Kelly Nolan has a lot of friends, and she has had them for a long time, and they love her dearly. Everyone says she is a great friend, and that doesn’t surprise me. I feel like she’s a great friend of mine, and I love taking her picture – she is a strong and loving person, and a strong woman, comfortable with herself and full of the spirit of love.
I am astonished every week at the grace and ease with which she tends a busy bar and handles a busy restaurant all by herself and all at the same time. She pours the drinks, runs the cash register, takes the orders, clears the tables, brings the food, writes the checks, checks on the customers.
Kelly is warm and patient, but I am not fooled by that radiant smile. Underneath there is a spirit of steel and strength. She has managed the very difficult act of grace.
The photo bombs are a chance for her friends to enter the portrait once in awhile, and this is fitting, because they are so much a part of her life. Their affectionate for her, and hers for them is so genuine, it is joy to capture it on film.
I wanted to let you know that the voluntary payments page is working, a software glitch shut it down for a few days.I like it better when it is working.
You have three inexpensive options for supporting the blog, your voluntary payments – which can be easily canceled at any time – make the blog possible and support my writing, photography and animal care for the farm.
It is good to be paid for my work and if you find the blog useful, entertaining or meaningful, please consider this program, which has helped my photography and the blog grow. You can also donate via the one-time donate button at the bottom of each post..
Check out the voluntary payments here, or the one-time donations in any amount here, and thanks. You make all of this possible, including my work with the Army Of Good. We accept Paypal and major credit cards and no financial information of any kind is stored on my site or servers.
Dominick works as a chef at the Round House Cafe, and we have become friends, I am fond of him and admire him. He has not had the simplest life, but Scott Carrino has mentored him and they have worked together for years. I met him while he was helping with the maple sugaring at Pompanuck Farm.
I see him all the time at the Round House, he is a whiz at cooking and pizza-making.
Dom seems to be thriving at the cafe, and he often tortures me on the phone when he can, claiming to be the owner of a Chinese or other ethic restaurant when I call.
He has tricked more than once, and I have retaliated by pretending to be an angry or hearing-impaired old grouch when I call. I’ve gotten him once or twice too.
We just click with one another, and he is one of my favorite portrait subjects. Dom has a great sense of humor and an expressive face.
In New Mexico – we were there during the Days Of The Dead celebrations – I got a couple of painted and decorated “skull” candles. One of the just cried out “bring me to Dom!”, so I bought it and brought it home and finally remembered to give it to him today.
I’ve given Dom a number of birthday presents – books and gift certificates to Battenkill Books mostly – but I never got the sense he had read any of them, so I thought the candle might work.
He was delighted, it was the perfect gift for him. He loved it without even knowing about the Days Of The Dead.
The New Mexico kitchen is finished, Maria painted it in bright yellow soft green and some dashes of red. We are keeping New Mexico in our lives while also keeping the farm and town we have come to love. The lesson is that we can keep both in our lives in different ways.
We have begun planning for another short trip in the Spring, scouring sites for cheap fares and inexpensive lodging. We have become good at that, we are learning to be creative with the money that we have. The next farm project is the installation of a ceiling track in our dining room.
We found one at Lowe’s for $300 and it looks great and will help brighten the one dark room left in our farmhouse, the dining room. We had an electrician lined up, but he didn’t come and refused to answer my texts and e-mails until I said we had to look for someone else if he didn’t reply.
I have no problem with somebody who is busy and takes awhile, but for some reason, I can’t abide people who will not respond to me to explain themselves. We need to know when someone is coming, so we can be sure to be home and deal with the dogs and animals.
When I told him he needed to contact me and tell me when he might come, or we would find someone else, he did find the time to text me and he complained that he was overworked. He seemed annoyed that I was bothering him.
We are looking to connect a portable used gas generator to our house for those big storms that knock power out for days these days. We need the water pump to work for the animals, and the refrigerator to stay on for food and medications. Heat would be nice too, and hot water.
We hired the electrician to hook up the generator for us and also to install the new ceiling lamp that has been lying around for weeks.
