Category Archives: General

It was my first day of preschool and something wasn’t quite right. After we walked into the classroom, they had the mothers sit in the front of the class while the kids were sent into the rest of the room to play. I didn’t know what was about to happen, but I could only half-heartedly play with the toys and other kids. Most of the time my eyes were watching my Mom, making sure she was still there, too scared to face the unfathomable idea that she was going to leave me there. When it came time for the parents to go, I was inconsolable.

For two days I hid under a table with another child named Jeff, who would become a friend and eventually kill himself when we in high school. On those first days, separated from our mothers for the first time, he shared a tissue with me because we were both crying under that table. We were lucky though. Our Moms were right there, waiting for us at the end of the half-day.

In our country right now, there are kids who no longer have that. Kids who have been ripped from their parents, sometimes literally, in Donald Trump’s horrid zero-tolerance border policy that separates parents from their children even in legitimate cases of seeking asylum. I never thought this country would sink so low, and while I rarely delve into politics on this blog (I usually save such ire for Twitter) this time is too much.

Last night, news broke that it wasn’t just kids – the government had opened three ‘tender age’ shelters for babies and toddlers who had been separated from their parents. In these cages, border guards are reportedly instructed not to touch or hold these children, and if there’s one thing I know from studying and reading and simply existing as a child once myself, that is horrific. It goes against the very essence of humanity. It is cruel, malicious, evil, destructive, and will cause irreparable damage to those children.

On my first day of kindergarten, I felt the same fear as I felt in preschool. When it was time for the parents to leave, I climbed into the teacher’s lap, just to be held. I still remember the tiny bit of comfort it afforded me. I remember her green dress, silky and soft, and how my quiet tears stained it in spots.

Four decades later I still remember those first days of school, how traumatic and upsetting they were, and I cry at the idea of what might be happening to those children whose mother or father won’t be waiting for them a few hours later.

I think of those children in cages now, and how they aren’t allowed to be touched or held. What is happening to them? What terrors have been unleashed upon their childhoods? What immeasurable damage is being wrought? No one is there to hold or comfort them. They are alone in a foreign country. Innocent and unable sometimes to even communicate. And now we are being told that thanks to this policy and the unpreparedness of our government to deal with so many, there’s a good chance some won’t ever be reunited with their parents. What does that do to a person? What does that do to a child?

America, under the ruinous govern of Donald Trump, has done this – is doing this, right now as you read these words. It is not a law, it is a policy enforced by Trump and this cruel administration, enabled by the GOP that controls all branches of government. If Trump wanted to do so, he could go back to what we did before he entered office, which was simply not to separate families. He could end it with a single phone call. But he is not doing that because he is a heartless and horrible person who doesn’t understand empathy or human compassion. He sees these children as political bargaining chips, and too bad if they have to rip a baby out of its mother’s arms to make a point and appeal to his deplorable base.

This needs to be everybody’s breaking point.

One day some of those children will tell their story. They will explain in eloquence and pain what they went through, and what each complicit individual did to get them there. We will, all of us, have to answer for what we did when it started happening. I don’t have the power to do much, but I can write. I can post this. I can call anyone in power who will listen. I can speak out and resist every single thing this administration tries to do from this day forward and do my best to kill every item on their hateful agenda. I will not give the benefit of the doubt, I will not normalize these atrocities, and I will not allow a lie to be placed on the same level as the truth simply because someone else believes in it. I will support everyone who fights against this administration, in whatever way they choose to do so, no matter how crude or rude or debasing it may seem. Fuck Trump. Fuck Pence. Fuck Ivanka. Fuck the GOP.

Every single thing they do must be stopped because the alternative is too frightening to imagine.

PS – The latest news has it that Trump is signing something that says we will no longer separate families. That is not enough. Thousands of families have already been separated. Some will never find their way back to each other. The damage has been done. Damage that was directly inflicted and kept going by Trump himself. He didn’t need a grand signing ceremony to stop his own policy. You can’t start a fire and then get credit for putting it out. This changes nothing. He must be stopped at every turn and on every front.

We are almost at the point where we bid adieu for the summer months, not to be seen nor heard from until September. Well, perhaps I’ll pop back for a post or two depending on what this summer brings. And I’ll still be on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, albeit on a much more limited basis. This is vacation time, and I love the idea of not being bound by blog posts when I’d rather be outside working in the garden or swimming in the pool or simply lounging with a book. Still, there is some time left before we go, time for a lot of good posts, so don’t depart just yet.

Fancy summer cellar. 

The week of the dogwoods. 

