Hung Out to Dry? More Like Hanging Out to Cry

Happy tears, though. I should provide a path through the thickness and denseness of that metaphor, though.

As I have mentioned here before, festivals of various kinds are the staple of the definitely not endless summers  of Western New York. There are celebrations of fruits, vegetables and flowers. There is music, there is art, and thanks to the Buffalo band the Goo Goo Dolls, there is “Music Is Art.“ That is a daylong celebration, which this year took place this past Saturday, that has been running for the last few decades with multiple stages and dozens of performers, many of whom I’ve come to love and even meet.

I didn’t go. It took place all day at Buffalo Riverworks. This is a venue in the shadow of the mostly abandoned grain silos that once made up some of Buffalo’s mightiest industrial shoulders. I had various reasons for sitting this one out,  primary among them being the need to take it easy before another full day planned for yesterday- of  going to Rochester for an even more established event that Emily was a part of this year for the first time.

We have our Allentown Art Festival, which Emily participated in back in early June. Rochester has, or had, a number of events of similar stature-  including Corn Hill in July, traditionally the hottest weekend of the summer, and one in my original Park Avenue neighborhood that got killed by Covid a few years ago. The only one we’ve ever attended there from afar, however, is the one at the major art gallery affiliated with the U of R, known as the Clothesline Festival. Originally named because the artists literally displayed their artwork from clotheslines on the Memorial Art Gallery lawn, it has evolved into a two-day ticketed event with live music, food trucks, and hundreds of tents exhibiting everything from tchotchkes to kayaks.  It only opened to out of state vendors in 2018, and Emily applied and got her acceptance into this one even before Allentown approved her this spring.

Even though we spent more time with her at and after that one back in June, this trip wound up being the more meaningful experience for at least the two 'rents.  For one thing, it was another three months beyond Eleanor's first knee surgery; back in June, she was still going through rehab and dealing with major limitations on activity and movement.  Also, because it was close to home, even though we spent more time with her at that one, this one was more of a chance for us to experience what Emily really does when she's making part of her living at this. She booked a Rochester AirBNB for the weekend, worked ahead of time to get all her paperwork in order as an authorized out-of-state vendor, and made all her own arrangements for travel, loading and unloading. It's a job, and she's getting damned good at it.

All we had to do was show up. Although the rehab has gone incredibly better over the intervening months, I knew parking would be a potential issue. Unlike Allentown's bigger size and ample supply of side streets, these Gallery grounds have no parking for attendees of this event, local ramps and parking lots surge their pricing, and the nearby streets have little parking to begin with, some of it closed off for emergency vehicles and all of it in high demand. I printed our tickets separately in full expectation I'd be dropping Eleanor at a gate, parking in a remote lot and taking a shuttle or a hike.

Nope: less than a baseball diamond from the Prince Street entrance to the festival, a car pulled out of a space and we slid right into it.  This guy was there to greet us on the way in to the grounds:





Wondering who made him? Wonder no more:



(Speaking of, I got off perhaps the world's worst Dad joke outside the kid's presence. She'd gone off a bit after 1 p.m. in search of lunch, having heard rumors of a food truck with supposedly healthy garbage plates; I guessed veggie burger, gluten-free bread slices and rescue-only dogs.  I tried to sell the merch in her absence, showing people how the QR codes on her paintings and prints worked and handing out her cards. I explained none of them were mine: “The artist is at lunch. We made her; she made everything else.” The healthy plate turned out to be cole slaw instead of mac and chicken instead of hamburger. No dogs, rescue or otherwise, were harmed.)

A look at her little slice of art from the outside and inside, respectively:




Hers was one of only a handful we saw on the grounds that wasn't a dull white tent. Most went with nothing distinctive on the outside. Artists, sheesh;)

Another of the milestones for us on this visit? Eleanor making an actual purchase of product from the artist. A bunch from her collection of stickers-



(the Josh Allen superhero was quite popular with the crowd in general)

- and a very special fullsize print, inspired by Emily's artistic recollection of a lanterned garden her mom created in our back yard.

