Rolling On One

Surprisingly enough, I’ve carved several eraser stamps recently.

First, I did a maple leaf, strictly for a practical reason. We’ve been looking around our woodlot to see if we have any maple trees we might want to tap next spring. There are a few scattered along the trails. How can we recognize them next March, when there are no leaves in sight? I thought I might make some little signs to hang on them. What better way than to stamp a scrap of wood with the image of a maple leaf, in permanent oil-based stamp mount indexing ink? So by now there are six trees so marked. Will we really tap them? If we do, will we get any syrup? Stay tuned.

Secondly, it was the world series. I’ve always liked the way carving stamps lets me be timely. If I want to send out a bunch of postcards commenting on current events, I can carve a stamp illustrating my ideas, print up an edition of cards, and get them in the mail before everyone has forgotten what had happened. So during the fourth game of the series I carved a baseball with a Red Sox “B” on it and another stamp of a little sock (it may not be obvious to non-stampers, and knitters may be so used to the idea that you do socks in pairs that they don’t think about this, but to stamp “sox”, plural, all you need is a stamp of one sock. It’s just the stamping that has to be plural).

Thinking ahead, I had saved cardboard from two six-packs of beer to use as card stock. This has several benefits: it saves the expense of buying card stock, recycles paper, and adds some meaning to the card — it’s not just watching baseball, it’s drinking beer and watching baseball. The downside is that my edition is even more limited than usual. In fact, because they were six-packs of two different kinds of beer, it’s two editions of two postcards each.

I did scan one of the stampings before putting the cards in the mail. Since it’s generally considered polite not to post images of mail art on the web before the recipients get the goods, I’ll refrain from including a picture for a few more days. Any readers in Houston, New Hartford NY, Moore OK, or Milford OH (probably a disappointed Cleveland Indians fan, but I owe her lots of mail art), please comment here if you get a card.

For conceptual art reasons, though it doesn’t show on the card, I wanted to make those cards while the world series was going on. But of course I was hoping for a sweep. Now that it happened, I carved a broom. I expect to make a larger edition of cards, not on beer carton cardboard, with all three of the ball, sock, and broom stamps. Anyone who wants one (up to the first dozen or so, but that’s more than I have regular readers, I think) please email deanlie at yahoo dot com with a snailmail address.

I took a day off on Monday Oct 8 (my company doesn’t have Columbus Day off) so that we wouldn’t have to leave the wedding early to come home. We’ve left weddings in New Jersey on Sunday before, but this one was farther from home and there were more people Arlene wanted to have plenty of time to visit with than other occasions; and I had vacation time to use up anyway.

We figured that there was enough time to spare that we could go up to Stokes State Forest for a couple of hours before we got on the road. Millie and Joel took their car, and we took ours since that was more or less on our way home — at least, going back to their house would have been much farther than going home directly from the excursion.

Stokes is up in the northwestern corner of New Jersey, near the Delaware Water Gap. Arlene grew up in New Jersey and doesn’t like to hear people knock the state, which many people who know New Jersey only from the New Jersey Turnpike do. The turnpike passes through lots of depressed urban areas, polluted industrial areas, littered marshlands, and other modern ugliness. When people drive from New York to Philadelphia or points south and only see that part of the state, they’re not going to love the scenery. Northwestern New Jersey is a different story, as beautiful as much of New England, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York. It was a pleasure to drive through there on the way to Stokes and on the way from Stokes to the highway.

Arlene and Millie wanted to see if cabin nine, where they had spent summer vacations in the ’50s, was still there. It was. It, along with the other cabins, had been modernized, with electricity and running water. The door and latch looked familiar. There were concrete steps up to the door, rather than wooden steps that Arlene thought it used to have. Lake Ocquittunk was of course smaller than it looked to Arlene as a child, and the swimming area didn’t seem to be there any more. The water was low with the drought we had had all September.

We drove up to the parking area near the top of Sunrise Mountain. A large bird, we thought a grouse, flew across the road just in front of Millie and Joel’s car.

It’s only a few hundred yards up the trail (the Appalachian trail!) from the parking area to the top of Sunrise Mountain. When we had been there once a few years ago in the spring we looked off the steep side and saw vultures soaring below us in the valley. There were vultures soaring like that this time, too. More exciting, there were two knowledgeable hawk watchers. They pointed out sharp-shinned hawks which were coming by frequently enough that there was almost one or more in sight. They spotted a peregrine falcon also, which is a very good bird in anyone’s book. Besides the hawks, there was almost always a monarch butterfly in view. I saw many of them migrating from my window at work last year, but hadn’t seen so many this year.

The fall foliage was beautiful, as good as we had seen it in New England up to that point (though we later had a gorgeous weekend in Maine the 20th and 21st of the month).

On the road again, we found a great public radio station, WPKN from Bridgeport CT, at 89.5. They seem to have mostly music, and are very proud of having no format and no underwriting. It’s like a college station, but not run by college students. I’ve been wondering for years what the difference is between underwriting statements on NPR stations and messages from sponsors. Of course, there are lots fewer underwriting statements than messages from sponsors on commercial stations, and they’re each shorter and less annoying, but still, it’s hard for me to accept NPR as noncommercial. This one is. The thing that struck me the most about it, though, was hearing the DJ say, “this recording has a special meaning for me, because we were listening to it the first time I smoked pot.” I mean! Right there over the radio.