A bittersweet anniversary. 

The quest for peach ice cream. 

Vibrant juxtaposition. 

The time someone pulled my pants down, and I wasn’t wearing any underwear. (Or, it twirled up.)

Shirtless male celebrities (and a naked male celebrity to boot). 

Classic clematis. 

Father’s Day memories. 

Luring a summer visitor. 

An epic Special Guest Blog by someone who’s been here before.

Hunks of the Day included Roger Frampton, Vance Joy and James Yates.

Our neighbor’s backyard looked down over a large rolling hill that led into what was called the ‘Four Diamonds’ – a set of four baseball fields sprawled over a broad plane of grass just above McNulty Elementary School. It was the perfect place for the neighborhood kids to gather on summer afternoons and evenings, usually after dinner, because it was a large property with lots of opportunities for hide and seek. They had a gym set, several gardens, and the entire expanse of green that was bordered by a forest.

The older kids would horse around, supposedly keeping an eye on the younger ones. I was somewhere in the middle, happy to disappear in the pack for a while. There were so many kids around that it was one big party, with groups breaking off into subsets, when one could flit from friendship circle to friendship circle like a butterfly or bee and no one was offended or bothered. It made it easy to disappear.

“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘The Great Gatsby’

There were swaths of gooseneck loosestrife, with their white flower spikes gracefully curving with bowed heads, a patch of herbs by the brick garage, dominated by chives and curly-leaved parsley, and a grand mound of bridal wreath spirea on the corner of the property, right before it turned into field. The spirea was so immense and full, it created a hiding spot haven: its arching branches went up and flopped over, forming a hollow tunnel that a small child could hide within. There was magic in that for a plant-lover like myself, and I confess I was more interested in the gardens and what they held than any social-mixing with the kids in the neighborhood. Beside the loosestrife was another semi-invasive species, lily of the valley, which spread its sweet scent along a shaded portion of the house, running to a formal stone step-entrance to the back door. In the side yard, two trees stood, signifiers of spring and summer: a pussy willow and a pear. The former would magically drape itself in gray cat paws every spring, while the latter would offer a few hard pears later in the year that were never quite ripe enough to be sweet. We climbed those trees as kids, dangling our feet high in the air and calling out to one another whatever kids say at such moments. I liked the vantage point and the view, taking in the Mohawk Valley from behind a curtain of white pear blossoms.

The other kids seemed largely unaware of the treasure-trove of horticultural finds, just as they passed by the staghorn fern inside or the majestic ponytail palm that filled a window in the back without so much as a pause to admire their beauty.

Despite my love of plants, I wasn’t immune to a little adventure and fun, so I joined the others in their escapades. We’d play loosely organized ball games, races, hide and seek, and all sorts of silly things that we’d make-up on the spur of the moment. There was a lot of running and playing on the gym set – swinging and pulling ourselves across the wooden bars with our hands, hanging there as long as we could without letting go. I was doing just that, dangling in the air and looking out over the fields that led all the way to the river when an older kid came up behind me and pulled my pants down. It was so sudden and unexpected, I just froze there, not knowing what to do. It wouldn’t have mattered so much if I hadn’t gone commando that day. I was in such a rush to get out of the house I had pulled on a pair of loose shorts without bothering to put on any underwear. Even as a kid, I liked to be free.

Mortification and exhilaration burned red across my face as my ass hung mid-air, framed by a jungle gym and backed by the verdant valley of the Mohawk River. No one was in front of me while my cock rocked out; a full-frontal tease from the very beginning. I dropped and quickly pulled my shorts up. Laughing, the kid who did it came up to me and apologized, saying he had no idea I didn’t have underwear on. I laughed it off too. I could do that then. Maybe the exhibitionist side of me was born at that moment. I’d been naked for the world to see and a bolt of God’s lightning hadn’t struck me down. No shame of original sin stained my bare bottom, and everything up front was intact and doing just fine. Not that any of this played upon my mind as I adjusted my shorts and went on to the next game.

It was the summer of ‘Top Gun’ and ‘Danger Zone’ was blasting over every radio.

