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A member of the state Democratic Party leadership team has canceled an event he organized for Melissa Seale, a Democratic candidate for state Senate in the 45th District, after trying unsuccessfully to ban three women, also Democrats, from the event.

Jason Clark of Saranac Lake, assistant secretary for the state Democratic Party and vice chairman of the Essex County Democratic Party, organized an event for May 7 at Rivertrail Beerworks in Saranac Lake to support Seale, a nurse practitioner from Glens Falls running for the seat now held by Dan Stec.

Stec, a Republican from Queensbury, is seeking reelection.

Clark canceled the event after Seale refused to cooperate with his attempt to ban Jesse Liberty-Murnane of Morrisonville, Colleen Mannix of Malone and Laura Garrant of South Glens Falls.

Clark feared for his safety, he said, when he learned Liberty-Murnane was attending, because she had said to him more than once online words to the effect of “Wait until I see you in person.”

“I’ll stand by that. At the end of the day, I did not feel safe,” Clark said.

All three women had engaged in multiple online arguments with Clark over the past several months. Although all are Democrats, the three women have expressed support for progressive policies and candidates, while Clark argues that more conservative Democratic candidates have a better chance of winning in northern New York.

Seale has rescheduled her event for May 21, emphasizing that everyone is welcome to attend. Clark is not involved in the rescheduled event, she said.

“It’s disappointing,” Seale said of Clark’s refusal to go ahead with the original event. “When he offered to host the event, I was grateful. But any event that I do, I want it to be open for anybody, to come, ask questions. When he started talking about restrictions, I said no, no, no. Then he talked about the police and that was a hard stop.”

Clark had vowed to have the women ejected by police officers if they showed up.

Here are screenshots of his post to Jesse Liberty-Murnane:

Liberty-Murnane is the founder of Show Up, a woman-led and woman-focused group that advocates for human rights and organizes humanitarian events. Since its founding in 2024, it has grown to about 25,000 members nationwide, Liberty-Murnane said.

Mannix is a member of the Franklin County Democratic Committee.

Garrant is the co-chair of the Democratic Party in Moreau and a member of the Moreau Town Board.

All three support Seale as a fellow Democrat, although they weren’t necessarily planning to attend the Saranac Lake event. Garrant, who doesn’t live in the 45th District, was not planning to go.

“I am completely confused and caught off-guard as to why it would be necessary to ban me from that event and threaten to have me arrested when she (Seale) is not in my district, and I had no intention of going,” Garrant said.

Garrant said she reached out to Jay Jacobs, chairman of the state Democratic Committee, about Clark but has not heard back.

“To be clear, I have been calling for Jason’s termination and removal from any leadership role in the Democratic Party,” she said. “I take it very seriously when someone in the Democratic Party threatens to have me arrested and banned from an event that I should be welcomed at if I were intending to go.”

Clark has a longtime reputation for bullying people online, she said.

“Cyber-bullying is exactly what Jason Clark has been doing for years. I would love to be able to tell the public that the Democratic Party does not tolerate cyber-bullying,” she said.

Clark defends his behavior as telling truths that some people don’t want to hear. He is not the only one to clash with Liberty-Murnane, Mannix and Garrant about their preferred policies and candidates, he said.

After canceling the May 7 event, Clark on Thursday sent out a 14-page email defending his actions. In it, he says Seale knew and agreed to his ban of the three women and intention to use the police to exclude them if necessary.

“Never,” said Seale. “Ne-ver. I would never agree with calling the police on someone, it’s never something that I said.

“My focus is on my campaign. This is something that’s unfortunate. I continue to focus on the campaign, and I’m thankful for the people who continue to support me. I want to have that opportunity to engage with constituents.”

When asked whether she, too, had complained to the state committee about Clark, Seale said, “No comment.”

Clark had engaged in extended arguments with the three women on Facebook over the past several months. The arguments began after an appearance by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez in Plattsburgh and were fed by Democrat Dylan Hewitt’s announcement he was going to try for the NY-21 congressional seat.

The chairwomen and chairmen of the county Democratic committees in the congressional district have chosen a moderate Democrat, Blake Gendebien, a farmer from Ogdensburg, as their preferred candidate.

Clark used Facebook to criticize Hewitt’s candidacy, and Garrant, Liberty-Murnane and Mannix at times responded to his comments. A back and forth sometimes continued for hours, late into the night. But in the morning, Clark would delete all of his comments, the women said.

Mannix and Liberty-Murnane began collecting screenshots of his comments to have a record.

In his long email on Thursday, Clark says, “If you listened to them, you would think that I was trolling Hewitt’s page twenty hours a day, every day for a year and that I made hundreds, if not thousands, of comments. I posted on seven, maybe eight…maybe eight of Hewitt’s posts.”

Hewitt recently ended his campaign, citing lack of funds. But Stuart Amoriell of Lake Placid announced at the beginning of the year he would campaign for the seat and seek a primary versus Gendebien.

In his long email, Clark says this about Amoriell:

“Some of you know that Bridie Farrel outed me to Stuart as the person who uncovered his misdemeanor convictions for burglary and animal abuse, his federal and state tax liens and his litany of high speed and unlicensed traffic violations. I think Stewie should have paid more attention to his taxes instead of running an idiotic campaign for a seat he could never win. Remember, Stewie was a Republican in a high-profile Virginia Republican family up until recently. But hey, that’s just me.”

An Intelius background report on Amoriell that Clark provided shows Amoriell was charged in October of 2008 with leaving a dog in a car but was acquitted. Ten years earlier, in June of 1998 in Baltimore, the report shows he was charged with burglary.

Amoriell said the charge with the dog was dismissed because the windows were down and the dog had a bowl of water in the car and was in no danger.

The burglary charge happened when he was a student and, after a St. Patrick’s Day Parade, he and some friends ended up in an abandoned warehouse where they shouldn’t have been, he said. The deal was, if they kept their records clean for six months, the charges would be dismissed, and his charge was dismissed after that time, he said.

Amoriell has several traffic violations on his record dating from the mid-2000s in Virginia, according to the report.

He said he has had two speeding tickets in New York in the last 10 years.

“I don’t have tax liens now,” he said. “During Covid I did. I set up payment plans. I’m not embarrassed about that,” he said.

When you set up payment plans with the IRS, the agency files liens for the amount you owe, he said.

He lived in Virginia recently, but his family is not from there, Amoriell said.

“My parents raised me in Maryland,” he said.

“My parents are originally from Tupper Lake,” he said. “Just before I was born, my parents moved to Maryland. My father was a professor at Loyola, where I went to school.”

Loyola is a Jesuit university in Baltimore.

Amoriell said he doesn’t recall ever meeting Clark in person, but he has heard of him.

“As I got in this race and started connecting with activists and volunteers, his name kept popping up and kept popping up in the way that he was trying to be intimidating. And he was really pretty aggressive,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s good for the party. It’s divisive. It’s disheartening for people. It demotivates people,” he said.

Amoriell owns and runs The Pickled Pig restaurant in Lake Placid, on Main Street across from the Olympic Arena.

Clark has been pushing the mainstream Democratic Party line that a primary would be bad for the party, Amoriell said.

“It was clear — it was very very clear that a lot of the Democratic committees did not want a primary. Some said, if you really care about electing a Democrat, you won’t run,” he said.

Maggie Bartley, chairwoman of the Essex County Democratic Committee, was out of town this past week, but she did respond to a question by text, saying that Clark, the vice chairman, “does not speak for the Essex County Democratic Committee.”

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Silence is not serving Queensbury school officials well when it comes to dealing with a group determined to intimidate and ostracize all trans students in the district and one trans student in particular.

This group, led by a local barber, Brian Howard, has gone to the extraordinary length of using a billboard along Route 9 to accuse district officials of failing to protect student safety.

Howard spoke at a recent school board meeting and was quoted in a story this week in the Post-Star:

“Seeing your faces on the billboard, I’m sure you guys all felt a certain way about it, right? Probably upset, angry, embarrassed, humiliated, maybe even exposed. How do you think these little girls feel every day in the bathrooms and locker rooms with a biological boy? Probably the same way you feel. I’m not done protecting my child and all the other children. This is going to continue until you guys start standing up for the children. I’m not done.”

Howard’s comment focuses on the subject his billboard avoids, a trans girl using the girls locker room. The billboard says students’ safety is at risk, but no one has accused this girl of putting any students at risk.

