apparently the local sheriff was good with that method.

Not to Be Snipy,

 ...but M.T.G. looks a lot like Joe Camel.

The Way Things Were

 Now that my mind is in grazing mode, and thus a blank space, bits from the past just sometimes float into the vacuum. I realize there is no one else still alive who would be able to recall the circumstances of  these old times. Such as they were:

      My aunt is talking to her sister, my mother. I am very young, not part of the conversation of course, just a listener.  My aunt's neighbor is a farmer, who for all his life plowed his fields with a team of horses.  Then the farmer, bowing to modern times, bought a tractor. He had no further need for his horses. They require more care and feeding than does the tractor. My aunt, living in a rented house in sight of his, observes him digging a hole in one of his fields. It takes some days of digging. He brings out the horses, leads one of the old animals to the edge of the hole, and shoots it. The horse falls into the hole. The farmer leads the second horse to the edge of the hole, but the placid old animal must know what has happened, and struggles, rearing and neighing. All to no avail though; it eventually suffers the same fate as its partner. 

"In the Bag." What?!

 Ted Cruz, appearing as The Fugitive, is spotted in the airport, and a keen-eyed reporter notices that he is pulling  his wheeled piece of luggage. Aha!  He had said he was only going to stay the weekend, an overnight trip.  But his luggage looks fully packed, for more than a change of underwear and a clean shirt. (Now if I had any interest in defending any part of his behavior, I might say that if he were traveling with his daughters, it is not beyond the realm of reason that they would have jammed some of their stuff in their father's suitcase. I have known that to happen.

One of those moments...

 

But let me make it clear...

 The morning after the last snowfall, when no one else had been around, these footprints looked much like the former tracks, a straight , single series of prints. This time they rounded the side of the house, and trailed into the woods behind the house. The shape looks like  a foot, so I think it must be something that neatly hops or leaps in a straight formation.  I figured I'd go into the back yard to take a better picture but there is a frozen icy crust on top of the snow, and I might not be able to climb back up the hill. That happened to the kids once; I think I went downstairs and brought them in through the basement door.

 (I'm not referring to the time Danny slid on a saucer down the icy hill, his head coming to rest against a tree, actually bashing into it so hard that he got a concussion and his sister later went and retrieved part of his front tooth which had frozen to the saucer. After the crash, Danny came to the front door, and kept asking, "What happened?"  While we were waiting for the Rescue Squad, he sat on Marilyn's lap in the living room and she kept trying to explain what had happened. After each explanation, he would say, "But what happened?"  I was sitting on the kitchen floor saying prayers. The only ray of hope came when responder Scott, or maybe Jan, Frisino asked him a different question; "Did you try to gnaw down a tree?"  We all laughed at that.

Small but Costly

     If the struggle for a Veteran's Claim was time consuming, it paled in comparison 

to  the Odyssey to health coverage. 

The Peripatetic Doctor and the Problematic Cast ...

    ..were idly doing nothing when producers wandered past. They first looked upon their offers with  a loathing undisguised.    Then said, "What the Hell, we'll do it.  Perhaps careers can be revived."

 I practically forced myself to finally watch "The Masked Dancer" last night. Trivial, ridiculous, outlandish, boring and worst of all, phony, is how I would review the show, in the unlikely scenario of my ever being asked. 

   All the overdone costuming, and the complexity of supposedly hidden clues which lead the one-time celebrities to speculate as to who the dancer could possibly be. One of the panelists, the annoying Dr. Ken, maybe, says something like "In the contestant's next to last video, I saw a T written on her costume, so that leads me think she may be a Tik-Tok artist."  We all know who that could be.  A number of their projected guesses are of people I've never heard of, though that would be my shortcoming. And all that talk, talk, talk...Not to mention, the camera-fades to members of the audience whose facial expressions reflect the intensity of their emotions. Could they have been coached?  This show was billed as the Finale. The competing  top 3 were indeed well-known celebrities.  They must feel embarrassed.

Cynic alert

    A man advertises that he found a woman's change purse with what appears to be a diamond ring and $700 inside. He is receiving many comments for his honesty. I rather despise myself for being skeptical, but if you found a sum of money and wanted to return it to its owner, would you specify the amount? 

Brooke Baldwin ---after all that exposure???

