Day: February 2, 2018

Maria does not pose for photos, and I don’t ask her too, posing makes both of us uneasy. We take what we can, hit or miss.

I was trying out my new art lens at the Round House Cafe in Cambridge, where we went for lunch Friday. The lens was a small, simple 35 mm with Russian glass and I told Maria I was just practicing with it, and she rolled her eyes and went on wither lunch.

She finished her sandwich and soup and very daintily and happily started working on one of Lisa Carrino’s achingly delicious Strawberry Galettes, a French pastry that is one of Lisa’s specialties.

Maria has an incredible sweet tooth, she gets grumpy and out of sorts if she hasn’t  had something sweet to eat. I make sure to look for cookies and sweets when I shop.

Her mother is the same way, both love sweet things, are skinny and never gain weight.

My portrait bell went off and I leaned forward and took this shot. Since it is a manual focus, I never know if I got it or not, but I lucked out this time and captured something new in her face. I loved the way her face was framed so beautifully with her Beanie Slouch hat, her colorful red scarf.

She was loving her Galetle, I was not ten inches from her face, and had no idea what the aperture setting was. This is the thing I love about the art lenses, which are manual and free of electronics. You either figure out how to take a photograph and learn the light or you just don’t get a picture.

I think I caught a slice of Maria’s attitude, she has a lot of attitude, and the Strawberry Galette is her friend. She looked quite at home in that moment,  as if we were in a Paris cafe.

At storms’ end this morning, we came out into a pure white world, Ed Gulley’s Tin Man standing guard in the cold and the whitness. On such mornings, the winter pasture is bright and pure, as the earth once was, I imagine. It was a lovely thing to see.

When I first met Dom at the Round House Cafe, he was under the wing of Scott Carrino, the co-owner of the cafe. He seemed a bit of a lost boy to me, he had trouble getting to work, he overslept, was distracted. Scott stuck with him, and it is pleasure to watch Dom evolve, he runs the kitchen on most days, and runs the cash register when it is busy.

He works hard and is a grounding presence at the care, he is a gracious and welcoming host and a conscientious chef. I rattled him this morning by telling him looked  spiritual, even Christic, like a prophet or a seer today.

For once, he is speechless. Dom has been trying to build his own car from bought and donated parts, and after a s eries of catastrophes, he is giving up on making his own car and thinking of buying one. Yesterday, he rode his bike to work in the snow.

He’ll get there, I’ve loved watching this very nice and competent man emerge. And good for Scott for sticking with him.

I am so happy to share the good news that the Army Of Good is very good, and that angels are real and are blessing our work. Yesterday, I asked for help in keeping Michelle and Ababele, two boys from the Congo, who came to America a few months ago from a U.N. refugee camp in Tanzania, now have the tuition money they need to keep them in the RISSE after school program until the summer recess.

The tuition fund received the money in hours.

We will worry about tuition for the rest of year later, I received more than $2,500 for the boy’s tuition last night and early this morning. A few weeks ago, we brought groceries to their mother Sifa, who has eight children. The father of the older boys was killed in the camp, the father of the younger boys remains in the refugee camp, he is so far unable to obtain a visa to join his family there.

Sifa fled the genocide in the Congo and has been in the crowded and violent refugee camp for more than 20 years. Because she has three young children at home, including twin babies,  she cannot work. Because the boys can’t speak English they are struggling to advance.

The boys attend the Albany Public Schools, but speak almost no English, in order to advance through the schools and through their new life in America, they desperately need the experience language teachers at RISSE, the refugee and immigrant center in Albany.

RISSE Director Of Operations Francis Sengabo asked me and the AOG if we could help, the school lost more than $75,000 in tuition subsidies for refugee and immigrant students when federal subsidies were slashed or eliminated this year. They are struggling desperately to keep needy students in the afterschool program, where they get warm meals and urgently needed lessons in acclimating to America..

I told them we can’t undertake to help all of those children, not at once, but would try to help these two, perhaps others later. Tuition is $500 a month, $10,000 for the year. I can’t thank you enough, this money will get them into the afterschool program through the Spring. We are also helping get the boys boots and some clothes.

If you wish to help these boys, you can contribute via my post office box, P.O Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or Paypal, [email protected]. I’d love to help get them through the year, but we don’t need to do that at once. I like to move in smaller ways, small acts of great kindness.

Thanks to the very generous people who answered this call, and who showed this family and others the true spirit of America. Angels are real. Sifa has invited us to dinner to thank us – Maria, Ali and me. We are happy to accept. Her most urgent request is for her kids to get the education they need, and were denied in their refugee camp.

This aid will change lives.

I had our own little “State Of The Dog” talk with Gus this morning, I said “listen you little warthog in a dog’s body, this is a muzzle for you to wear when you are outside so you can learn to stop eating like a pig and stop throwing up all over our home? Get it?”

I am getting a lot of messages, I said, pointing out that with this muzzle you are looking more and more like Hannibal Lecter, so I might change your name to Hannibal  Wulf-Katz. Get it?

I think he did. We’ll see. He does look a bit like Hannibal Lecter.