Look at Howard’s list — “upset, angry, embarrassed, humiliated, maybe even exposed” — all common feelings. Safety isn’t mentioned. Howard doesn’t really think this girl is a danger. What he objects to is her presence.

Howard’s behavior is creating an actual safety risk. Specific threats of physical violence have been made on social media toward this trans girl, her family, trans people in general and Queensbury school board members in response to posts by Kayla Stone, Howard’s fiancee.

Kevin Stephenson, a local man who administers the Glens Falls, NY Political Life group on Facebook, has documented in his own Facebook feed some of these threats that were “liked” by Stone.

The more I see of the Howard/Stone group, the more I feel this eruption of theirs is about identity — their identity. They have leaped on an opportunity to define themselves as anti-trans crusaders, riding out to offer middle school kids protection they do not need or want.

Their crusade has stirred up hate toward a vulnerable child, creating a real emergency that the board and superintendent are ducking.

“What I’ve told people, I think he’s talking to the wrong people,” said Tim Weaver, school board president, in reference to Brian Howard. “There’s nothing we can do. We didn’t make that law. We just follow what we have to. It’s unfortunate the situation has gotten to where it has.”

Blaming the law allows for the impression Weaver would rather the law didn’t exist.

“We cannot control what happens outside the walls of our campus,” said Kyle Gannon, in a written response to my email, which is the only way he would agree to take questions. “Our hope is that people will understand that there are children in the middle of this situation. We are doing everything we can inside our walls to protect our students at all times.”

Gannon and Weaver and the rest of the board should publicly stand up and speak out for the student in their care who is under siege. Of course, they shouldn’t identify her. But they have to make clear whose side they are on.

One student is being singled out on social media, in public meetings and on a billboard as a danger to her classmates. School officials must pledge to protect her, not some generalized “every student” but her, the student who right now is under active threat from an angry mob.

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Editor takes a side

It was great to see that Lisa Reider, editor of the Post-Star, took an unapologetic stand on what is happening in Queensbury. Reider’s editorial is well-written, accessible and thoughtful. Check it out:

Post-Star editorial

And now (Saturday), she has done it again, with a more hard-hitting, righteously angry column:

And further more ...

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Overthinking overuse

The Adirondack Explorer put up an article early this month about a DEC-funded study on visitor use of the High Peaks that found the most popular Adirondack trailheads are overused during peak hiking season. Hiker access at those few very popular trailheads should be curtailed, the study concluded.

A commenter — tgoodwin129 — wrote this: “Given that there has at least been the perception of overuse in the High Peaks for over 50 years now I don’t feel there needs to be an immediate solution.”

That commenter, I’m guessing, is Tony Goodwin, who has been climbing in the High Peaks and working on its trails since the 1950s.

In the 1970s, I took a hiking trip of a few days through the heart of the High Peaks with my younger sister and brother, which was supposed to include the ascent of two or three mountains. Instead, we walked around the trails leading up to the mountains but decided actually climbing them was unnecessary.

While we dawdled our way from Tahawus to, I think, Johns Brook Lodge, I took notes on the conditions of the trails and how many people we passed in the woods. I interviewed some of them. After we emerged, I wrote a story for the Adirondack Daily Enterprise that said the High Peaks weren’t overcrowded, the trails were fine and a few spots, like Marcy Dam, were busy.

Apparently, as tgoodwin129 implied, little has changed. Most people are drawn to hikes, like Cascade Mountain, with trailheads near the road, that can be accomplished in a single day.

I’ve seen the photos of hikers perched all over the summit of Cascade. But much of the angst voiced over what is called “overuse” has to do not with environmental effects but human perceptions. It feels crowded, people say. It’s not the pristine experience they were looking for.

Isn’t this a self-correcting problem? People who tire of struggling for a parking spot at the handful of popular trailheads and who don’t like marching up a mountain with a bunch of strangers will choose less popular hikes or less popular times to hike. As word gets out on social media that peaks like Cascade are overrun on sunny weekend days in the summer, visitors will plan accordingly.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of the Adirondack Park will remain mostly empty of human beings, and those few peaks that draw thousands of summer visitors will enjoy the rest of the year without them, as they always have.

Adirondack Explorer story

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I’ve written before about how grim downtown Glens Falls was in October 1993, when we moved here.

No coffee shop. A couple of restaurants. A big antiques store. A lot of empty storefronts with empty floors above them. One-way streets that circled City Park and encouraged drivers to speed through on their way somewhere else.

For seven years, we lived downtown in a solid little house on Bacon Street, and things didn’t improve much. Still no coffee shop. I was calling the police regularly on the apartment building residents next door.

We moved to a big, old house in the Fifth Ward in 2001, and the city started to rejuvenate, fitfully but, over time, steadily.

We’ve been blessed with a series of hard-working mayors and ward representatives over the past few decades, along with community-minded businesspeople and artists. Little by little, downtown has been revitalized and now has dozens of restaurants and small, locally owned shops and hundreds of people living in the rehabilitated upper floors of lovely old buildings and, yes, several coffee shops.

The neighborhoods always looked good, and they still do, with a diverse array of homes, from tidy ranches to big colonials, Sears kit houses, bungalows, small old brick homes and big mansions. I amuse myself when walking in the neighborhoods by seeing how many different sorts of porches I can identify, not that I know all their names. But in a couple of blocks, I’ll spot everything from neat porticos to expansive verandas.

Ever since we moved into this house, I’ve complained about the storm sewer on the corner, which doesn’t function, so the street floods every time it rains. Also, a few years ago, a National Grid truck pulled off the road to work on a pole and smashed our sidewalk. Ever since, I’ve been putting in annual calls to the DPW about fixing it.

I don’t mind continuing my complaints, but the city is denying me the pleasure. As soon as the snow melted this spring, crews were out on the street, removing the sidewalk blocks and digging around the storm sewer. Soon, it will be my driveway, with grass growing through the cracks, that looks bad in comparison with the smooth ribbon of new sidewalk and the gurgling storm drain.

I used to wander over to the Shirt Factory when I worked across the street at the Post-Star and walk through its long, usually empty hallways. What a mecca of food and fun and commerce and art it has become over the past 30 years! It’s a second downtown perched between Lawrence and Maple streets, but one with an innovative, impromptu vibe.

I can’t name all the changes the city is undergoing, because there are too many — too many new shops and restaurants, too many murals, too many improvement projects, too many buildings going up, too many reasons for optimism.

Here it’s the opposite of the national scene, where bad news keeps flaring up in a bonfire of incompetence and malignancy.

We’ve got a lot to be happy about in Glens Falls, and these days we need it.

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A new plan

Speaking of improvements, the city has put out a draft of its new comprehensive plan and is looking for feedback, which can be sent to directorofplanning-zoning@cityofglensfallsny.gov by noon May 1.

I can’t comment on the plan, because I haven’t read it yet. But even though comprehensive plans have not always led to comprehensive action, or much action at all, this plan has the power of necessity behind it. Glens Falls is at a critical juncture, with more development happening downtown and more housing being built and proposed than I have seen in the 33 years I’ve been here. It’s important that we get it right, because the development happening now will shape the character of the city for decades.

Here is a link to the plan:

Glens Falls Comprehensive Plan draft

New LARAC show

The third show of the year has been put up in Lapham Gallery next to City Park. It’s called “Secret of Life” and features work from three generations of the Perone family — Chip (photographs), Alex (digital paintings/cartoons) and Sophia (ceramics).

The pleasure of this show is in the variety. Not only do the three artists create very different works but their own works show great variety within their chosen medium.

Here are a couple of examples:

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Richard Carella

Richard Carella is the poet from Hudson Falls whose work I’ve been running here each week. He wrote recently to say this Sunday will mark 52 weeks I’ve been running his poems and suggesting a hiatus afterward.

I agreed, for the sake of variety or, more accurately, unpredictability. It’s good to keep readers guessing a bit.

Richard was friends with William Bronk, another poet from Hudson Falls, who became quite well known and won the 1982 American Book Award for poetry.

In his note, Richard said a friend of his remarked one of his poems “reads like philosophy,” and he told his friend about an exchange he had once with Bronk.

Bronk was quite excited about something Richard had written and Richard said, diffidently, “They’re just thoughts.”

“What else?” Bronk replied.