As the light in the sky slowly faded and we approached the 8 PM bewitching hour (our curfew), the June bugs would arrive, swarming the trees and street lamps. They looked as I imagine the locusts would look in biblical times, and they always freaked me out, but as long as they stayed high in the sky it was all right. Our games slowed, our shouts softened, and the hush of the day’s end lent those last moments a certain reverence. We looked down over the field, and the bank of wooded land that stretched out to the right of it. Later in the night, teenagers would gather in a little clearing hidden by a bend in the forest, smoking and drinking beer. Teenyboppers, we called them derisively. Someone even created a little song for them:

Teenyboppers, oooh, teenyboppers (neer, neer)

Teenyboppers, showing off their rear (neer, neer)

That was it. (I played no part in writing it, thank you.) But it was catchy enough and I sang along. Apparently there were whispers that the teenagers would come out and moon those who spied on them, as if it was the most scandalous thing that could ever happen in Amsterdam. And maybe, in those days, it was. It would be years before a classmate shot himself, years before the tribute pages of dead kids would show up in our yearbooks. Our dangers were mostly imagined then, and how we thrilled at them.

In the daylight, we’d walk down into the field where the teenyboppers had gathered. Hidden by the foliage at the edge of the woods, we’d whip out our dicks and pee, giddy at the freedom of that insignificant act of rebellion. We would inspect the little pit of what had been a fire, the charred wood and ashes in shades of gray and black. Crumpled beer cans and bottles filled with cigarette butts littered the space. Once, we found a beer ball – a magnificent orb of dark amber plastic whose opening smelled vaguely of skunk. We could scare ourselves into feeling like we were being watched, as though the teenyboppers might suddenly appear and attack us. At such times we’d let out a warning cry that they were coming, then bolt out of the wooded area, running as fast and as far from the danger-zone as possible.

It’s always better when the danger is only in your head. That’s what summer is, at least for the lucky kids: controlled excitement and adventure within the safe confines of neighborhood backyards.

Truth be told, I’m not a big fan of this penstemon plant that I put into the perennial bed last year. I was much more looking forward to the coreopsis that was next to it, but of course that one didn’t make it through the winter, and so we are left with this straggly thing that looks better in photos than it does in real life. If you examine it closely, you can see its messy nature: the faded flowers stick to the same stem on which new blooms are borne, lending it an unkempt feel. I’m a notorious Virgo, and that’s extremely troublesome to me.

Less troublesome, and the reason why I haven’t excised it to the hidden side yard yet, is the coloring. It’s a gorgeous hue somewhere between fuchsia and purple, and it gets set off brilliantly by a backing of lady ferns currently in their early-season chartreuse shading. That combination alone sets off fireworks, and saved this little penstemon for the moment.

(Word of warning: I’m not promising anything when the flowers fade for good, so enjoy this moment while it lasts.)

All I wanted was some peach ice cream. Chasing after a childhood memory that probably never even happened, Suzie and I were with Chris on a hot summer day in Central Park. We’d scoured a nearby Whole Foods Market for a carton of peach ice cream, finding nothing but frozen yogurt which is most definitely NOT an acceptable substitute for ice cream. Chris looked quickly online and said there was talk of peach ice cream in the Chinatown area, but it was too hot to move from our rock.

We sat on a large piece of native stone, something that had been here before the city went up all around it, something that would likely remain after it fell. The day was sweltering, but in the shade of a few plane trees and the company of a couple of close friends it was all bearable. It might have even been beautiful. If only we’d found the peach ice cream.

The original memory, sketchy and problematic as it may be, was of a restaurant in New York City – something like Serendipity. We couldn’t even have been teenagers yet, as Suzie and I were traveling with our Moms. We had been in town for a couple of plays – ‘Lost in Yonkers’ and ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ – and were finding a brief respite from the pounding heat of a New York sidewalk in the middle of the day. We had our lunch while whimsical lamp fixtures fascinated from the ceiling. When it came time for dessert I played it safe and ordered a hot fudge sundae or something similarly plain. Suzie ordered a bowl of peach ice cream. It was the prettiest, most luscious-looking dish. Peaches dotted the creamy mound of ice, wonderfully crunchy in frozen form in the spoonful that Suzie offered me. A perfect treat for a hot day. It was a summer memory made instantly, one that I have held onto and probably morphed into some more than it ever was, especially seeing as how Suzie doesn’t even recall it happening. But I know it did. The details may have been different, but that bowl of peach ice cream was real. To this day, it symbolizes childhood, summer and New York City all at once.

And so we found ourselves, years later, sitting on that Central Park rock and dreamily contemplating an elusive bowl of peach ice cream, making a new summer memory while simply passing a hot, sunny day.

Andy’s Dad passed away one year ago today, and the weather of this afternoon seems to match the mood: ambivalent, cloudy, peaks of sunshine, and dramatic winds. Dark patches of sky threatened to cry down upon us, but for the most part remained peaceful. The pounding thunder of last night has been replaced by something calmer.

