Yonkers v. Crossover
The Virginia cat Virginia missed me enough to draw blood on first greeting and the little beads of blood on my hand are testament to her devotion to me. I spank her lightly on her right haunch which is something she actually likes so it's not really punishment. She listens attentively and without blinking to my brief recitation of Roman adventures and then retires to her cardboard box. I don't tell her about the cats of Palermo. She crowds me on the bed now and I pet her when I tire of the keyboard.
Three days in New York after finishing the Italy trip with three days in Rome and I am a little disoriented by being able to understand what people are saying and wishing to some degree that I could not. Also I find it harder to understand the architecture in New York so I wander off on Saturday in search of something to relate to and instead of crossing the Williamsburg Bridge stop at the East River. Walking back and forth looking for a spot to own I pause at a little league baseball game and end up staying for the double header. The boys are twelve or thirteen I think or maybe a little older. There is a little league football being played on a field that takes up part of the baseball outfield and periodically the game is stopped while eight and nine year olds line up for third and long. I stand mostly, to the right of home plate and watch a Chinese kid for the Yonkers team throw slow looping curve balls with fairly decent accuracy. I was rooting against him though as the prevailing sun and dust storms caused me to move over and by default root for the Crossover Phenoms.
I was like a scout as far as anyone was concerned and with my uncanny understanding of the game and ability to recognize talent there hung in the air the possibility of some young player being drafted into a better league. This was a shared fantasy (with little or no factual basis) that was however shattered when tossing a ball back to a kid practicing off in the grass, my arm, surely constricted by the wide padded straps of the small backpack I wore, conspired against all fantasy and the ball went several feet short and to the left of its target. Perhaps the worst throw of my life and one that brought back memories of my own little league career, a mediocre one at best. I wandered off shortly after that, all dreams on hold for the time being, and walking back up Houston instead of Delancey I was again dismayed by the prevalent lack of architectural integrity.
...more recent posts
Pesaro Archipelago
It was not altogether unlike an I Love Lucy episode in that the way things turned out was a bit more frenetic than what we initially anticipated. They did have a conveyer belt you bent over but instead of wrapping chocolates you picked through the passing grapes for any remaining stems the de-stemming apparatus had missed. And it did go faster than you could handle but you were never tempted to shove the passing stems into your mouth. For every small piece of stem you grabbed, and tossed behind you onto the floor, the more refined this 2009 batch of Cabernet Francs would be, despite all the literal blood, sweat and tears that would eventually over a very long process also end up with the grapes. There was not however a large wooden barrel of grapes we all climbed into, smashing them with our bare feet, nor did tempers flare and lead to a grape throwing fight with the locals. No, these grapes went from red plastic totes into the de-stemmer and up the conveyer into flexible suction tubing that led up to twenty foot tall 7 foot wide stainless steel containers, where mixed with a little yeast or other secret ingredients they would sit for a week or so and then be hand raked from a small door at the bottom into another suction device that leads them to the ATI Softpress 12, which very effectively removes every bit of juice and sends it I'm not actually sure where (but eventually into wooden barrels) after which the nearly dry clumps of grape husk are fed down that earlier (now repurposed) conveyer, into blue 50 gallon plastic barrels, which along with all those stems, will be used at some point to make grappa.
The night before, at dusk, after a day of sightseeing in and around Pesaro and a swim in the Adriatic, the four of us--our host, Antonio Ramone, Bernadette, and I--followed behind a specifically sized John Deere tractor driven by the brother of our host, that fit without room to spare between the rows of grape vine, and from the tractor our host off loaded to us an impressive quantity of red plastic totes that we then space out every third vine or so down each row. It took no time at all to do this and when we were finished we had the totes spread out down about 5 or 6 long rows and I went to bed that night thinking this would be no big deal and how it was sort of quaint that we were helping out with the 2009 harvest. In fact that is how I had been thinking of it since first learning we were going to Italy and that we would be for a brief period of our trip "helping" with this year's harvest. Quaint it was not.