Here is a poem from Richard Carella:

Voice

He heard what he thought                                                                                                       was the voice he heard                                                                                                            often when he was a child

sternly calling to him,

as he drifted toward sleep,                                                                                                     and drawing him back                                                                                                              into wakefulness–

as if to remind him

of something he                                                                                                                  promised to do that                                                                                                                      he hadn’t done yet;

or of something he did

that he shouldn’t have done,                                                                                                      and should not do, again...                                                                                                         he wasn’t sure which:

and the voice didn’t say.

For more on William Bronk, check this out:

Folklife Center blog post on Bronk

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In a severe escalation of a complaint that could have been settled quietly, Brian Howard has rented a billboard on one of the busiest stretches of Route 9 to convey a message of fear and bigotry.

Take a look:

If you haven’t been following Howard’s appearances before the Queensbury school board or the Facebook posts of his girlfriend, Kayla Stone, you might have no idea what this billboard is about.

You might wonder why it implies local schools aren’t safe and why it claims school officials are “putting our children at risk.”

You might wonder what that flashy logo is above Howard’s name.

The logo is for Maiello’s Barbershop in South Glens Falls, where Howard works and where, apparently, the owners have decided to link their business with his crusade against a child.

Howard first raised his complaints in December in a rant at a school board meeting that Stone videoed and posted on Facebook. His main complaint then seemed to be grammatical.

“… and then when you put your paperwork out of what was said, it was ‘boys and,’ not boys in, ‘boys and girls spaces.’ The problem is boys in girls spaces is the problem. But you guys want to reiterate and change the wording in your paperwork so it looks like we don’t know what we’re talking about. That’s a problem. That’s a problem,” he said.

He was upset, then and now, about a trans middle-school girl using the same locker room his daughter uses.

Instead of finding a solution both families could accept — private changing rooms are available at the school for any child who wants to use them — Howard has ratcheted up the pressure with his cryptic, menacing billboard.

He’s not trying to solve a problem. He’s trying to create a hostile local environment for one child and her family and for any others questioning their gender identity.

Howard recently brought up the state law against endangering the welfare of a child and mentioned it includes “mental” as well as “physical” and “moral” welfare. He seems to believe the mental welfare of girls in Queensbury schools will be endangered if they’re in the same bathroom or locker room with a trans girl.

Another Queensbury parent, Tetyana Denford, made a critical distinction when she was quoted in a story in the Post-Star.

“I want to make it really clear, discomfort is legitimate, but it’s not equal to a safety risk. Growing up involves moments of adjustment; that’s how we learn empathy. We’re the ones, as adults, who should have those conversations with our children. But using children to manufacture a safety crisis is manipulative. This isn’t protecting girls, it’s teaching them to be afraid of people who are different,” she said.

The school district, backed by state law, is supporting the trans girl’s right to use the girls locker room.

Meanwhile, as thousands of motorists a day drive past this inflammatory billboard, Howard is away on vacation with his daughter and Stone. Judging from the photos and video Stone has put on Facebook, all three are having a wonderful time.

I wonder what kind of vacation week it has been for the trans girl in question, as people see this billboard and talk about it and the media reports on it. What kind of spring will it be for her if Howard continues his anti-trans crusade?

The billboard, asserting a child’s classmates are at risk because of her gender identity, is not only false but cruel. If anything is endangering a local child’s mental welfare, it’s this billboard.

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All those who have wished for the country to be run like a business must admire the way Donald Trump is running the country, just as he ran his businesses, by whim and grievance, impulsively and corruptly, with no purpose beyond ego satisfaction and personal enrichment.

In private business, his approach led to multiple bankruptcies. As president, he has pushed our national debt to $39 trillion, which is 124 percent of the gross domestic product — the highest ever for both measures.

Along with profligate spending, he is pressing the economy to the breaking point, through the war with Iran, which has spiked gas prices; his violent anti-immigration policies, which are hollowing out the nation’s agricultural, construction and service workforces; and his misbegotten tariffs, which pushed up prices.

But worse is the way he’s attacking the ideals to which Americans aspire, of free speech, due process and equality before the law. Who can watch videos of ICE officers smashing car windows, dragging out drivers who have committed no crime, beating them and binding them with zip-ties without feeling horror and amazement this is happening in the United States?

From his summit of power, Trump has made his priority destruction of the country’s moral and philosophical foundations. Why he’s doing this I don’t know, but what matters is stopping the destruction.

On Wednesday, I listened to audio of the Supreme Court arguments over birthright citizenship, which Trump hopes to do away with via executive order.

I enjoy the court’s verbal sparring, although, on Wednesday, Solicitor General John Sauer’s raspy speed-talking had a frantic edge. At times, he seemed to be screaming.

Probably, his nerves were frayed by the presence of Trump and Pam Bondi in the audience as he attacked a revered constitutional amendment with a tissue-thin argument. His case rested on a single word — domicile — that doesn’t even appear in the 14th Amendment and a novel interpretation of the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” too far-fetched to bother explaining.

Here’s the text of the 14th Amendment, Section 1:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

So much is contained in those two sentences and stated in absolute terms, such as “all,” “no,” “shall” and “any.”

You’d think no arguments against these guarantees would be at all possible on any grounds, but then you wouldn’t be familiar with the nitpicking potentialities of our legal system.

You wouldn’t have heard the way Justice Alito can formulate maddening, irrelevant and, sometimes, unintentionally hilarious hypotheticals.

You wouldn’t have witnessed the smug way Justice Thomas, rather than questioning the government’s already stated premise, tees up chances for the government’s lawyer to repeat it.

You wouldn’t appreciate — the way many of the justices seem not to appreciate — this case is not a good faith effort at constitutional interpretation but one prong of a many-pronged pitchfork the Trump crew is jabbing at our civil liberties.

The country is bleeding. Citizens have been murdered in the street by government agents, on video, and no one has been held accountable.

Tens of thousands of people, many of them innocent of any crime, some of them children, are penned in filthy, overcrowded government concentration camps, where they are getting sick and dying.

The news media in which I have spent my career is as guilty as every other U.S. institution of normalizing these immoral behaviors.

Every time the president or his enablers such as Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, J.D. Vance and dozens of others are quoted in the press, their history of dissembling should be highlighted. They are proven liars, operating in bad faith, and their word should not be trusted.

In many ways, the Trump administration has shown itself the enemy of the American people. The effort to abolish birthright citizenship is one more attack in its wide-ranging campaign against us.

Trump et al. may lose this particular battle — a majority of justices sounded skeptical of the government’s case — but so far, they’re winning the war. We can’t celebrate until they are out of government altogether — all of them, not just the occasional (female) scapegoat like Kristi Noem or Pam Bondi. For that housecleaning to take place, we have to first acknowledge what is happening, that the things about our country that make us proud are being destroyed.

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Poetry

Last week, I messed up the formatting for a poem by Hudson Falls poet Richard Carella, so I’m reposting it here, along with a second poem by him.

Piece Worker

You can                                                                                                                                question the

results of                                                                                                                                    the work–

but you                                                                                                                                      can’t doubt

that I                                                                                                                                           am working:

this didn’t                                                                                                                                    write itself.

Argument

Life’s ugliness                                                                                                                contradicts...

its beauty;

life’s beauty                                                                                                                     contradicts–

its ugliness;

as dispassionately                                                                                                                      as possible,

we witness

this (incessant)                                                                                                                 argument that

life is having

with itself,                                                                                                                                about itself;

and, sometimes:

we’re drawn                                                                                                                                 into it.

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Parking progress

Glens Falls officials have proposed dropping the citywide two-hour time limit on parking and adopting a three-hour limit for certain hours of the day downtown and a few other designated zones.

Since no one follows the two-hour limit nor enforces it anywhere but downtown, the change is sensible.

But I hope this isn’t the extent of parking changes, because others need to be made.

Some narrow streets, for example, should not have parking on both sides, because two-way traffic becomes impossible if parked cars are lining both sides of the street. If you’ve ever tried to navigate the Poopie’s block of Lawrence Street during lunchtime, you know what I mean. I’m not sure a single firetruck could squeeze between the big SUV’s and pickup trucks frequently parked on both sides in front of Poopie’s at lunch.

And why has the Board of Public Safety decided to preserve the 2-6 a.m. parking ban? I have for years asked what the purpose of this ban is and have received answers ranging from the unsatisfactory to the ridiculous.

