Or maybe this blazing begonia seen at Faddegon’s will prove the incendiary source of inspiration to usher me into creatively fertile ground. Any recommended music, books, shows, movies, or artists are always appreciated.
Easter came and went amid sun and snow squalls, indicative of the transitory nature of mid-April. We spent a lovely early dinner with the family, then a quiet afternoon in which I managed to fill a few more lawn bags as I rounded the far corner of the yard. It’s about half-way done now, though the weather looks iffy for the next week, meaning I’ll be taking it slow, which bodes well for this 46-year-old body. On with the Holy Week recap…
This admittedly-bastardized version of the Ramos gin fizz – entirely bereft of alcohol and egg white – has no real business being called a gin fizz, but it tastes just as lovely, with the fresh lemon and lime juice ricocheting neatly off the orange blossom water and kaffir lime simple syrup. With those potent flavors, the non-alcoholic gin alternative works well enough. For the soda water topper, I used some yuzu seltzer water, which was wondrous. All in all, it’s a mocktail that doesn’t feel like it’s missing anything.
Easter shouldn’t be entirely traumatic, so here’s a fun and happy Easter post that shows off the original trailer for that sweet musical ‘Easter Parade’ starring Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. It’s not my favorite musical – not by a long shot – but the costumes and theme are resurrected every year at this time because I’m not a fan of the other Easter movies out there. Such a difficult theme to do well…
Along with this glimpse at the musical, I offer you a few Easter lilies, whose fragrance always brings me back to another traumatic event: serving mass during Holy Week. But that’s a nightmare for another holiday. For today, let’s rest and revel in a spring revival.
It is probably one of my very first memories, and it is ingrained wherever memories are made and stored. I remember standing in the line at the Mohawk Mall, a small part of me wanting to see the Easter Bunny, and the much larger rest of me freaking entirely out, shuffling ever closer with increasing terror and fright. That likely didn’t start my social anxiety, but it was the very first remembered brush with it, so traumatizing was the event.
And even though nothing bad happened, even though I made it through and survived without major incident, it left a mark, and my social anxiety didn’t abate or lessen. If anything, it was emboldened to terrorize me for the next forty years, because it wreaked that much havoc with my head.
It didn’t help that the bunny was such a fright in and of itself. I mean, how cruel was it to introduce that glorious purple tulle ruff to a gay boy, and pair it with a face as diabolical as that? No wonder my taste eventually ran to what it became.
My relationship with the Forsythia bush has long been strained. While I always appreciated its early blooming period, often the very first plant to bravely put forth any blossoms at such a precarious point in time, the rest of the plant, and even the flowers themselves, have proven problematic for my admittedly fastidious, and perhaps unfair, viewpoint.
As mentioned, Forsythia is known best for its bright yellow blooms, seen here on a few nursery specimens (because I absolutely will not grow this in our yard). They are a happy mark that signals the return of spring, and warmer weather to come. Their drawbacks are that while stunning in color, in form the flower branches are often bare at top and between the blooms, making it necessary to drastically prune for any sort of arrangement. They also generally appear on straight and rigid stems, giving a somewhat unnatural and stilted appearance.
More problematic for me is the rest of the plant and its growing style. With the exception of some rigid stems bearing flowers, the rest of the new shoots are wild and wiry, issuing forth from the center of the plant and going absolutely everywhere without rhyme or reason. They will grow tall, to the point where they flop over and start rooting in the soil – a method of propagation that might work well in the wild, but absolutely ruins any hope of landscaping order. It goes against my very Virgo nature, and while I have learned to appreciate such wild wanderings from some plants, the forsythia doesn’t appeal to me in many other ways to change my view. As such, I admire these plants from a distance, just at this particular time of the year, and move on to warmer days as quickly as possible.
An anything-but-good Friday began with Betsy spilling her coffee on her shirt, and from there the workday went swiftly downhill. Halfway into the afternoon I wondered briefly if there was a full moon in effect, but then more things piled up and I forgot to check. As messes and mistakes grew in scope and size, and the day turned even crazier, Andy picked me up and went into detail about the lunatics he had just encountered on the road.