In the same way that his Mom’s passing is now a part of the early holiday season, his Dad has become part of our early summer remembrances – not only because of Father’s Day, but because his birthday falls right now as well. It is a bittersweet time of the year, one that completes a poetic full-circle of life.

It’s still too soon for his memory to be much more than sad, but as the years pass I hope we can move to happier reminiscences, and that June will be a time to celebrate and honor everything he did as a father. For now, we mostly mourn, and miss the guy who brought his family such fun and amusement.

When there are rainy summer days, or mosquito-infested summer nights, I retreat to the basement, where there’s a new sofa, a television that always has lots of trash playing, and a pristine desk for prime project development. As we get ready for our summer hiatus, this is where I’ll be working on some new things, and when we return in the fall this site will (hopefully) reap the fruits of that labor. As much as I may love summer, there are always those moments when one needs a respite from all the heat and haze. The cool below-ground calm of the cellar provides just such an oasis.

These little pockets of space are important during the summer months, and I find myself seeking them out when I’m in Boston or New York. It’s not just the place itself either, it’s the frame of mind. Summer, the season that’s supposed to be such an escape, has its confines as well.

Whether it’s a stifling heat-wave or a drought that devours the garden, there are stretches when relief is not at hand. A line of summer storms that hits every weekend is equally mentally debilitating, when the world refuses to grant us a break. Summer cuts both ways.

I’ll put on ‘Gosford Park’ or a black-and-white oldie like ‘The Women’ – each lends comfort to a gray or sickly-hot day in their own way – and I’ll languidly lounge in some ridiculous robe and a pair of underwear. If I had children (God forbid) this would be the state in which they’d be mortified to show their father off to their friends. Thankfully, we remain happily unburdened by children, so there’s no danger posed to anyone other than a wayward Jehovah’s Witness that dares to ring our bell.

Moments of respite and underground escapes – these cool jewels keep my mind mentally collected in a season hellbent on making us all loopy. Not that I’d have it any other way; the shackles of winter leave scars that run deeper than summer’s brief lapses in loveliness.

The high from a glorious weekend in New York City is just starting to wear off, so let’s go back and do this week all over again…

It began with the planning, and trying on a new Kimpton Hotel. 

A summer treat: Prosecco and cherries. 

Pretty in pink.

A new Madonna Timeline: Cry Baby.

Preparing for the brilliance of Betty Buckley.

Underneath the dogwood tree.

Bringing Suzie home: a birthday post. 

The sweetly-scented Korean lilac.

Hunks of the Day included Roger Frampton and Kyle Andrew.

Follow the pink-petaled road!

A summer fragrance. 

My most favorite moment in quite some time: seeing Betty Buckley live at Joe’s Pub. 

And one more time: Fuck Trump. 

Two words.

Two words I am loathe to use.

Two words that hold power and meaning, no matter how awful.

Two words that, when put together, are going to cause a lot of trouble.

Two words that Robert DeNiro said on last night’s Tony Awards:

Fuck Trump.

And I couldn’t agree more.

It’s time.

It’s time to resist everything to do with Donald Trump.

It’s time to stop all that he’s trying to do. There are no more passes to be given. There are no more opportunities to meet him halfway. He has burned all those bridges, and now he’s burning our standing in the world.

He has endangered our citizens, our country, and our earth with his utter ineptitude at being President. It wasn’t enough that he lost the popular vote, that he gleefully welcomed intrusion by Russia in the election, in the e-mails, in all the things we don’t even know about yet, he then had to take the vaunted office of President – an office once respected and honored the entire world over – and burn it to the ground. He’s destroying our economy and bankrupting America like he’s done with all his companies. Our deficit is the largest it has ever been. He’s stoking division and inciting hatred among our people. He is morally corrupt, mean, petty, and abusive.

What’s worse is that we have let it happen.

And we continue to let it happen.

It should have been stopped in the Republican primaries.

It should have been stopped in the general election.

It should have been stopped every day he has occupied that office.

But it hasn’t been.

The only way to do that is to resist everything Trump. The media needs to stop writing him free passes. The GOP needs to stop being silently complicit in what he has done and stop their support. The Democrats need to stop playing the traditional political game and realize he will never play fair. The American people need to stop excusing and normalizing what he has done.

We all must stop him at every turn.

It’s the only way.

This is how you deal with a dictator.

And so I say, “Fuck you, Donald Trump.”

Fuck you for all the evil you have unleashed in our country and in the world.

Fuck you for all the hate you have condoned, promoted and released.

Fuck you for all your lies, your hypocrisy, your racism, your intolerance, and your ignorance.