I was told, for example, the police department recommended the ban so that muggers or other early-morning criminals would not be able to hide between parked cars then spring out at unsuspecting pedestrians.

I don’t know where to start with the absurdity of that in a city whose streets are wonderfully safe, not to mention empty between 2 and 6 a.m.

In the winter, it could be practical to have the streets cleared of cars early in the morning, so plows can work unimpeded. Of course, snow falls at all times of day, and plows operate day and night when needed. But if an overnight ban makes some limited sense in winter, why not impose it from the first of December through the first of April?

Otherwise, the city should not be handing out tickets to residents parked in front of their own houses between 2 and 6 a.m., nor to their guests. Do you know that if you work a late shift and return to your house at 3 a.m., run in to grab a quick bite to eat and then back out to your car at 3:30 to go to the store for milk for breakfast, you can during that half an hour get an “overnight” parking ticket?

City officials will say you can call the police department and inform them you’re parking on the street. But why should you have to do this? What is the practical purpose of a parking ban during the hours when the least amount of traffic is on the streets?

I remain unconvinced this ban has a single speck of utility but consider it one of those things that has been done for years and shrugged off with justifications that make no sense but that people accept because, well, it has been done for years.

The inertia of useless laws is a powerful force.

A public hearing on parking is scheduled to take place prior to the next Common Council meeting at 7:25 p.m. April 14 in City Hall.

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After months spent in the house, getting out three times a week to go to the grocery store and the transfer station and the therapist’s office and occasionally to meet a friend for coffee, I took a whole day and a night off last weekend to drive with my sister to Pennsylvania to see my father.

He is 89 and has not been well. He just underwent radiation treatment for prostate cancer and has been injured several times in falls.

We found him in a recliner in a ground floor room in his house, where the sun comes in through sliding glass doors, which can be opened for fresh air when it’s warm enough.

He smiled, happy to see us, and I and my sister Erin sat and talked with him and his wife, Amy, for a few hours.

Amy is my age and now, like me and many others, in the position of being the primary caregiver for a loved one. Like other caregivers but unlike me, she is also working at a full-time job.

A 2025 report from AARP and National Alliance for Caregiving found that 63 million Americans were providing ongoing care for an adult or child with a complex medical condition or disability. Most of them — 59 million — were caring for adults. (Click this paragraph to see the report.)

This care is demanding, lonely, sometimes expensive and usually uncompensated. With all our technological and financial resources here in the world’s richest country, we might as well be in the 19th century when it comes to caring for aging and disabled family members.

And since families are smaller now, households frequently comprise only two people — one providing care, the other receiving it.

My situation, with a spouse and a parent who need help at the same time, is common. Some people are caring for both.

The caregiving experience is not all hardship. The act of providing for the needs of someone you love can be satisfying and enriching.

Sometimes, Alzheimer’s makes my wife, Bella, testy. She stamps up to me and yells, “You’re wrong! You’re bad! You shouldn’t do that!” I know this is a symptom.

Other, quieter times, she will say she loves me. And sometimes she says “thank you” for no apparent reason. When I came home last weekend, she hugged me for a long time, then took ahold of my front pants pocket and dragged me around with her for awhile.

Down in Pennsylvania, we found my father grizzled and gaunt, holding on to the life he has left.

Dad has always been a big personality, dominating rooms with his big physical presence and stories and laughter. Now, like the father of the poet Dylan Thomas in a poem Dad used to quote from, he, too, burns and raves at close of day.

Erin and I left in the late afternoon and drove up to our brother Mike’s apartment on Sandy Hook in New Jersey.

He was making pasta sauce with sausage when we arrived. I had a beer for the first time in two years, and we went out on his porch on the second floor and looked at the Navesink River, an estuary that comes in from the Atlantic Ocean.

On the other side is the road that goes down the spit, then a sea wall of large stones about 15 feet high, then, via staircases that surmount the wall, the beach. After dinner, the three of us went out for a walk on it in the dark.

“Those lights straight out are container ships,” Mike said. “Down there to the left is New York City.”

We talked and walked and looked at the green sea crashing on the shore. Mike’s little dog, Goose, ran around frantically and joyfully in the sand.

The trip — the long talks in the car with Erin, seeing Dad and hugging him, eating and drinking and laughing with Mike and Erin and experiencing the ocean — restored me after a winter of isolation at home.

I slipped back into a world I had previously inhabited and felt comfortable there, if older and calmer and, I hope, better, because of my experience with Bella, at caring for all the people I love.

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Odd comment in Warrensburg

During the discussion in Warrensburg on a proposed law that would subject political demonstrations to onerous requirements, one member of the town council, Brian Rounds, made an odd comment.

First he quoted Voltaire as saying, “I may disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Apparently, Voltaire didn’t say this but a 20th century author writing about Voltaire’s attitude toward free speech did.

Regardless, Rounds used the quotation to lead into a dubious assertion of his own: “In the history of the world, protesting has probably changed zero minds.”

What history of the world has he been reading?

The French Revolution began with popular protests in the streets of Paris. Nonviolent protests in South Africa and worldwide were key to overthrowing the apartheid regime. In Poland (Solidarity), Czechoslavakia (Velvet Revolution) and Ukraine (Revolution of Dignity), mass protests and worker strikes led to the abolition of Soviet rule and democratic elections.

The civil disobedience movement in India, which included large nonviolent protests led by Mahatma Gandhi, helped to end British colonial rule.

In the United States, nationwide anti-war protests helped convince Lyndon Johnson not to seek a second full term as president.

The extremely well-organized protests in Minneapolis this year swung public opinion against Donald Trump’s immigration policies.

All of these movements led to some violence, usually perpetrated by authorities against protesters, which also helped persuade people of the righteousness of the protesters’ cause. But none of them were fought out on the battlefield. All conquered through persuasion.

The mass movement of a population in protest, when it becomes large enough, is a force few governments can resist.

Perhaps Rounds meant that in the history of his mind, protesting has changed zero minds. In the history of the world, it has changed millions of minds. It is a more powerful force than war.

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Poem

Here is a poem by Hudson Falls poet Richard Carella:

Piece Worker

You can question the

results of the work–

but you can’t doubt

that I am working:

this didn’t write itself.

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LARAC show

LARAC has another excellent show up, but only for another couple of days — sorry about the late notice. But if you haven’t seen it, the elegant stoneware pieces by Ava Tesorio and mysterious, luminous paintings by Toni Nastasi are worth a look. (The Lapham Gallery will be open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday and Tuesday).

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Hot coffee is back

Thank you to everyone who weighed in last Sunday in response to my complaint about not being able to find a percolator to replace my old one, which died, and especially to KLanci who said Ace Hardware sells them.

Ace Hardware does sell at least two different brands and several different sizes of percolator, putting an exclamation point on its status as my favorite store! I bought the medium size, which makes up to eight cups, and I can report it operates wonderfully well.

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Attending the No Kings rally on Saturday or not, none of us can avoid being affected by what the federal government is doing under the leadership of Donald Trump,.

Here are a few of the many bad things he has done: refused his assent to laws, obstructed the administration of justice, made judges dependent on his will alone, erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power, cut off our trade with all parts of the world, imposed taxes on us without our consent (in the form of tariffs), deprived us in many cases of the benefits of trial by jury and abdicated government here by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

Those aren’t my words (could you tell?) but are drawn from the Declaration of Independence, as it lists “repeated injuries and usurpations” perpetrated by “the present King of Great Britain,” who, the declaration states, has “in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.”

It is instructive to see how comfortably those words from 250 years ago fit the actions of Donald Trump.

I went into town this afternoon (Friday) to ask people whether they were going to the rally and found few out in the chilly, gusty streets and no one inclined to pause for a chat.

But a handful of folks keeping warm in Lapham Gallery, where the latest, excellent LARAC show is hanging, opened up about their thoughts on the eve of the protest.

Phil Casabona, executive director of the Lower Adirondack Regional Arts Council, mused on the overlap between the arts community and those millions of Americans made fearful and angry by the Trump administration:

Robin Brewer of Queensbury spoke of the supportive community that has formed around a common interest in changing the country’s direction:

Diane Hawkins of Baldwin, New York, in town for a storytelling conference at the Queensbury Hotel, spoke about the interest of the conference attendees in protecting Americans’ civil rights:

Previous No Kings rallies have had a joyous feel, but I expect this one to be more somber. Our irresponsible, inexperienced and corrupt president recently started a war, which has already claimed scores of innocent lives, including those of more than 100 children whose school was bombed and more than a dozen U.S. soldiers.