I took out my phone and googled ‘full moon April 2022’ and sure enough, here we are. Today marks the full Pink Moon – named not for its pretty color, but for the fact that the moss pink (Phlox subulata) is in bloom now. Not in these parts, of course, but somewhere a bit warmer. The Phlox subulata in our area won’t come into its glory for another month or so, but I love the idea of the moon reflecting what blooms are showing up somewhere else in the world.
When spring is slow to start, and the flowers are hesitant to open, I find my way to Faddegon’s to get a little floral fix before everything opens at once. (It usually happens when more than one day in a row deigns to be warm, and since that doesn’t look to happen with any consistency soon, here are a few floral blasts from the local greenhouse. They give a thrill because of their strong colors, and may be appreciated more than when the outside world will inevitably catch up to them.
Yesterday hit 82 degrees, instantly bringing out the first blooms of the season – and they happened to be blue. These little Scilla bulbs are usually the first into blossom after winter, and often they’re ragged and torn from wind and snow and ice. This year they’ve been largely unscathed, though I’m not holding out hope that such pristine delicacy will last (there were whispers of snow in the forecast sometime in the next few days). For now, they are a welcome beacon of spring – and the one spot of color in a brown and barren yard. Even the Lenten rose has delayed its arrival, still huddled close to the ground and slumbering beneath a layer of oak leaves.
The photos give a greatly exaggerated idea of their size and stature, but in my mind this is how big and impressive they feel, especially when nothing else is brave enough to be in bloom at this stage. The largest bloom in actual size is about the size of a dime. That such a tiny thing can have such an impact will always impress my mind and thrill my heart.
In the magical way with which she does just about everything, Tess Collins provided the perfect segue into this Dazzler of the Day with one of the photos from her feature. Most people in Albany need no introduction to the magnificent Matt Baumgartner and his storied career (from starting the Bombers enterprise with a single casino win to his current raging success at June Farms). For all his business successes and acumen, he has an equally-powerful philanthropic side that more than justifies his ability to dazzle (many of us still recall the billboard he erected in support of marriage equality, back when New York teetered on the edge of not passing it into law). For a beautiful glimpse of the spell Baumgartner has cast on upstate New York, check out the idyllic majesty of June Farms this spring and summer, and visit their website for all they have to offer.
Despite what some consider a somewhat ferocious appearance, the opossum is an animal that greatly aids our backyard ecosystem. As seen in the helpful reminder below, this creature gets rid of hundreds of pesky problems, while offering no threat or harm to us. Earlier this year, I witnessed two of them lumbering through our yard early in the morning, a reminder of this visitor from two years ago. It was good to see them making their patrol, and I’m glad they are working their neighborhood magic.
These are trying times. New York State especially has been rocked with horrific news this week, and I had to get away from the media just to ease the awfulness of everything that is happening. Work is getting more and more stressful as far as workload and volume goes, and as I started to feel the weight of it all bear down and slow my ability to simply get usual tasks done. Add in our yard’s daunting spring clean up (which consists of single-handedly cleaning and pruning the gardens, and then filling about 50 lawn bags) and lending whatever support I can to my parents has my plate full – and I only ever want a full plate on Thanksgiving or Christmas. I realized I’m at a breaking point, due in part to the dismal fact that I haven’t had a proper vacation in several years. It wasn’t just COVID – we hadn’t gone on a vacation in the few years before that – and I understood that such a lack of relaxation is finally having an effect on me.
As much as meditation and therapy has helped, there’s just so much anyone can do without periods of recharging and restoration, and the increasingly sporadic and spread-out weekends in Boston only charge bits of my battery. It’s probably time for a new battery entirely.
In the past I might have barreled through such a lull in inspiration, forcing myself to just keep going. I know myself better now, and it’s ok to need a break, and to insist upon one. The world wears all of us down. Now and then we deserve a break.
For the past 75 days, I’ve been reading and doing my best to try one meditation practice per day, from Matthew Sockolov’s ‘Practicing Mindfulness’, and while I admit that I didn’t fully execute each and every one, I did the majority, and added them to my daily meditation. Unlike some things in life, where excess may lead to harm, the more one meditates, the better one gets.