Fuck you for defiling the office of the President and making posts like this necessary.

Fuck Trump.

A path is the promise of possibility.

A path of pink petals is the promise of possibility draped in prettiness and enchantment.

I will always choose the option of pretty if ever it’s available.

Here, our Kwanzan cherry has shed its flower petals in one fell swoop of a windy day.

What makes it all the more magical is its fleeting nature.

This scene lasted but for a few hours at the most.

After that, it was wrecked by more powerful wind gusts, battered by falling rain pellets, and ultimately shriveled in the return of the sun.

Only the memory, and these photos, remain.

A little bit of inspiration is left too, in the way that the world sometimes leaves things when it takes something away.

Before the summer, and often during, rain is what keeps the gardens and the lawns and the trees alive. We do not mourn it or curse it just yet. Our summer has not yet begun. On with the last week…

A bouquet of lily of the valley. 

Let the pride parties begin.

May departs in a flurry of petals. 

Theater review: a brilliant production of ‘The Boys in the Band’.

The magnificent Betty Buckley.

Following the wisdom of Coco Chanel. 

An enchanting find: Jack-in-the-pulpit.

A little bloom in a hue of blue. 

Your next must-read book: ‘The Summer That Melted Everything’. 

What is the summer movie of 2018?

A quick pasta dinner idea. 

Hunks of the day included Igor Kolomiyets, Zachary Quinto, Sam Hunt and Dan Slater.

What is this summer’s popcorn movie? I’ve been out of the loop and ignoring the pop culture landscape of late. I think ‘Infinity War’ came too soon to be a proper summer movie. I’m looking for the next sleeper hit – like ‘The Others’ or some similar, off-kilter fare. Of course, I’m also willing to make-do with the return of Jurassic World, but the previews look too cheesy to be any good. (A dinosaur at the foot of a child’s bed? There’s just so much belief I can suspend.) 

I’m looking for something new…

I didn’t mean to come upon them. That’s always when you find the best things. They were huddled together in a little clump, rising out of the brown expanse of a leaf-littered forest floor. My eyes picked them out of the forest because back then I could do such things. A single lobelia in a mile-wide meadow was the one thing I would see; a lone lupine on the side of the Thruway as we sped by at 60 miles per hour stuck out like a sore thumb. I’m digressing, moving further away from the memory I want to record here.

It was early June. The end of the school year was upon us, which meant that final exams were at hand too. In those days I didn’t stress much about final exams. If you paid attention and did your work during the year, what more could you do? I usually did well on them. Still, the older I got, the less I seemed to retain, so a look-back was a good idea, even as it pained me. Studying notebooks from the entire year is a big chore, and there’s a point when you can’t do it anymore, when your brain is going to hold all that it’s going to hold, a saturation point that simply won’t allow anything else inside. When I hit that point I stopped and looked out at what remained of the day.

The sun was still slanting through the trees behind our house. It was my favorite time to be out walking in the woods. I hurried down the bank, past the emerging patches of Japanese knotweed, then across a street to another wooded area, up that bank, then down into a slight ravine.

There, in the belly of the forest, in the midst of all the fallen oak leaves, was a nice-sized clump of jack-in-the-pulpit plants. They were part of my childhood lore, when Suzie’s family had them growing happily in front of their house. Each summer I’d study them, fascinated as much by their form as for their endangered status. There were even whispers that they had spread to the point that someone had dug a bunch out and threw them down the bank behind the house.

Now, in the wild, was a tiny collection of them, happily unnoticed by most eyes. I was grateful that I happened upon them. Given their endangered status at the time, I left them alone, content to keep the secret of their location while enjoying the visage they made against the otherwise brown forest floor. It was the perfect study break. Nothing clears the head as well as a brush with the sublime.

The jack-in-the-pulpit plant is a fascinating woodland native. It sends up spikes that unfurl into handsome three-segmented leaves, followed by the ‘flower’ which is a hooded spathe enclosing the ‘jack’ in a cloak of green. If left alone, it will develop a stalk of bright red berries. The specimen shown here was purchased on a whim, in one of those mass-produced plastic bags that contains a sad little dried-up root or rhizome that rarely if ever comes back to life, so I planted it in a shady nook and promptly forgot about it. Other plants took over; a carpet of sweet woodruff, a lacy dicentra, and a hellebore stole the focus, and so the unobtrusive leaves went unnoticed. A couple of years later the spikes emerged and I was pleasantly reminded that it was there. Now it’s a sight to which I eagerly look forward, coming as it does with such pleasant early-summer memories.