What I did not understand, until it became painfully obvious, was that after the totes were filled with the clipped clumps of purple blue grapes and then picked up and stacked ( don't fill the totes so full we were admonished early on, they have to be stacked) on that same tractor and off loaded near the de-stemming apparatus, they were then brought back to the field empty and it was after nearly ten hours of this, with a short break now and then (one break was in the de-stemming line where eyeing carefully the passing conveyer of loose grapes for minute bits of stem I did have brief but unremarkable hallucinations), that I could feel it coming on, although in the end I did fight it off, a fit of uncontrollable full out weeping. I was determined though not to let the young Moldavian pickers see me cry nor any of the 65 year old men, especially that one with the bad leg, nor any of the Italian women, least of all that bossy one, good God would she ever shut up. Bernadette and I picked together, facing each other and attacking a vine from adjacent rows, and we were not the only pickers who purposefully searched for places to pick grapes out of earshot from that bossy, relentlessly chatty woman. Our friend Antonio Ramone, who is one of the original partners, along with Bernadette and a few others, of this NYC five floor walk up, and who lives just across the hall up here on five, has been traveling to Pesaro for the last three or four years and was no stranger to any of this process spent almost all of his day in the extremely arduous stem removal line. Antonio, who at times is a most expressive and gregarious fellow, was however from first mention that we would join him on this trip, mute to us about the rigors of what we were getting ourselves into. Which on his part I thinks shows a good judgment.
Early in the day, after we had picked barely a crate or two, the first line of women showed up with fresh cold mineral water and fresh breads, some of which, while without cheese or any other ingredient beyond a smear of marinara could almost be little pizzas. And they did this throughout the day but whereas early on it seemed like a wonderful and classy way to run a work project, by the end of the day, with knowledge of a promised grand feast of wine and pork, lasagna, chicken, rabbit and even pigeon, this bread and water break became to seem more like a picture from some slave labor story, or a prison road gang movie, and from one such famous movie the line "what we got here is a failure to communicate" began to ring into my consciousness with a tone so much clearer than ever before.
All of this I say with an attempt at humor because far from slave like treatment our accommodations were splendid and our host was most gracious and heaped onto us so much exquisite food (much of it prepared by his mother) and wine and tour guiding over three days that I would have to work another three harvests just to make up my share.
Next year we are traveling to a dude ranch in the Gulag Archipelago.
It was not altogether unlike an I Love Lucy episode in that the way things turned out was a bit more frenetic than what we initially anticipated. They did have a conveyer belt you bent over but instead of wrapping chocolates you picked through the passing grapes for any remaining stems the de-stemming apparatus had missed. And it did go faster than you could handle but you were never tempted to shove the passing stems into your mouth. For every small piece of stem you grabbed, and tossed behind you onto the floor, the more refined this 2009 batch of Cabernet Francs would be, despite all the literal blood, sweat and tears that would eventually over a very long process also end up with the grapes. There was not however a large wooden barrel of grapes we all climbed into, smashing them with our bare feet, nor did tempers flare and lead to a grape throwing fight with the locals. No, these grapes went from red plastic totes into the de-stemmer and up the conveyer into flexible suction tubing that led up to twenty foot tall 7 foot wide stainless steel containers, where mixed with a little yeast or other secret ingredients they would sit for a week or so and then be hand raked from a small door at the bottom into another suction device that leads them to the ATI Softpress 12, which very effectively removes every bit of juice and sends it I'm not actually sure where (but eventually into wooden barrels) after which the nearly dry clumps of grape husk are fed down that earlier (now repurposed) conveyer, into blue 50 gallon plastic barrels, which along with all those stems, will be used at some point to make grappa.
The night before, at dusk, after a day of sightseeing in and around Pesaro and a swim in the Adriatic, the four of us--our host, Antonio Ramone, Bernadette, and I--followed behind a specifically sized John Deere tractor driven by the brother of our host, that fit without room to spare between the rows of grape vine, and from the tractor our host off loaded to us an impressive quantity of red plastic totes that we then space out every third vine or so down each row. It took no time at all to do this and when we were finished we had the totes spread out down about 5 or 6 long rows and I went to bed that night thinking this would be no big deal and how it was sort of quaint that we were helping out with the 2009 harvest. In fact that is how I had been thinking of it since first learning we were going to Italy and that we would be for a brief period of our trip "helping" with this year's harvest. Quaint it was not.
What I did not understand, until it became painfully obvious, was that after the totes were filled with the clipped clumps of purple blue grapes and then picked up and stacked ( don't fill the totes so full we were admonished early on, they have to be stacked) on that same tractor and off loaded near the de-stemming apparatus, they were then brought back to the field empty and it was after nearly ten hours of this, with a short break now and then (one break was in the de-stemming line where eyeing carefully the passing conveyer of loose grapes for minute bits of stem I did have brief but unremarkable hallucinations), that I could feel it coming on, although in the end I did fight it off, a fit of uncontrollable full out weeping. I was determined though not to let the young Moldavian pickers see me cry nor any of the 65 year old men, especially that one with the bad leg, nor any of the Italian women, least of all that bossy one, good God would she ever shut up. Bernadette and I picked together, facing each other and attacking a vine from adjacent rows, and we were not the only pickers who purposefully searched for places to pick grapes out of earshot from that bossy, relentlessly chatty woman. Our friend Antonio Ramone, who is one of the original partners, along with Bernadette and a few others, of this NYC five floor walk up, and who lives just across the hall up here on five, has been traveling to Pesaro for the last three or four years and was no stranger to any of this process spent almost all of his day in the extremely arduous stem removal line. Antonio, who at times is a most expressive and gregarious fellow, was however from first mention that we would join him on this trip, mute to us about the rigors of what we were getting ourselves into. Which on his part I thinks shows a good judgment.
Early in the day, after we had picked barely a crate or two, the first line of women showed up with fresh cold mineral water and fresh breads, some of which, while without cheese or any other ingredient beyond a smear of marinara could almost be little pizzas. And they did this throughout the day but whereas early on it seemed like a wonderful and classy way to run a work project, by the end of the day, with knowledge of a promised grand feast of wine and pork, lasagna, chicken, rabbit and even pigeon, this bread and water break became to seem more like a picture from some slave labor story, or a prison road gang movie, and from one such famous movie the line "what we got here is a failure to communicate" began to ring into my consciousness with a tone so much clearer than ever before.
All of this I say with an attempt at humor because far from slave like treatment our accommodations were splendid and our host was most gracious and heaped onto us so much exquisite food (much of it prepared by his mother) and wine and tour guiding over three days that I would have to work another three harvests just to make up my share.
Next year we are traveling to a dude ranch in the Gulag Archipelago.
Palermo
In Palermo we travel dark alleys but this day it is light and Bernadette and I are being chased down by a guy with a mug like Quasimodo. He is shaking his finger at us and ordering us to hault. It is Giovanni and he is reminding us to honor the Saint. I reach into my pocket and take out my Euros and let him pick out what the Saint wants. He takes four or five and drops them into a slot and that is that. We have recently stood by and watched two men break into our rental car, a very nice handling Fiat Punto.
On the way to Agrigento yesterday I am down shiftng into third to get a little torque up so I can speed past those motorists doing the speed limit. Antonio Ramone and Bernadette and I looked at enough ruins to give us a good feel for what a ruin is.
We were recently behind a student driver to get the idea that not all drivers start out with the pure skill necessary to maneuver like a mad person. It is exhilarating but requires a concentration I have not fully used for such extended periods during any time in my life. Bernadette has map skills, without which we would get nowhere.
I have not lost a key in a long time but I was due so this morning I locked the one key in the Fiat. The car rental agency had also lost their spare key so that is why they were breaking into the car. We were on our way to Tapani I think or maybe that is not even a place. Giovanni looks over the lot we park in and treats us like a friend. Giovanni and the lead mechanic breaking into our Fiat with a coat hanger seemed for a minute like they might go to blows but it all worked out. Pretty much you have to let the guy with the coat hanger do his thing. It is another skill which requires a certain amount of concentration. I had not said a thing or gotten too close and may have even dosed off for a moment when the guy, the lead mechanic, who had so far not really shown any sign that he knew I was there, called out to me so that I could be made aware of his success. He and his partner we rewarded with 10 euros a piece and I think seeing this, and knowing that he could have done just as well is perhaps why Giovanni later chased us down and suggested we honor the Saint with a little appreciation as well.
I cannot really go into what we have eaten but some of it has been spectactular, especially anything resembling a little fish. We have had pasta so fresh that it is like born on your plate and speaking of birth I am after ten days in Italy starting to resemble a man who while still skinny as a rail, is about to give birth to a 12 pound baby.
We were in Rome for only enough time to land, eat two meals and be driven the three hours to Pesaro by our friend. We picked enough grapes on our third day in Italy to remind me of that distant distant past when I for about a year worked in the Texas oilfields, 12 hour days, ten day stretches. I should say more about the grape picking and maybe I will later but now I should get back to the house. I have gone swimming in the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. I have not been that tempted to be online and I cannot find the apostrophe key on the keyboard so if you have been wondering why no contractions, well there you have it.
I think we are going out to eat in a few minutes. I am not the least bit hungry but that does not seem to be stopping me. We are not going to the opera tomorrow but The Teatro Massimo, around the corner from us, is going with Madame Butterfly for its opening night. Ciao.
In Palermo we travel dark alleys but this day it is light and Bernadette and I are being chased down by a guy with a mug like Quasimodo. He is shaking his finger at us and ordering us to hault. It is Giovanni and he is reminding us to honor the Saint. I reach into my pocket and take out my Euros and let him pick out what the Saint wants. He takes four or five and drops them into a slot and that is that. We have recently stood by and watched two men break into our rental car, a very nice handling Fiat Punto.
On the way to Agrigento yesterday I am down shiftng into third to get a little torque up so I can speed past those motorists doing the speed limit. Antonio Ramone and Bernadette and I looked at enough ruins to give us a good feel for what a ruin is.
We were recently behind a student driver to get the idea that not all drivers start out with the pure skill necessary to maneuver like a mad person. It is exhilarating but requires a concentration I have not fully used for such extended periods during any time in my life. Bernadette has map skills, without which we would get nowhere.
I have not lost a key in a long time but I was due so this morning I locked the one key in the Fiat. The car rental agency had also lost their spare key so that is why they were breaking into the car. We were on our way to Tapani I think or maybe that is not even a place. Giovanni looks over the lot we park in and treats us like a friend. Giovanni and the lead mechanic breaking into our Fiat with a coat hanger seemed for a minute like they might go to blows but it all worked out. Pretty much you have to let the guy with the coat hanger do his thing. It is another skill which requires a certain amount of concentration. I had not said a thing or gotten too close and may have even dosed off for a moment when the guy, the lead mechanic, who had so far not really shown any sign that he knew I was there, called out to me so that I could be made aware of his success. He and his partner we rewarded with 10 euros a piece and I think seeing this, and knowing that he could have done just as well is perhaps why Giovanni later chased us down and suggested we honor the Saint with a little appreciation as well.
I cannot really go into what we have eaten but some of it has been spectactular, especially anything resembling a little fish. We have had pasta so fresh that it is like born on your plate and speaking of birth I am after ten days in Italy starting to resemble a man who while still skinny as a rail, is about to give birth to a 12 pound baby.
We were in Rome for only enough time to land, eat two meals and be driven the three hours to Pesaro by our friend. We picked enough grapes on our third day in Italy to remind me of that distant distant past when I for about a year worked in the Texas oilfields, 12 hour days, ten day stretches. I should say more about the grape picking and maybe I will later but now I should get back to the house. I have gone swimming in the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. I have not been that tempted to be online and I cannot find the apostrophe key on the keyboard so if you have been wondering why no contractions, well there you have it.
I think we are going out to eat in a few minutes. I am not the least bit hungry but that does not seem to be stopping me. We are not going to the opera tomorrow but The Teatro Massimo, around the corner from us, is going with Madame Butterfly for its opening night. Ciao.
How To Make Dried Flower Arrangements
The tobacco leaves are harvested from the bottom of the plant upwards as they begin to yellow and I guess are vine ripened in this sense. The leaves are picked by hand by mostly Mexican workers and loaded onto small 6 by 8 foot trailers with 4 foot high plywood sides and stacked high and slightly above the top and then pulled behind slow moving pickup trucks down highway 49 in North Carolina, on their way to being graded and weighed at area processing plants. The bigger and bottom-most leaves may be picked in mid summer but the harvest begins in earnest in late August and into September. During this latter period the roads are littered with tobacco leaves and suggest a time gone by unaffected by a hundred years of progress and all things modern.
There is a well maintained family cemetery less than a mile behind the house I have been working on, through thick hardwood forests cut here and there with footpaths opening onto tobacco or corn or soybean fields, ponds with forgotten bass and bream, and the occasional sagging barn and farmhouse, and in the cemetery is the remains of a man who in the mid nineteenth century was an area "Negro speculator," which to my imperfect understanding means he acquired and then resold slaves as a profitable business. He and other landowners in the area are commemorated for their years of hard work and sizable real estate holdings by having most of the area's back roads named after them, and many are also remembered, with surprising detail, by recorded slave narratives. Slaves, some one hundred years old, interviewed in the 1930s and 40s, offer a remarkable insight into a time that for some people is surely looked back to as a "good ole day" and to others is seen as a time of unimaginable horror. The slave narratives are as interesting for their kind memories as they are for the evil retold. There was it seems always a good man or woman doing battle with the bad. Which is not meant as an overly simplified blanket of forgiveness for badness but just to suggest that there have always been people willing to stand up and fight the good fight. And that nothing is hopeless.
Not without my good friend Doubt but feeling ok, perhaps even full of myself, pulling away from the end of the dead end road and the property almost entirely detail-cleaned of it's momentous yard garbage--garbage spread and in some cases buried over one-third of the two and a half acres, and taking in the house prepped and scraped and primed and double-coated with fresh paint, inside and out, and even allowing for its persistent appearance of lower, working-class dowdiness, which cannot be cured with paint or new roof or new central air and heating system, or refinished wood floors, new linoleum, new second hand appliances, some repaired plumbing and electric, the new coat of varnish on kitchen cabinets or even the new shelving paper on every cabinet shelf and in every drawer, I am still driving away with a sense of pride, which has been long in coming and is a pretty fair distance away from the palpable shame and I dare-say horror I experienced pulling up to the property two years ago, after ignoring it for every bit of fifteen years.
Knowing that this is but my penultimate exit, that I will be back for a final go over, I turn left from gravel onto the paved highway 49, away from that family cemetery behind me, and I begin passing tobacco fields with large clusters of Mexican workers. I wave to them and see them in my rear view mirror turning to see who it was waving and perhaps wondering could I be the better employer (or who knows, employee) sometime down the road. The heat had broken a few days previous and the red dirt and green/yellowing tobacco and blue sky is not mired by the haze of superheated wet air and the view is crisp and clean. I look at a variety of weeds growing on both sides of the road and see possible dried flower arrangements.
The tobacco leaves are harvested from the bottom of the plant upwards as they begin to yellow and I guess are vine ripened in this sense. The leaves are picked by hand by mostly Mexican workers and loaded onto small 6 by 8 foot trailers with 4 foot high plywood sides and stacked high and slightly above the top and then pulled behind slow moving pickup trucks down highway 49 in North Carolina, on their way to being graded and weighed at area processing plants. The bigger and bottom-most leaves may be picked in mid summer but the harvest begins in earnest in late August and into September. During this latter period the roads are littered with tobacco leaves and suggest a time gone by unaffected by a hundred years of progress and all things modern.
There is a well maintained family cemetery less than a mile behind the house I have been working on, through thick hardwood forests cut here and there with footpaths opening onto tobacco or corn or soybean fields, ponds with forgotten bass and bream, and the occasional sagging barn and farmhouse, and in the cemetery is the remains of a man who in the mid nineteenth century was an area "Negro speculator," which to my imperfect understanding means he acquired and then resold slaves as a profitable business. He and other landowners in the area are commemorated for their years of hard work and sizable real estate holdings by having most of the area's back roads named after them, and many are also remembered, with surprising detail, by recorded slave narratives. Slaves, some one hundred years old, interviewed in the 1930s and 40s, offer a remarkable insight into a time that for some people is surely looked back to as a "good ole day" and to others is seen as a time of unimaginable horror. The slave narratives are as interesting for their kind memories as they are for the evil retold. There was it seems always a good man or woman doing battle with the bad. Which is not meant as an overly simplified blanket of forgiveness for badness but just to suggest that there have always been people willing to stand up and fight the good fight. And that nothing is hopeless.
Not without my good friend Doubt but feeling ok, perhaps even full of myself, pulling away from the end of the dead end road and the property almost entirely detail-cleaned of it's momentous yard garbage--garbage spread and in some cases buried over one-third of the two and a half acres, and taking in the house prepped and scraped and primed and double-coated with fresh paint, inside and out, and even allowing for its persistent appearance of lower, working-class dowdiness, which cannot be cured with paint or new roof or new central air and heating system, or refinished wood floors, new linoleum, new second hand appliances, some repaired plumbing and electric, the new coat of varnish on kitchen cabinets or even the new shelving paper on every cabinet shelf and in every drawer, I am still driving away with a sense of pride, which has been long in coming and is a pretty fair distance away from the palpable shame and I dare-say horror I experienced pulling up to the property two years ago, after ignoring it for every bit of fifteen years.
Knowing that this is but my penultimate exit, that I will be back for a final go over, I turn left from gravel onto the paved highway 49, away from that family cemetery behind me, and I begin passing tobacco fields with large clusters of Mexican workers. I wave to them and see them in my rear view mirror turning to see who it was waving and perhaps wondering could I be the better employer (or who knows, employee) sometime down the road. The heat had broken a few days previous and the red dirt and green/yellowing tobacco and blue sky is not mired by the haze of superheated wet air and the view is crisp and clean. I look at a variety of weeds growing on both sides of the road and see possible dried flower arrangements.