“I have six houses and a franchise restaurant I’m working on,” he said testily, adding that “I would be very skeptical if I found an electrician that wasn’t busy, I am on seven days a week, 12 hour days.” He didn’t seem to grasp – he texted when he wanted to – that I was upset with being ignored, not delayed. And he was suggesting I couldn’t do better, that anyone who was available and responsive was no good.
I told him to keep the money we had given him for his time, and wished him well. I said I was busy too, and have worked seven days a week for about 30 years, 12 hour days are standard for me. I think it never occurred to him that someone like me might work hard also.
I live in awe of these men and women here who know how things work. I respect them and treat them with great care. I pay promptly and without complaint, I pride myself on that. I often pay more than asked if the work is good.
But I won’t be dissed. That hasn’t worked for me.
So we parted company. The point for me was not that he was busy and would take a while to get here, that didn’t bother me a bit. The problem for me was that he wouldn’t respond to requests about when he would come at all, as if my own time didn’t matter. I also hate whining.
The working people up here do work very hard, and the good ones are always busy, that is par for the course. People like me are totally dependent on them. Most of them treat me very well.
I am a whiz on the phone, that is one thing I am very good it. I got some recommendations and I got another electrician right away. He is coming this weekend (hopefully.) He’s done work for us before, I think it will be fine.
It was pride that changed angels into devils, wrote St. Augustine, and it is humility that makes men as angels. I have leaned a lot about pride and humility in my life, and in recent years became painfully aware that I had become my own joke.
One of my favorite jokes was about men, and it went like this: the only men I truly loved, I used to say, were those men who had either been tortured as children, or humiliated as adults. This was a self-deprecating joke, I knew, because I was not the kind of man I loved.
I think it was a signal to people, especially women, that I knew I was broken, I think I was asking for mercy in my own tortured way.
I was, in fact, tortured as a child, but it took my utter humiliation as an adult to shatter my pride and set me on the path to humility. Breakdowns can be a gift – we get to recover, if we choose. I set out to find the angels.
And humility, like empathy, I have learned, are the highest aspirations of any human, especially men.
“This is the very perfection of man” wrote Augustine, to find out his own imperfections.” This is the time for that, it seems. Men’s perfections have never been more on display. All of the men I know are seeing them, and those who can’t see them are feeling the wrath of God.
I found this to be true. For many years I had lived without love or human connection. When I met Maria, and we finally fell in love – no easy task for either of us – she told me she loved me because I was the first man in her life that she could talk to, she had dreamed of someone like me, and in fact, had conjured me.
This stunned me, because it suggested I was finally beginning to become the kind of man I wanted to be, a man who cold listen, feel and hear. I didn’t dare to believe it. But love is a powerful thing, it broke down the walls.
Women, I have come to understand, seem more often to grasp the value of empathy and humility, and it should be obvious to everyone who can see and breathe by now why this is so.
When I think of some of our political leaders and of the parade of sex devils we have endured this autumn, I see fractured people who lack both empathy and any kind of humility. To dominate the weak and the vulnerable, in politics, or the workplace, in policy or sex personal behavior is to be arrogant and prideful, to be devoid of humility or any kind of compassion.
The revolution that began when I was young has exploded again and is on the march. The defenders and enablers are clustered at the parapets, throwing rocks and spears, but they seem hopelessly doomed to me. I guess these things just take time. The old ways of men are coming apart, right before us, every single day.
When I endured my worst humiliations, I began reading St. Augustine, along with Thomas Merton and Joseph Campbell, and I read more than once that beauty grows in you to the extent that love grows, because charity itself is the soul’s beauty. For some years, I sought out God, while I never found him, I did find many of the men who created and nourished the idea of him.
When you are broken, you are open, everything is a gift.
I saw that love had died in me, and charity along with it, and when I refused to live a loveless life, I opened my heart to love and found it, charity became the beauty of my soul.
I had become my own joke, I had brought my own joke to life. In order to become the kind of men who could love or be truly loved, I had to come apart and try to put myself together again. I will say without complaint that it has been a long and very hard road, and I know now that I will never come to the end of it, the challenge is to stay on the path.
I don’t tell that joke any longer, it seems false and contrived to me now. It is not funny.
If the very perfection of a man is to find and accept his own imperfections, then I am on the path. Humility is a gate, not a door, and when it opens, there is a whole other world to see.