In The Freshly Fallen Snow

     I'm done with trackin', just lookin'.   Some of the track seem the same, and this time have rounded the corner of the house and trailed off into the woods. I can't see where they originated as several branches are weighted down and obscure the view. I hope it's something cute.

Chalk Paint Monstrosities Fad

    So you take an old time-worn but sturdy piece of furniture. It is fully able to fulfill its original function as a dresser, hutch, stand, table, but it looks old. You aren't good with its looking old, so you strip the finish, sand it down, and apply several coats of chalk paint in an antique finish. It now looks even older, antique if you will, but you're okay with that because everyone knows the chalky finish is not really old; it's just made to look that way. Of course, it's known that it is a really old piece because no  one would do that to a brand new piece of furniture, would they?

 When you don't want something to look its original age, you remove the signs of aging, and then make it  look even older, signifying you don't like things to look genuinely old, but want it to appear fake-old.  And as if you worked to get it that way...

Purge #4 or maybe 5

  Every once in a while, I realize that the vast  downloads and accumulations of what consumed my time over a 3-year period will never be seen by any eyes but mine. I have already disposed of about 75% of the paperwork, but there are 2 remaining bags of communications and information related  to the Claim. I decided to clear out the remainder today, but didn't quite succeed. They tell you to always retain anything from the government, but logically it can't all stay in my house forever. I took the largest remaining bagful and emptied it out on the floor. I should probably just have dumped the contents in the trash, but find that impossible to do. So I read every page, and that is slow going. Maybe someday...

The Analysis of Teeth

 Dave had perfect teeth for most of his life. He grew up in Wappinger's Falls and Kingston and the city had fluoride added to the drinking water. His mother was a registered nurse and an avid proponent of all aspects of health care.  ( I knew a man who had 5 children and he said they all needed orthodonture. He was of Irish heritage and his wife was German, and his dentist had told him his kids had the large German teeth in the small Irish jaw.) This probably was a factor in Dave's dentition. He wore the braces for years, and soon after they were removed, he got tackled  while playing football which damaged the nerve to his front top tooth. His mother was furious, after all that money for braces and now he had ruined a tooth.

     When I met Dave, his front tooth was slightly discolored, but it didn't bother him, and truthfully I thought it was rather distinctive looking, just slightly different. In his later years, the tooth did start to bother him. I guess it must have weakened over the years. First he had it crowned, but that became problematic and he needed a root canal and some other procedures. After some years, the tooth again failed, and he decided to follow a procedure well-advertised on tv and other sites. That also failed and he was referred to another  endodontist or such. The end result was that his front tooth was extracted and because the other procedure had failed, he had to wait a period of time before the new implant could be installed. 

   During that waiting period, I had some transactions which necessitated employing the services of a lawyer in Albany. That attorney had handled other issues for us and we had paid the costs. He had told me that this latest service would be $175. That was fine with me. Dave drove the paperwork to the law firm and delivered it to the lawyer. His front tooth was missing at the time but  Dave was never one to be intimidated by its lack. He would not have tried to cover up his tooth loss,  would not have hesitated to be his usual outgoing and talkative self. 

 When I  received the bill from the attorney a week or so later, the charge was $100, not the $175 previously agreed on. I paid it without question, figuring the attorney had thought we could use it to pay dental bills. (Actually he was not far wrong because, while  most of Dave's dentist's bills had previously  been for cleanings only, that tooth had cost over $7,000. 

   

Those Horribly Inappropriate Giggling Spells

    You know the type: you're in church or some formal type situation, something strikes you funny, you almost burst with pent-up laughter which you can't control. Afterwards, you realize what triggered your mirth wasn't even funny after all.

    The first  time I remember its happening to me was at my grandmother's wake when  I was 12 years old. In those times the deceased was often waked in their home and so it was with my grandmother. The funeral director would set up chairs in the room where the coffin was and where the service was to be held. Back then the priest would come to the house and would lead the assembled in reciting the Rosary. Also true in those times that meant the entire Rosary, not just one decade as happened later before they pretty much abolished the whole ritual. The point is that the recitation was serious business and took about 15 or 20 minutes. At my grandmother's wake, I was sitting next to my cousin Shirley in the wooden chairs that the  funeral director provided. The chairs were brown with the name of the funeral home faintly stenciled in yellow on the back. At some time part way through the Rosary, sitting and staring at the backs of the chairs in front of us, we made out the lettering to decipher the name---Sandvich. To at least Shirley and me, that read Sandwich, which struck us as extremely hilarious. The word sandwich printed on a chair during the recitation of the Holy Rosary at a wake, our grandmother's no less. I don't think anybody else ever detected our situation but I can still recall the distress we were under, stifling the giggling fit was actually painful.