On Sunday we rode with Joel and Millie to Forsgate Farms Country Club in Monroe, NJ, for the wedding. It was an unusually hot day for October. It would have been a hot day for September, and a warm day the last week of August. We had expected the ceremony would have been planned for indoors, but it was set up outdoors. Lee had woven the chuppah, her second effort at a chuppah. The first was for Gena’s wedding.

The ceremony was unusually short, and a good thing, because the rabbi was close to illiterate. Have you ever run into the word “betrothed”? As in “engaged”, basically? This rabbi kept pronouncing it “be-throat-ed”. And he seemed to be rather lacking in Hebrew grammar as well as English vocabulary. When the bride says to the groom, in a double-ring deal, “With this ring I thee wed,” wouldn’t you expect that since “thee” is different for masculine and feminine in Hebrew, the phrase would be different from what the groom says? This rabbi didn’t think so.

The reception was pretty lavish but nowhere near over the top. There were around 200 guests and a nine piece band. I thought the trumpet player was very good, and particularly enjoyed some of the extra ornaments he played in some old swing numbers.

Diane, the mother of the bride, has been in a wheelchair since her aneurysm in 2001. She seemed much better than she was the last time we saw her, almost three years ago, but she still can’t talk except for three or four responses. We do get the impression she understands what you say, but there’s no way for us to be sure.

After the reception we went to the home of one of Lee’s old friends from college. Arlene has known this woman at least since she was seven years old. Arlene’s family and Judy and Ralph’s family had spent their vacations camping in cabins at Stokes State Park in the summers after Arlene’s father died, that would be mid 1950s. Ralph was a musician and record producer and self-taught sculptor. Judy is an artist who with Lee was one of Arlene’s biggest early influences. We had one of her watercolors on the wall in our first apartment.

I’m not much of a baseball fan. When I was a kid living in Flushing, NY, three of the sixteen major league teams were in New York — the Yankees, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the New York Giants. We were Giants fans. My dad took me to see games at all three of Yankee Stadium, Ebbets field, and the Polo Grounds.

I never saw Babe Ruth. I did see Willie Mays and Yogi Berra play. I probably saw Jackie Robinson also, but I was pretty young, his historical significance was lost on me at that age, and the Dodger players didn’t make as much impression on me as the Giants we rooted for or the Yankees that most of my friends were fans of. When my family moved to Lexington MA my dad and I went to Fenway once just so he could say he had seen Ted Williams play.

But I do feel that when the Red Sox are in the playoffs I need to at least turn on the games. We listened to the first game against Cleveland on the radio on our way to Maine. The only station we could find that had the game was from Cleveland. We watched most of the last few innings of the last playoff game, up to Pedroia’s big hit in the 8th. At that point I said, “If they blow a lead this big, they deserve to lose,” and turned the TV off.

So with that background, here’s the pennant fallout:

First, on Monday at work, two Japanese women were sitting in the kitchenette/lunch/break area having an animated conversation in Japanese with a man wearing a Red Sox cap. I thought, those must all be big Daisuke fans, and it’s a great day for Boston’s Japanese community.
Second, on Tuesday at klezmer band rehearsal, at the very end, when I had packed my baritone horn away and was stowing my mute and valve oil in the trumpet case, Barry started playing one more piece on the piano — Take Me Out to the Ball Game. I picked the trumpet back up, asked what key he was in, and found half the notes by ear.

When we were walking around the block yesterday, we notices some witch hazel growing along the other association’s road.

I learned about witch hazel from Lois & Sandy Brown probably thirty years ago. It blooms very late in the year, even after frost, and keeps its flowers through a lot of the winter. Insects have no alternative flowers to pollinate if they come out on a warm day in winter. The flowers are relatively small, not more than an inch across, with spidery yellow petals.

After we saw it yesterday we looked it up on the web and found that it’s very unusual in that it can have flowers, seeds from last year’s flowers, and buds for next year’s flowers on the plant at the same time. We went out again today to look more carefully at it and take pictures, and we were able to find some seed pods:

Here’s another look at the flowers:

Later in the fall I expect to see branches that are bare except for clusters of flowers.

We hadn’t seen any on our property, but when we looked carefully along our driveway, we found several bushes. So I don’t have to find out how to grow the seeds.

There were eight wild turkeys in our side yard today, chowing down on crabapples and whatever else was around. I hope they found a few japanese beetle grubs. Anne and Matt had seen turkeys on our property last year the day before Thanksgiving, but this was the first Arlene and I have seen any here.

It’s been a good weekend for wildlife, with two deer bounding across the road on Friday evening, both between the Heath Marina and here, warblers and sparrows on our walk yesterday, and a red-breasted nuthatch and a kinglet in the heritage apple tree this morning, and hermit thrushes in some burning bush bushes.