Sockolov offers practical and easy meditation practices, and this book is good for anyone new to meditation. While most are designed for ten to fifteen minutes of focused practice, I found that a big-ask for the beginner. When I started out, I was at two minutes a day – for over four decades I’d been trained to occupy every single minute of the day with action or thought. That doesn’t go away the instant you decide to start meditating. I took it a couple of minutes at a time for a couple of weeks before I gradually increased – maybe an extra minute after a few days, then two extra minutes – until I began to be comfortable with the stillness and the silence.
Many of the meditations that Sockolov describes can be whittled down to a few minutes for those still not quite comfortable with a longer practice. I found these a decent supplement to my daily 20 minutes, and they offer a helpful entry point for anyone looking to start simply, and for those looking to bring the practice into everyday life.
It was Easter week 1993, and somehow Suzie and I found ourselves on a train from New York to Florida for a questionable visit to Disneyworld. That two teenagers at the height of their cynicism and moodiness should be taking an overnight train ride to Florida, and the purported happiest place on earth, is the height of improbability, if not downright foolishness, but there we were.
Sweetheart
The sun has set
All red and primitive above our heads
Blood stained on an ageless sky
Wipe your tears and let the salt stains dry
Let them all run dry
All run dry
Suzie is the ideal traveling companion for me, as she and I know each other very well. Most importantly, we know when to leave the other alone, which is really the key to any successful relationship or friendship. Thankfully there would be just one or two moments when we needed that alone time – the rest of the time we were helping each other though such a trip at that particular point in our teenage lives. Nowhere was that more evident than on the long-ass train ride, which forms the memory of this post. The aural backdrop playing on my headphones was Annie Lennox’s brilliant ‘Diva’ album (which just celebrated its 30th anniversary, so that’s how far back we are going here). The track ‘Primitive’ soothed the gentle rumble of the train as the middle of the night arrived and our car flickered with only an occasional night-light. Outside, the amber lights of the tracks whizzed by overhead. It was a moment in time stilled by this song.
Sweetheart
Take me to bed
That’s where all our prayers are said
Whispered silent in the night
That’s how all our dreams take flight
Let them all go by
All go by
At that moment, I think both Suzie and I wanted to be just about anywhere else, and nowhere else at the same time. The agitated conundrum of a typical teenager, when nothing felt typical or normal. We sat across from each other, back in those days when there was space between seats, when people weren’t all crammed uncomfortably on top of each other. At such a young age, I could have slept anywhere, but even with that ease and luxury, my sleep on that ride was less than ideal. We passed the time talking and listening to music, and I did a lot of writing for a project I was working on for English class. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that project would be the first of many.
For time will catch us in both hands
To blow away like grains of sand
Ashes to ashes rust to rust
This is what becomes of us
As our train rolled through the night, amid fits of sleep and wake, we seemed to be leaving the cold gray world of upstate New York in April as the outside grew greener and more temperate. When morning arrived, the landscape was already different than when we had left, and I felt different too. It was a rare realization of change as it was in the process of happening. I wouldn’t get many of those moments, so I leaned into it, wondering what it meant, wondering what was in store for us.
Sweetheart
Send me to sleep
Pray to God our hopes to keep
Take our fears and make us strong
Lead us to where we belong
And let it all go by
All go by
The fabulous Mother Hen of all Albany misfits, celebrities, restaurant workers and just about everyone who has played a part in this fair city over the past couple of decades, Tess Collins is long overdue for this Dazzler of the Day crowning. No matter how many setbacks or knockdowns that are thrown her way, she gamely deflects and defies, rallying over all adversity in the take-charge manner for which she is rightfully adored and admired. Generous of spirit and industry, she has crafted a one-woman enterprise that is a foundation of all that is good in this city, and remains a font of wisdom for anyone seeking guidance or some tough love. She is one of my favorite people in Albany, so be sure to say hello the next time you catch her working her magic at McGeary’s.
