It is Sunday morning, our last Sunday as residents of 1482 East Ave.  Carol is in the kitchen baking!  I have been clearing things up and cleaning in preparation for an open house this afternoon.  Maybe the buyer, who must be out there, will come through today.  We have so much going on it is hard to fathom.

Carol has put together a show for October, all the parts are at Lumiere.  In September she will begin the final assembly of frames.  We are moving out of this wonderful townhouse after 21 years on Thursday to a glorious apartment on St Paul St, two blocks north of Main in the Warner Building.  This building is a cast iron and brick building put up in 1869.  For more about the history click here.  We hope to get settled fairly quickly as we are leaving for Tanzania, traveling with Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT) on August 15, returning August 31.

The trip includes Kilimanjaro, Ngorogoro Crater, and Serengeti.  Hopefully it will include many large mammals and birds we have never seen before outside of Discovery Channel and books that date to my childhood which we have unearthed in the preparation for moving.

We will stay put for at least 18 days on our return, through Rosh HaShana and then leave for a local Tiffin Rally in Bath NY.  We don’t know where we will find ourselves for Yom Kippur yet.  Could be back in Rochester (the drive is only 90 minutes) or . . .

Things we have found in the preparation for packing:  Letters from my maternal grandfather, Abe Levey to Mildred during courting and later as he made his rounds as a traveling salesman.  The originals of the v mail my father sent Mom from England, apparently they returned the uncensored letters after photographing them for transport.  Every letter I sent Carol from 1962 to 1964, mostly from Brown.  Just think what we have lost.  Email, Skype, phone are wonderful tools for keeping in touch, but they don’t leave of record that you can hold in your hand and laugh and shed tears over 48 years later.  The record of our history comes to a halt when we stop writing on paper.  I know emails can be saved, as long as you retain backups, and FaceBook posting will haunt you 3 years later, but will FaceBook, and its timeline, exist and the means to access it 30 years from now.  How many memories have I recorded on reel to reel and then transcribed to cassette only to find that my last cassette player is being left behind and the tapes are oxidizing and virtually unplayable?  Where are the photos I saved to floppy disk and to Iomega and to – I can’t even remember the names of the ever larger memory devices that became obsolete as soon as I adopted them?  Carol’s bread cookbook, published on 5 1/4 floppies for IBM (!) and Apple //e is coming with us, but there is no equipment to read the disks and the format was proprietary and the publishing company was gone after the second royalty check.  She never made a complete print copy, just proofs.  She does have the recipes and photos in a box.

I could become maudlin (have become so?) We are giving up four stories of home with a five step entrance, not because it is a problem for us, but it has become problematic for some friends to even gain entrance to our living room coming up those five steps.  Who is to say we will always be able to negotiate them?  In the mean time we choose demanding trips and are clear that our cross country motorhome travel will continue in G Whiz so long as we can  mount the stairs and find the life a pleasure.

I had thought to post some pictures I took of the apartment, but decided not to.  The place is empty and the wall plates are off and it was being prepared for paint.  Later when we have moved in and put up some art.

Now to post and be off so the Realtor can show the house.

It’s over!  We heard the last note at 11:15 last night at Max.

We started last night with a walk down East Ave as usual.  When we approached Alexander Street, the stage for Thunder Body and Trombone Shorty was up and as we walked past, Trombone Shorty was on stage doing his sound check.  That was all we heard of him.  By 4:15 we were in line to get into Hatch Hall, where we had heard our first performance of this festival.  This last night we waited for the 5:45 performance 90 minutes in line to hear JoAnne Brakeen solo on the piano.  It was worth the wait.  She played over an hour of straight piano jazz that left us breathless.  It is really good to be reminded that there is still great classic jazz being performed.

We left there and picked up dinner on the street.  Carol went to Ludwig’s for her usual salad and I ran to Java Joe in hopes that they hadn’t sold out yet.  They hadn’t and I had a great sandwich, this one was called “Dark Horse” and it had roast beef and their wonderful chipotle mayonnaise.  Don’t order the chipotle if you don’t like really hot.  After eating we walked over to Lutheran Church to hear Hakon Kornstad.  He plays Tenor Sax, Operatic Tenor, Flute, Flutenette and a great looping machine.  He is one of the few performers we heard who made great use of the electronics without letting it get in the way of the performance.  He laid down a couple of rhythm tracks and some background melodies, as many as a total of four or more, and then played over them.  He used the wind sound from the sax and the flapping of the keys to make rhythm.  He sang over the loop a couple of times.  His flutenette is actually a flute with the mouthpiece replaced with a Clarinet mouthpiece.  It was a wonderful performance and we were sad to hear it end, but it was time to get back in line. . .

We wanted to hear Chic Gamine at Max and it seemed clear from the 6:15 show that getting in would be restricted to those who were in line when they opened the door.  As we approached the line was already at Main St at 8:30 for the 10 PM show!  One last 90 minute wait.  This wait too paid off.  The four woman sing, play a variety of instruments and entertain along with their percussionist, the only male in the group.  Between his broken English, he is French Canadian, and there jokes it was difficult to stop laughing when they were singing.  Sing they can.  They did one acapella number, this was the source of a joke, as they said someone in the audience at another show had asked them to do an Acapulco number (type acapella into a document and run the spell checker).  They sang and played with much energy.  We would both love to go to another performance by them.


Sadly, we began our last walk home on East Avenue from the Jazz Festival.  This years festival is over and next year, all things going as planned, our walk will be from St Paul St and much shorter, only 1/2 a mile at most instead of 2 1/2 miles.  It was a great festival and the weather could not have been better.  I am not sure when I will post again.  We are not going out on the road this summer as we have a household to move and things to sell.  We are going to Tanzania from August 15 to 31.  I do not expect to be able to post from that trip as we will have limited electricity and doubtful internet availability in the Serengeti  and other places we will be going.  There will be a major posting of photos and maybe some stories when we home.