(Yes, I took a picture of it. No, I'm not posting it. Stickers are one thing, but I'm not getting in trouble with one of my own kid's copyright trolls for posting one of her images on the internet without agreement and payment. It's not on her website yet; if it shows up, I'll link to it.)

We spent another hour or so after her lunch break just people-watching and listening, and trying to not distract her or the customers from the business at hand. All of the interactions with festival guests at and away from her tent were fun and positive- well, except for the one Karen we passed on the way back to the car, who was lecturing her maybe 7-year-old boy as they came out of Cutler Union: 

Never say anything like that to embarrass me again!

He's SEVEN, bitch- it's his JOB to embarrass you, but not nearly as good a job as you were doing on your own:P

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By the time we got on the move, we had rumblies in the tummies  and the nearby Village Gate strip of shops and restaurants was charging ten bucks parking to even see if Selena's Mexican was open, so we SouthWedged it over to India House, a longstanding South Asian place on South Clinton. Biryani and Shrimp Korma to die for, leftovers for days- and one guy was waiting, serving, busing (but not, it turned out, cooking) everything entirely on his own.   We also once again snagged a perfect parking space, this one mere steps from their door. Technically, though, it was in front of this barber shop next door, with an owner with a wicked sense of humor:




Most of our favorite Indian joints closer to home have gone Namaste! on us in recent times, so it was a treat getting to this one that's been around from over 30 years ago:)

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Those memories I have from three decades back? They finally helped me to an understanding about how they are different from Eleanor's memories spanning twice that time.  I had something of an epiphany about why it's rare for Eleanor to want to come with me to any show, concert or other event in Rochester, even though it's only an  hour away and I always offer to do the driving. It took this amount of a mother-daughter bonding opportunity to break the usual gravitational push away from her going. Why wouldn't she want to go to a place she grew up in, lived more than four times longer than I did and probably knows more about, even now, than I do?

Duh, Ray- you just answered your own question.  In my imagination, I pictured a strange yet plausible alternative timeline for my own life, in which maybe I lived in a similar house, with a similar wife, but in some similar suburb of northern New Jersey. And imagined further:  if that similar wife had grown up, or at least lived with me for a time, on Long Island, and she observed the same things about ME not wanting to go back there:  It's only an hour away, I'll even drive, and why wouldn't you want to go back to where you lived way more years than I did and have so many memories?

Exactly. For East Meadow is that place, for me, that is such a mishmash of sentiment, absence of once-loved people and places, but especially trauma- my own and that of others close to me.  Rochester, for Eleanor, had plenty of all of those things. This weekend brought out particularly painful memories of her own mother-daughter relationship: to a mom who never would have paid actual U.S. currency to support her artistic endeavors. Who wouldn't let her take art classes in high school because she wanted her daughter to be on the Honors track. Who relegated her to a musty cellar when trying to paint on her own in her own room. And a mother who, when Eleanor used one of those advanced high school courses to submit a painting as a final project, had the resulting artwork framed but, years later, threw it out. That's a month of therapy right there, I said when she recounted those memories.

I think this experience helped immensely in healing the wounds from that maternal relationship- as well as helping her to realize the one she has with her own daughter wasn't nearly as broken.

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We rolled in our driveway around 5 p.m. Eleanor wound up, well, all wound up after we got home from all the feels just described, most of which she would express in words and on paper over the ensuing hours. The animals were even more wacky than usual on our arrival, that was no doubt simply a result of us both being out of the house for six whole hours without giving them any attention or food. The horror!

The late lunch took the place of dinner, and reading and reflecting replaced the usual nightly ritual of film or television show. I took another crack at The Crow Road, a novel briefly homaged during the recent Good Omens series and also the subject of a British miniseries now waiting in our DVD queue. The book’s a slow slog but I’m sticking with. On page 63, Our Hero, a young man named Prentice,  references an old Caledonian legend about Pontius Pilate having been born in Fortingall, Scotland. That’s a “stop and lookit the fook oop” fact if ever there was one, and sure enough, it has some arguable basis in fact.

Although, as I told it to Eleanor at the time, We can’t be certain. It’s not like they had a Saint Maury of Povich back then to sort things.