   A similar stifling occurred much later. I was on Grand Jury Duty in Troy. Mostly the accused did not appear, but the assistant D.A. would present the case against them. The majority of the cases during the month-long period consisted of drug selling and child abuse allegations, usually of the funny-uncle genre. But one memorable case was an arrest for breaking and entering. The person whose home was broken into appeared in person to relate what happened. I forget the details but the intruder was apparently a man wearing a woman's wig. (No mention of trans or such back then.) The home owner discovered someone pushing into his home from an attached garage and he pushed back. He stated to us the jury panel that he had never before encountered such a strong "woman." That was enough for me to get started thinking in the humor mode. The accused was named Ronald La Mountain, as I recall. When the D.A. was describing, in all seriousness, what had happened, he inadvertently referred to the accused as Ronald McDonald and in the constraints of the County Court House, I had that feeling of starting to laugh, restraining it, and then getting the urge again. I know I held myself together, but at what cost is painful to remember.

   Even worse, it must be every broadcaster's worst nightmare to lose control on the air. Crying would be bad; giggling is worse. I recall in detail one day when I was driving my Chevy Convertible from Clifton Park into Mechanicville and Chris Kopostasy as she was known then was reading a news story when she was completely overcome by a fit of the giggles; she just could not control herself, had to cut away several times. To make matters worse, the story she was reading was about someone's death. I remember thinking her career was over before it started but she survived. Maybe no manager types were listening that afternoon, and in those times, few listeners would have reported it.

   About a year ago, a young weather reporter, new to whatever channel he worked for, fell victim to a serious giggling fit while he was standing at the map reporting the weather. He stopped, composed himself, but then broke down again. It was so embarrassing I couldn't watch. A year or so later, he's still reporting the weather as well as anyone else could, but every time I see him, I just think he looks silly.

   Judge not lest you be judged.  (Or something like that.

Track Attack

 There are new tracks. I posted them on Sch. Community Page for any Identification, and some helpful souls suggested they look human. HaHa. Where's that Trail

Cam when I need it need it? I put my glove near one for size. 

Maybe on Retreat

 

Refresh my mind...

 Mitch McC acknowledged that Trump was guilty of  "provoking" the insurrection, and is morally responsible, and subject to private lawsuits. He claims it his belief that it is impossible to impeach a former president. OK, that may be his personal belief, not held by  Constitutional scholars, but shows his dilemma. He actually sounded a lot like the Impeachment Managers, but for his final vote. But on the eve of the Jan. 6 insurrection, did Mitch vote to accept the electoral votes? Gee, I can't recall.  

Aha!

 So Snidely Whiplash is a Philadelphia lawyer.

And he can dance...

False Symmetry

 Ah, those Greeks and Romans...

And if I were to advise the speakers, I would suggest they follow Gov. Cuomo's lead, and, when their throats get dry, drink water from a glass, not a water bottle. 

(I was drawn to Attorney Schoen's speech after I saw him put one hand behind his head while he raised the bottle to his lips.     Oops Update. It's a Jewish tradition, I read.

Tracks Closing In

 

Special Delivery

 On Friday I ordered Breeze refills from Amazon. They arrived today, Monday, via U-Haul Truck. 

Eons Ago College Student Communication

 Parent, absent the presence of their dear child, is happy to learn that there is now a means to communicate through technology, no need to do the letter-writing thing. So parent sends chatty  little messages about life in the old homestead, community doings, updates on family members, and maybe even a few thoughts about life in general.   College student replies, if at all, in the fewest words possible, signifying that they have moved on. And so it goes.

That guy!

 

Tracks

 

Vaccine Mecca

 

Name THAT Tune

 When Dorothy and I were in 5th grade we took violin lessons with music teacher Mr. Edwards. We used this book: