4 posts tagged “olean”
Where have I been?
- Editing the last few chapters of my novel. The storytelling's pretty much completed. It's mostly punctuation and proofreading now. Although there may be a hidden message when I see where I've written: "She turned his head."
- Quick visit to Olean, NY, where I get a re-charge from a non-fishing trip with my Sunday NY Times-reading friends. Now I need a recipe for yosenabe.
- Back to saying "no" to requests for charitable support. Especially from whiners who accuse my employer of dissing a diversity segment, when we've given more than $1 million to support that constituency over the years. "We don't find value in underwriting your online knitting festival, but we support knitters in general."
Spent the weekend raking accumulated snow off my roof. There's speculation that the weight of the snow is damaging the cinder block foundation of our house. I'm dubious, but the snow came a-tumbling down, anyway.
The quilt at left is one of a series of handmade quilts. They've been donated by a couple of temple members for auction on 3Bay. The idea is to auction the quilts to earn enough to pay to restore one of our Torahs.
Here are a few more from the collection. If you're truly interested in bidding on these, visit my friend Carl's 3Bay listings.
Sure enough, I turn to my left, and there's -- yet another quilt!
I smell a conspiracy. Especially since I'm a tapestry man.
Cruise night:
Once a week, the gray-haired hot-rod enthusiasts in our town congregate in the evening with their fire-breathing Detroit hardware. Norm sets up a sound system that plays top-40 hits from the 1960s, while the rest of the boys open the hoods of their freshly waxed Torinos and GTOs. They display snapshots of the before-and-after restoration work that resurrected their real-life Hot Wheels.
I never owned one of these four-wheeled rockets. The cars of my misspent youth were a 1968 Ford station wagon with a Mustang V-8 that kept snapping motor mounts. For some reason, my hot-wired brain cells link the defunct Ford with later pushing a girlfriend's semi-operative Plymouth Cricket through the snowy streets of Olean, NY. Another tale for another time.
The rolling mint julep above is as near a perfect copy of Arnold's troublemaking ragtop as I've seen at Cruise Night.
In real life, Arnold wrapped his F-85 around a telephone pole, and ended up driving a Toyota Corolla. He taught me to drive a manual transmission on that little car, with the warning: "If you don't get this in 10 minutes, I'll break your legs."
Sweet memories.
By the way, I have my scruples about Cruise Nights. There's a nice one earlier in the week, just down the road in Fairport, NY. But I won't go, because the organizers insist on labelling it "Kruz Night."
Sorry, guys. Urban slang is one thing, but these street rod aficionados ought to know better. If you can afford to restore a 1960s classic car, you can afford an effin' dictionary.
Oh, and to be perfectly factual: they don't cruise. They park their cars, chat about gear ratios, and shoo little kids away from marking permanent fingerprints on their cars.
Winter drags on. And I think it's going to drive me crazy.
Luckily, I have an insane amount of photos. Unluckily, many of them are Polaroids, dating back to the SX70 era. The SX70 was a semi-cool camera in its day, spitting a photo into your hand a second after pressing the shutter. Wait a minute, and you could watch it develop in your hand. The pictures themselves weren't anything great, but they had the cachet of being "instant."
The whole Polaroid thing died a couple of years ago. Polaroid got steamrolled by digital photography. A bunch of investment bankers ended up with the brand name. As a result, anything you buy with "Polaroid" on it is likely made in some Asian factory, and it no longer has roots in California or Boston, where the company once thrived.
But, rummaging through myUntidy Archives, I unearthed these early 1980s Polaroids of my college theatre friends from St. Bonaventure University:
Handsome bunch of actors, you bet. We were semi-famous for meandering the streets of Olean, NY, looking for offbeat trinkets and hard-to-find copies of the New York Times. Olean's a solid seven hours west of New York City -- Cleveland and Buffalo are closer.
But Olean, and our theatre director, Stephen W. Gray-Lewis, always welcomed us back for a visit. When he died last year, we all felt as if a very long-running theatrical production had had its last curtain call.
And we gathered last September once more to remember our dear director. Digital camera this time, in place of the Polaroid:
We're not exactly ready to go club hopping. But on a frosty March evening, it's good to remember old friends, and thank the photographer who snapped this photo.