The backyard in Casco was covered in white-throated sparrows and juncos today. That’s a pretty good sign that winter is really on the way. We saw a couple of (undoubtedly southbound) palm warblers, some yellow-rumped warblers, and some other sparrows, probably chippies and a field sparrow though we were hoping for a white-crowned, on a walk around the block. Also lots of witch hazel in bloom on the other association’s road.

There were no apples at all on the red delicious tree when we got here. I’m disappointed not to have tasted any at all from that tree this year. There are still a lot on the heritage tree. After we came back from walking and warmed up with some hot chocolate I went out and picked enough for a pie.

It seems a little like cheating, when the point is to use up some of the apples from our own trees, to add the juice and grated rind of a lime to the apple pie, but it sure makes a good pie.

We were in New Jersey last weekend for Heidi’s wedding.

Heidi is the youngest child of Arlene’s first cousin Diane. She’s the only person of that generation (other than my own kids) whose date of birth I know. We were staying at Diane’s sister’s house in Albuquerque when the phone call came to say she had been born, and it happened to be Arlene’s and my tenth anniversary.

This was a wedding we had been looking forward to for a long time. Maybe we knew about it long in advance, maybe it was because a lot of people Arlene doesn’t get to see often were going to be there. At any rate, it finally arrived.

Arlene had made a print as part of the wedding present, working from a photo of a wedding two generations back, when Heidi’s grandmother Lee was just the age Heidi is now; it includes pictures of Lee at that age, Diane and her sister Mira as small children, and Heidi’s late grandfather. The print wasn’t completely dry as of Friday, so Arlene didn’t want to shrink-wrap it until the last moment. It took longer than we anticipated to do that, so we didn’t leave until close to noon on Saturday. There was lots of traffic at the Sturbridge exit from the Mass Pike, lots of traffic just before the Tappan Zee, and a fair bit of traffic just before the exit to the Garden State Parkway. Arlene was on the cell phone with Millie several times with progress reports and a request for us to stop and buy corn for supper at a farm stand between I-80 and their house. The farm stand also had lots of pumpkins and apples. We didn’t get any apples. We already had a basket of ones I had picked last week in the trunk for Millie.

Gena’s youngest kid, Baylor, was at Millie & Joel’s house when we got there. Just about as soon as we had our bags out of the car, Gena pulled into the driveway with her two other kids.

After supper, and after the Gena and all the grandkids had left, the four of us in the elder generation played dominoes. I kept drawing the double blank, something uncannily improbable like five or six times in a row, and got several non-starter hands. I hadn’t been fond of playing dominoes to start with.

Last night (Weds 10 Oct) we went to shul so Arlene could say kaddish for her father. We reached for the prayerbooks and, what’s this?! Unfamiliar new-looking prayerbooks. We had been there just under two weeks ago for the anniversary of Arlene’s grandmother’s death, and these were new since then. We found out as soon as the service started. The guy who lead it, the synagogue’s ritual director, said, “You’ve probably noticed that there’s a change. Tonight is the first time we’re using these new prayerbooks. So here’s what we’ll do: we’ll recite ashrei (psalm 145, which we say as a token afternoon service. It has a whole domain named after it!), then say kaddish, then, since we’ll have used the prayerbooks as a congregation, we’ll all stand and say a shehecheyanu.”

OK, everyone there knew what he meant, but maybe not all my readers do. That’s a little two-line prayer that I learned when I was a kid. It’s one of three blessings you say (or more likely sing) before lighting candles on the first night of chanukah.* You also say it on other holidays, and at special times like weddings and bar mitzvahs. It’s basically, “Thank you, G-d, for letting us live to see this event.” So it was kind of neat not only to have been there the first time those books were used, but also to have been part of marking the occasion.

* On subsequent nights of chanukah, you’ve already made it to chanukah this year, so you only say the other two blessings.

Last night Barry called in sick to klez (his back is bothering him — he can’t stand and hold an accordion) and Dimitri took over as director.

I’ve felt for a long time that Dimitri is a better musician than any of the rest of us. He told us last night about some of his background that I didn’t know. He started on the violin about sixty years ago and played upright string bass professionally at some point, probably back when he lived in Ukraine.

One time when he was playing bass for an opera the bridge of his instrument fell down with a noise that made people think a pistol had been fired. He knew how many measures of rest he had until his next entrance, counted them while he put the bridge back up, and came back in on time.

We only played four different songs, but went over them in such detail that they sounded lots better than they ever have before. First, “On the first part, the first four measures mezzo forte, then when you get to the di-di-dah, di-di-dah on the next measure, fortissimo, then back to mezzo forte. Second time through that section, piano the whole way.” Dynamics! what a concept! Then, “On the second part, first time through, just clarinet, violins, piano, and bass. Second time through, trumpet and flute also.” Orchestration! Then, “better, but you [flute] are playing everything staccatto. You [clarinet] are playing everything legato. You all have to play the same way. On the groups of four eighth notes, the first two should be slurred and the next two separate.” Articulation! So by the time we finished, it was sounding like music rather than like a lot of people playing a lot of notes.