The children’s deaths were unnecessary and shameful.

The soldiers died in vain, for the ego and vanity of a narcissistic leader.

How can we stop him? How can we make things better?

Showing up Saturday is a start.

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I was surprised last November when I heard Sean Palladino was elected to the Common Council from the city’s Fifth Ward, where I live.

I’d heard he was running but knew nothing about him and assumed the seat would be won by Bob Curtis, retired from his tenure as city clerk and a frequent sight during his long walks around the neighborhood.

“I was surprised I won,” Sean said. “It all stems from a little bit of a mental health crisis I had in 2024.”

We met a week and a half ago at Spot Coffee. I had ordered the baklava, a bad choice, because I was trying to keep up with Sean’s fast-moving talk while taking notes with fingers sticky with honey.

Sean bubbled on about all the wonderful things happening in Glens Falls, his joy at running with local clubs and his marriage last year to his longtime boyfriend and fiancee, Michael Biele.

He thinks he’s the first openly gay person to serve as a member of the Common Council. He may also be the only one who has spoken openly about a stint in the mental health unit at Glens Falls Hospital.

“It was scary but kind of an eye-opening experience,” he said of his nine-day stay for depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation.

“I love that I got to know myself and get rid of all this technology,” he said.

He made a sweeping motion with his hands to include cell phones and other devices and distractions of the virtual world, all of which are banned from the MHU.

Those nine days helped him reorient his life, he said.

“I finally found my confidence,” he said.

Sean is on the small side, with eyes that shine from behind glasses and a luxurious black beard. He talks fast about new and old shops and events and volunteer boards and neighborhood committees in Glens Falls, interspersing his sentences with chortles of approval.

He radiates positivity.

“One of my friends now refers to me as ‘Hallmark Sean,’” he said with a chortle.

As we talked, I understood how he won his seat over a longtime and widely liked public servant like Bob Curtis. His candor is refreshing and his cheerfulness is endearing.

It also doesn’t hurt in a time of widespread disillusionment with establishment politics that he’s 34 and has never before held public office.

His excitement at all the evidence that Glens Falls is flourishing is infectious, and he backs it up with participation.

He signed up to volunteer with Friends of Crandall Library, “and they put me on the board,” he said. (Check out the photo of the Friends at the top of their Facebook page by clicking this sentence and see if you can find Sean.)

After each of the library’s quarterly book sales, he makes videos of people talking about their special finds and posts them on the Friends page.

He recently took over the Adirondack Runners newsletter.

He persuaded Glens Falls Running Club to clean up its route by collecting bags of trash from along the Feeder Canal.

He works full-time in the Warren County Clerk’s Office and does freelance writing and keeps an extensive blog (click here) that now includes Common Council updates.

“Now that I’m in public office, I have to be a little more careful of what I say,” he said with a chortle.

I hope not.

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Poem

Here is a poem by Hudson Falls poet Richard Carella:

Participant Advisory

The maneuvers will be difficult;                                                                                       nuance dominates the play which,

in some instances,

will develop to such a degree                                                                                                 that you may become disoriented

and, therefore, vulnerable to attack;

adaptability is an asset...                                                                                                          and fair play is, vigorously, urged;

however, because of the game’s intricacies,

violations are not easily monitored;                                                                                 evident infractions are computed, at once;

of course, only a fool is obvious–

in which case, his exposure is deserved;                                                                                  but the penalties are severe:

you are advised to honor the rules.

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Reading

I read “Blacktop Wasteland” by S.A. Cosby, a rising star writer of crime novels who has had five books published.

“Blacktop Wasteland” is his second and breakthrough novel. Its protagonist is Beauregard Montage, a car mechanic who lives in Virginia with his wife and two sons in a doublewide trailer.

Montage runs his own shop, but as the novel opens, competition from a well-financed competitor is undercutting his business. The life he left behind as a getaway driver beckons as a way to get out from under the increasing weight of debt.

This classic, some would say cliched setup is brought to vivid life by Cosby’s deft handling of the details of car mechanics and racing, the landscapes and living spaces of poor rural Virginia and the physical violence, casual, serious and sometimes fatal, administered with fists, cars, guns, knives, bombs, a plastic bag and whatever is handy.

Montage is a smart man drawn by circumstances into doing stupid things, but as his mistakes add up along with the body count, I found my sympathy draining away. It’s a problem when you stop rooting for the hero, and I had reached that point by the end of the novel.

“Blacktop Wasteland” is well done from start to finish, and I devoured the book in a couple of days, but it contains enough plot twists and bloody denouements for three or four novels, and by the end, I was oversaturated.

The fights and the thrills, the deaths and escapes come so thick and fast, it’s hard to appreciate any single one of them. In a fit of book-buying, however, I ordered all four of his other books, so I’ll have the opportunity to find out if any of those are more restrained.

Percolator Lost

Percolators make the hottest and, therefore, best coffee. So why was it on Friday when I went looking for a new percolator in Target and Walmart, I discovered an entire aisle of Keurig machines (Target) and dozens of drip machines in an array of sleek, futuristic styles (Walmart) but not a single simple electric percolator?

Who are the anti-percolator perpetrators?

I did find a camp-style percolator in Walmart’s extensive camping section, and I bought it. It works in the same way as a plug-in version, but you place it on a stove burner. I’m going to try it tomorrow, full of hopefulness for a very hot cup of coffee and a future that is not absent of percolators.

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Bella is enduring a years-long descent into incompetence, incontinence and death.

Alzheimer’s is clouding her mind. She can’t describe what she sees. She can’t say how she feels. She can’t process the signals her body sends.

I handed her a partly peeled banana two days ago, and she took a bite out of the peel.

But when she sinks into her seat and leans her shoulder against the back of the chair, I can see she understands what is happening to her. Her eyes look down a tunnel of grief.

I should take her photograph.

I feel ashamed of that thought. But that is what I have been doing for decades, mining people’s misery for poignant stories. That is what I am doing now with Bella’s story.

I picture myself lifting my phone and trying to take a few photos before she notices. I can’t do it.

I smile at her.

“I love you,” I say and lean forward and rub her knee.

The next day, the thought returns as I stare at her face, worn with weariness.

I should take her photograph.

It has been nine years since her diagnosis, but she has aged three times that.

It’s OK if she gives permission — a thought that offers justification.

“Can I take your photo?” I say.

“Yes,” she says.

As I lift the phone, I see her eyes shift and harden. She looks out into the room instead of down. I take seven photos, shifting the focus in and out.

Today (Monday), I look at the photos and choose the closest one. Her face shows sadness and determination.

Bella used to be a news photographer when we lived up north. She had an eye for it, and she was aggressive. She got yelled at by firefighters and once by Mario Cuomo to back up.

After her diagnosis, she agreed we should do a podcast for the Post-Star to chronicle the disease’s progression, even though she dislikes being in the spotlight.

We discussed each step of her decline until her stories were reduced to single words. Then I took over, describing my experience as her caregiver.

But I still have a life in the sociable world. People call. People come over, and we talk while Bella wanders the house.

When it comes to Alzheimer’s, I’m a witness. Bella walks alone, by her own brave light.

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In addition to the stories authors mean to tell, books may also tell stories about their previous owners, through names and other information written in them and ephemera such as tickets, maps, letters, photos or notes left between the pages.

I love finding these things. Once in a book I found a photographic print of Ron Turcotte riding Secretariat to victory in the Belmont Stakes, so far ahead you can’t even see the other horses (he won by 31-1/2 lengths).

On rare occasions, I’ve found a previous owner’s name I recognize, which is exciting. Years ago, I found a book with the signature of Erastus Corning, Albany’s long-serving mayor, on the flyleaf. Unfortunately, that was a period when I was selling books online, and I foolishly sold that one.

More recently, I picked up a book at one of the Crandall library book sales with an intriguing ownership history. It’s called “The Officer’s Guide” and features a military cap on the cover. It is the ninth edition of the guide, published in 1942 by The Military Service Publishing Co. in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

On the flyleaf is a personal motto, written in pencil: “Duty well performed, honor above all, country before self.”

On the inside of the front cover, the owner wrote his name in pen, followed underneath by a number, then the fort where he was stationed: “2nd Lt. Milton J. Shapp/0-508856/OBMTC - Fort Monmouth, N.J.”

I don’t know what OBMTC stands for. It could be Officers Basic Military Training Center, although I can’t find any mention of such a place online.

Fort Monmouth was the headquarters during World War II for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Looking in the Pennsylvania State Archives, I found that Milton Jerrold Shapp received in 1946 an honorable discharge as a captain in the Army Signal Corps, having served in North Africa, Italy and Austria. I’m assuming he trained at Fort Monmouth before being deployed.

Milton Jerrold Shap founded Jerrold Electronics Corp. in Philadelphia immediately after the war and became a pioneer in cable television. In the 1950s and ‘60s, Jerrold was the dominant company in cable TV, but Shapp sold the business in 1966 to enter the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania governor.

He won the primary, lost the general election but won on his second try in 1970, becoming Pennsylvania’s 40th governor and its first Jewish governor.

He was, it seems from my reading online, an extraordinary politician. As a businessman, he was known for hiring women and minorities, to the extent that the Philadelphia Bulletin referred to Jerrold as “a little United Nations.”

As a politician, he became in 1973 the first governor in the country to meet with gay activists. He then set up the nation’s first official government body to look into problems faced by the gay community, The Governor’s Commission on Sexual Minorities. In 1975, he issued the first state executive order in the U.S. to end discrimination against gays and lesbians in state government.

He pushed for full financial disclosure legislation for top officials, the most comprehensive “Sunshine Law” in the country, a strict code of ethics for all state employees, and a rigorous campaign code of conduct

He nixed state labeling of children born out of wedlock as “illegitimate” and signed into law divorce reforms, prison reforms, improvements to Pennsylvania’s portion of the Appalachian Trail, and $300 million in business tax breaks to small and medium-sized businesses.

He appointed a crusading state insurance commissioner, who managed to get premiums lowered dramatically before the industry put enough pressure on the legislature to get him fired.

He eliminated pay toilets in Pennsylvania Turnpike rest stops.

His wife, Muriel, converted several rooms of the governor’s residence into an education center for brain-damaged children and a Late Start program for senior citizens.

He was elected to a second four-year term as governor and ran for president in 1976 but didn’t do well and dropped out early. He was ahead of his time.

Now, 50 years later, what I want to know is, where are our Milton J. Shapps?

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Speaking of books and wars

I read “Regeneration” a historical novel by Pat Barker, published in 1992.

I should have loved this book, since it features World War I poets, and I went through a phase when one of them, Wilfred Owen, was my favorite poet, and I memorized at least one of his poems, “Anthem for Doomed Youth.”

I do admire the book. It is well crafted, clearly a work by a skilled professional. It is short (250 pages) but tells a complete story. The writing is vivid and spare.

But it feels too neat. Barker begins with a historical event, the writing in 1917 of a letter of protest against the war by an English soldier and poet, Siegfried Sassoon, and his resulting confinement in Craiglockhart War Hospital for treatment by Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, a neurologist and social anthropologist.

Barker imagines the details of the relationship between Sassoon, who believes the war is morally wrong, and Rivers, who is committed to persuading him to return to active duty. The two men, both part of the British upper class and both quietly gay, become close (not intimate).

Sassoon also becomes friends with Owen, also a real-life patient at Craiglockhart, and helps him with his budding effort to write poems. A manuscript of a draft of “Anthem for Doomed Youth” exists, with edits suggested by Sassoon.

Other characters who populate Craiglockhart are fictional, like Billy Prior, a working-class soldier whose forays into the nearby village provide some romantic relief from the hospital’s claustrophobia.

Checking online for the name “Billy Prior” to make sure he wasn’t a real person, I discovered that “Regeneration” was made into a British-Canadian movie in 1997. Also, it’s the first book in a trilogy, which explains why it seems to stop short at the end, with much possibility left in its various storylines.

I liked it enough to seek out the next two books. Maybe after I’ve read all three, I’ll appreciate the first one more.

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Into the viscera

Visceral is the word that slides into my mind when considering the Brazilian movie “The Secret Agent,” which has been nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture (the Oscars are tonight, Sunday, in case you didn’t know).

The movie doesn’t build to its visceral parts, it begins with them as the protaganist, Armando, drives into a dusty roadside gas station. I won’t say what’s going on there or reveal much of this movie’s nitty-gritty, because everyone who sees it deserves to savor its banquet of surprises.

All expectations get confounded in “The Secret Agent,” starting with those set up by its title.

Here is what movie and TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz wrote about it: “Once in a while, you see a movie that doesn’t feel made, but extracted from a dreaming mind.”

Something else gets extracted in another lurid scene in the movie. I won’t say what.

A movie like this can be a disappointment, because it follows its own logic, veering away in space and time from its story just when you’re looking for an emotional payoff. Parts of the plot are surreal, and bewildering if you’re not familiar with Brazil’s political history in the 1970s, which I wasn’t.

“The Secret Agent” asks you to jump into its world and ride along with the laconic Armando (also known as Marcelo) as he enters the city of Recife during Carnival for a rendezvous with Dona Sebastiana, an aging revolutionary who gives him shelter.

Gradually, we learn details of Armando’s past that illuminate the dangers of his present. Eventually, we learn, too, of his future.

“The Secret Agent,” among other things, is a story within a story or, rather, it is one story wrapped around another, and this is probably the boldest and potentially most disappointing aspect of the plot.

One scene in the movie reprises a famous bit from the movie “Jaws” but is far more revolting and funnier than the original. That scene and others made me expect the action to build to a climax of violence and vengeance, as “Jaws” and thousands of others have done. That isn’t what happens, which left me crestfallen and confused at the end but also exhilarated by the movie’s daring.

This is one of the rare movies that would probably be even more fun and satisfying to watch a second time. But you have to watch “The Secret Agent” a first time for that to be possible, and you should.

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Poem

Here is a poem by Hudson Falls poet Richard Carella:

Unspoken

Sometimes, we feel like                                                                                                         we’re already dead...

and haunting the places,                                                                                                          and the people, we love;

hovering near them–                                                                                                            (with benevolent intent);

and, yet; afraid, if we speak,                                                                                                   they will not understand;

or, worse: that they                                                                                                                won’t hear a word.

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Heavenly day

I often find myself silently singing to myself the song “Heavenly Day” by Patty Griffin while I’m lying in bed at night, before I fall asleep. I’m not sure why, except that it’s a beautiful song.

This past Tuesday was a heavenly day, brilliantly sunny and so suddenly warm that, during a short walk through downtown, I not only took off my sweatshirt but found myself wishing I was wearing shorts.

I bought tacos from Taco Kings Jalisco on South Street and sat in the new plaza next to the Market Square building to eat them. While I was there, I took a couple of photos.

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Good things happen when Molly McMaster Morgoslepov gets knocked down.

She met her husband, Sergie, in a Wednesday night men’s league hockey game that way. He knocked her down, she looked up at him from the ice and said to herself, “Yeah, we’re gonna date.”

After she was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1999 at age 23 and went through surgery to remove a large tumor from her large intestine, followed by months of chemotherapy, she decided to strap on inline skates and skate from her home in Glens Falls to Greeley, Colorado — about 2,000 miles — to raise awareness of the disease.

It took her three months to reach Greeley, finishing in August, which gave her two months to train for the New York City Marathon, with a sponsorship from the New York Apple Association to promote the cancer-fighting qualities of apples.

“I made it, not in an impressive time, but I made it,” Molly said.

A young woman in Arkansas named Amanda who had colon cancer sent her an email and Molly went to visit her.

“She was dying. She said, ‘I’m jealous of all the things you’ve been doing.’ I promised her I would continue doing them,” she said.

She received an invitation to appear on the Today show from Katie Couric, whose husband died of colon cancer in 1998 at age 42, and they spoke with Amanda via satellite.

“She cut the interview at the end, because she started crying,” Molly said of Couric.

Afterward, Couric told her if she could come up with “anything crazy” for cancer awareness month in March, she’d have her back on the show.

Molly was working at WCQL in Glens Falls at the time, getting up early to go on air.

“I was in the shower at 3:30 a.m., and I thought, ‘I’ve got it. I’m going to build a giant colon,’” she said.

She took the idea to Adirondack Studios, raised $60,000 in three weeks, got back on the Today Show, and in February of 2003 launched a national tour with the 40-foot-long, 4-foot-tall Colossal Colon.

Beginning in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, she crisscrossed the country for 10 months, to Atlanta, D.C., Miami — “on South Beach, where nobody wants to talk about colons,” she said.

But she met Dave Barry, the humor writer, in South Beach, and he crawled through the colon, and in a column for the Miami Herald, wrote an appreciation of all its finer points as only he can.

She continued to Houston, Dallas, Phoenix and Los Angeles, where she and “Coco” (that’s what she calls the Colossal Colon) appeared on Jimmy Kimmel, and all the guests had to crawl through Coco to get on stage.

Gary Busey didn’t want to do it, she said.

On to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Boston and Philadelphia, where, burned out from 12-hour days, she went out for a sandwich but was called back by Hannah, Amanda’s cousin and co-founder with Molly of the nonprofit Colon Club. Hannah said a 22-year-old woman named Erika with stage 4 colon cancer had driven three hours to Philly just to meet Molly.

Molly and Hannah told Erika the Colon Club’s goal was to find creative ways to raise awareness of colorectal cancer, especially in young people.

“We should do a calendar! We can show our scars!” Erika said.

Thus the Colondar was born, an annual undertaking that, in its first year, had Erika on the cover and Molly, in hockey gear and a bikini, as one of the 12 survivors.

Molly, married, working and raising two kids, began to step back from the Colon Club about 12 years ago. Two years ago, the club merged with a larger organization, Fight Colorectal Cancer.

Molly, who recently turned 50, runs the strength training program for New York Dynamo, a youth hockey development program in Clifton Park. She is brimming with health, and all the treatment she needs is a colonoscopy every five years.

But colorectal cancer is now the leading cause of cancer deaths for adults under 50.

Molly can’t see all the results of the work she has done over the past 27 years to convince people to pay attention to their bodies, talk to their doctors and get colonoscopies.

But thousands of people like me, with a loved one who was recently diagnosed with colon cancer, know how important the work is.

And thousands of people like Ginny, my daughter who has colon cancer, appreciate that people like Molly are out there, raising awareness.

Ginny, who is 46, has been responding well to treatment. Some days are hard, but she has taken hold of life in a new way since an MRI three months ago turned everything upside-down.

Colon cancer knocked her down. But she, too, is getting back up.

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War as diversion

This headline and the commentary that follows it is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in the Chronicle, reducing war to the level of a heated sports rivalry in the season’s final stretch.

“Who are you rooting for?” Frost asks, Iran or Trump, as if that is the choice.

I’m rooting for an end to the needless killing as soon as possible, regardless of whether Iran capitulates (unlikely) or the U.S. slinks away (likely, but it may take awhile).

I would have been rooting for this unjustified and unexplained war never starting, but it’s too late for that.

What a crew of monsters we have in charge of our government, celebrating bombings that, by their nature, kill indiscriminately. Evidence points to U.S. responsibility for a blast that killed dozens of children at an Iranian school. Is Mark Frost going to ask his readers whether they’re rooting for or against civilian casualties? For or against children being among the dead?

It’s obscene to be treating these events as political theater.

How about the Iranian ship torpedoed by the U.S. after it participated in multinational exercises in the Indian Ocean meant to promote international naval cooperation? How about the surviving Iranian sailors the U.S. left thrashing in the ocean? For or against?

I’ve never been a fan of Mark Frost’s. But I think his embrace of Trumpism, his willingness to look away from the corruption and the cruelty, has brought out a callousness in him, as it has in many others.

The horror of the situation is, Frost’s cheerleading for what he describes as Trump’s “mighty swing” in Iran is probably just what Trump was trying to achieve — a thoughtless “rah-rah” for the bigness of our bombs and the mightiness of our ability to end human lives.

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Poem

Here is a poem from Hudson Falls poet Richard Carella:

Worldview

To say this world                                                                                                                         is ugly, is to confuse

this world with us;                                                                                                                        who, at our worst,

are the ugliest feature,                                                                                                                 (by far), of its geography–

and, both, blind to and                                                                                                    unworthy of its beauty;

but, this world is beautiful,                                                                                 notwithstanding us...

and, even at our worst,                                                                                                             we can not diminish:

this world’s beauty.

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AOC coming to Glens Falls

A last-minute announcement has revealed that Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Congressman Pat Ryan will be leading a town hall meeting from 6 to 8 tonight (Sunday) at the Charles R. Wood Theater in downtown Glens Falls. I’m guessing it will be packed and, if you want to attend, you’ll have to show up very early, prepared to spend some time on the sidewalk.

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Bella’s mom, Harriet, died in 2013 in the middle of the night at her home in Lake Placid.

Bella handled the arrangements, notifying friends and family, wrote the obituary and gave the eulogy in the service at St. Agnes Church.

In a balancing act, she showed an appreciation for her mother’s outspokenness while acknowledging what a difficult person she could be.

Four years later, at age 58, Bella was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and a few years after that, she began to speak about her mother as if she were still alive.

“I want to go home and see her,” she would say.

“We can’t, Sweetie,” I said.

“Yes we can,” she said.

“No we can’t, because she died a few years ago, Sweetie, I’m sorry,” I said.

It was difficult to convince her, and she would soon forget what I had said and the conversation would be repeated.

I printed out a copy of Harriet’s obituary — the one Bella had written — and kept it on a shelf in the dining room to show her when she insisted her mother was still alive.

It felt cruel, repeatedly breaking the sad news to her that her mother was dead, and eventually, I stopped, choosing instead to make a vague promise about visiting then changing the subject.

A few months ago, I found out that our daughter Ginny, who is 46 and lives in Boston, has stage 4 colon cancer. I immediately told our other kids and members of my family the bad news, but not Bella.

Ginny and her siblings, Tam and Zo, and I all had the same impulse, that telling Bella would be the wrong thing to do, not because she wouldn’t understand but because she would.

Bella doesn’t say much now, except “Yes” and “No” and sometimes, when she’s feeling happy, “I love you.” But she can grasp the gist of a conversation, especially if the gist were “Your daughter has cancer.”

That would break her heart. But she wouldn’t be able to talk about it. She would not be able to tell Ginny she loves her and assure her she is going to live and enjoy life and that she, her mother, would be with her.

She would not be able to do what, 10 years ago, nothing could have stopped her from doing — jumping in the car and driving straight to Boston.

And if we told her, she would forget, and we’d have to tell her all over again, again and again.

So we watch what we say around Bella, and when I’m talking to Ginny, I take the phone upstairs.

It’s hard, what Ginny is going through, the treatments and side effects and hours in stark hospital rooms. She is being strong, while the rest of us are scared but hopeful.

It makes it harder that we don’t have Bella here, the way she used to be. In those days, I could be Bella’s support, consoling her while she consoled everyone else. In those days, most of what I heard about Ginny, I heard from Bella, because they talked on the phone almost every day.

When Bella was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, concern for her drew us all closer. Now, with Ginny’s diagnosis, that is happening again. Now, Ginny and I talk frequently, sometimes for an hour or more.

That she has cancer, that it is “treatable but not curable,” is difficult for me to accept. I hesitate to confirm it by saying it or writing it. Part of me is waiting for her to recover and return to her old self.

She has always been clever and sharp and aware and fun, full of sparkling energy. She likes to tease and to laugh and celebrate the quirks of those she loves.

Now, as she loses her hair and breaks out in rashes from the treatments, she looks for perspective to buck herself up.

“I could have burns over 90 percent of my body,” she said.

Instead, she is picking out a wig.

She has a new thoughtfulness. She was raised as a Catholic by her mom but fell away from the church, as Bella did. Now, returning to it, she has discovered a churchgoing community among her friends that she didn’t know was there.

She finds purpose in dealing with the new realities. She celebrates small victories.

She is moving ahead despite hard circumstances, so that’s the requirement for the rest of us now, too — to push on, to walk beside her. Her mom is sadly unavailable. The rest of us are here.

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Poem

Here is a poem by Hudson Falls poet Richard Carella:

Poems Are Sparks

Poems are sparks,                                                                                                                        in the dark

of the world;                                                                                                                             not bright enough,

(by far), to                                                                                                                                  show us which

way we are                                                                                                                         heading; what way

to go or, even,                                                                                                                        where we are;

but serving to                                                                                                                       remind us that–

there is a fire...                                                                                                            somewhere, nearby:

which we may                                                                                                                             be approaching.

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Reading

“The Mohawk,” by Codman Hislop (what a name!), published in 1948, is one of the multitudinous “Rivers of America” series, although the only one I’ve read so far.

It was surprisingly great. I didn’t expect to like it or even to read it, but I picked it up because I’d read an article about the “Rivers of America” series and was curious. I expected lots of geography and prose celebrations of both rivers and America. But Hislop (how do you pronounce that, I wonder? And did kids call him “Codpiece” on the playground?) weaves the geography in with thrilling historical tales from the French and Indian War and the American Revolution and fascinating stories of the creation of the Erie Canal and the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad, which supplanted it.

The early war stories, and even earlier exploration stories (Isaac Jogues is a central character in this part) are violent and exciting. The later stories of the development of the transportation industry and movement from publicly owned canals to privately owned railroads is fascinating and depressing, redolent with regret for the path not taken.

I’ve always felt geography is very important to the affairs of human beings but have rarely, if ever, been able to focus enough attention on the subject to keep any but the most obvious geographical facts in my head. But I learned in “The Mohawk” that the Mohawk river valley, heading west from Albany to Buffalo and beyond, was (and is) the only low-level passage west through the Appalachians, which means it was the only easy route west for most of the East Coast in the 17th, 18th and part of the 19th centuries. Suddenly, I realized why the Erie Canal was such a big deal, because it made easier the movement west of settlers and made possible the movement east of freight.

Hislop (OK, apparently it’s a Scottish name, combining the words for “hazel tree” and “remote valley”) does not adopt the serious (boring) approach of a “just the facts” historian but feels free to make his characters and stories colorful. He even abandons historical neutrality to bemoan the destruction of the canal business by the rapacious railroad tycoons.

I will definitely read another in the series. I’m eyeing “The Everglades” by Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, although “The Hudson” by Carl Carmer and “Lower Mississippi” by Hodding Carter are tempting, too.

View from the Top

Zo got me back on skis Saturday for the first time in about six years, and I’m so glad he did. We had a beautiful afternoon of skiing at West Mountain, I fell only once and got to again admire the magnificent view of Queensbury and Glens Falls from the mountaintop.

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Diana Palmer, mayor of Glens Falls, flashed a bright smile and waved her hands at the space you step into when you get off the elevators on the second floor of City Hall.

She and her team decided to concentrate the art gallery near the elevators as part of the decluttering she has been pushing since taking office last month.

Previously, the art went up on the walls all around the room, circling a long table and chairs and interspersed with entrances to various city offices.

That table has been swapped with the one from the mayor’s conference room, which is wider and fits the space better.

The walls have been painted a very pale green, track lighting that wasn’t needed has been removed from the ceiling and a new tan carpet has replaced the dull purplish one that “had been there since the 1970s,” Palmer said.

Local artist Hannah Williams painted the pilasters in a marbled pattern that reflects the colors of the room.

Lynn Underhill, a local interior designer, volunteered advice on the redo.

Since the Public Works Department painted the walls, and Williams was paid by donors, the transformation from dingy and cluttered to bright and clean was accomplished at low cost.

The conference room, formerly yellow, is now also light green, with black trim that highlights the old-fashioned elegance of the walk-in vault on one side of the room.

On the other side is a row of shadow boxes holding posters from various special events held in the city. They replaced photographic portraits of past mayors, 23 in all, which were moved to the back wall of the office at the room’s far end, which serves as the entryway to the mayor’s office.

Palmer chuckled about walking back and forth every work day past those portraits of her predecessors — 23 men in ties (only one, Bob Regan, isn’t wearing a jacket).

More than the decor has changed at City Hall.

She has a wish list of large projects she’d also like done — the elevators, the windows, the cooling and heating system — but since economy is one of her top priorities, the inexpensive stuff is getting done now.

“We made a little go a long way,” she said.

She would like to tinker also with the first-floor landing, the lobby of City Hall, which serves as the city’s indoor showcase the way Crandall Park is its outdoor showcase.

“I’d like to curate it a bit more,” she said of the photos and posters and brochures and cabinet displays arranged haphazardly in the space. “There’s so much there.”

In office for about six weeks now, Palmer has been working on more than spiffing up City Hall.

The new comprehensive plan she pushed for and campaigned on is in its final draft and will soon be submitted to the New York Department of State for approval.

Once approved, the plan will be used to apply for grants to undertake a citywide zoning code review. It’s a time-consuming process but a necessary one as the city faces its greatest development pressure in decades.

Downtown, Palmer’s top concern is finding a private sector partner to take over the city’s lease for the first floor of the incubator building at 36 Elm St. Ideally, hospitality professionals with experience in staging events would operate both the incubator space and the neighboring market center, she said.

Without a private partner, the city will be on the hook to Bonacio Development for the $900,000 lease over 10 years.

“There’s basically no real plan for covering the lease costs,” said Palmer, who voted against the lease when she was on the Common Council.

A private company “would take over the lease and we’d give them the Ed to run,” she said, referring to the market center by its nickname in honor of former city official Ed Bartholomew.

She’s starting small with cleanups and coats of paint, but the steps the city takes in the next couple of years will be critical to its future. A lot is happening, as Glens Falls moves toward again becoming the busy and prosperous small city it was more than 50 years ago.

For now, the new carpet and colors look great.

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I don’t get out much now that my wife, Bella, who has Alzheimer’s disease, is scared to leave the house.

Stairs frighten her, so for awhile, we were leaving by the back door, where the driveway slopes up to the door, instead of the front door, which has three stone steps leading down to the walkway.

We’d go out the back, walk around to the car and go to coffee shops and for walks in the woods.

But it’s all overwhelming for her now, especially getting in and out of the car, which required holding onto the door while she put one leg in, then sitting and pulling in the other leg.

The bustle of a coffee shop, too, with people and conversations criss-crossing, became too much.

I get out three times a week, on Wednesdays when my son and daughter-in-law come over while I go to therapy for an hour, and two other times when our respite caregiver, Erin, comes for a couple of hours while I run errands or meet a friend for coffee.

I go to Adirondack Samaritan Counseling in Hudson Falls for therapy, always leaving with lighter spirits than when I arrived. Without therapy each week, I fear nothing would arrest a descent into the cave of my thoughts.

Isolation is crazy-making, as many of us discovered during the pandemic. Being heard and felt and understood by other human beings is as necessary as sleep.

So I get excited when I have the opportunity for face to face conversation. But even as I’m enjoying the back and forth, the stories and smiles and silences, doubts arise. Am I too exuberant? Oversharing? Uninformed?

Insecure thoughts prey on me afterward. I imagine I’ve alienated whoever it was I was talking to, that they regret our interaction and will avoid me in the future.

This is what happens when you’re cooped up for days that pass in slow motion, when you’re casting about for a purpose and obsessively checking your phone for something to care about. Evidently, you’ve got nothing better to do than sit on the couch. So what good are you?

And when it comes to full-time caregivers, I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m healthy. My kids help. My parents and siblings are supportive and so are friends and people I don’t even know who read this newsletter.

Lots of folks in my situation are struggling with their own health and their finances and have very little support. Very few get to air their struggles regularly to a sympathetic audience like I do here.

I tell people the caregiving experience has opened my eyes to the hard personal challenges many people endure. But, really, I already knew that lots of people have hard lives.

What the years at home with Bella have done is open my heart. I feel for those who are going through the gradual, unpredictable, tedious, heartbreaking decline of a loved one.

There is no reward for the months and years of caregiving, except the feeling that, flawed as you are, you’re doing your best at something that has to be done.

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Snow

What Ringo, a mockingbird and I have all decided is this latest snowstorm makes it undeniable that this year we’re having “a real winter.”

Poem

Here is a poem from Hudson Falls poet Richard Carella:

Summer Light

He felt more than desire                                                                                                            for her, as he observed

her at the bathroom sink,                                                                                                    where she stood

with her back to him;                                                                                                                her skin seemed

–unbeknownst to her–                                                                                                                 as if, casually, gathering

the summer light...                                                                                                                   (that was filtering through

white curtains, then),                                                                                                                 for some

inscrutable purpose;                                                                                                             unless, (as, later–

it occurred to him),                                                                                                                     it was as a gift for him;

which he accepted,                                                                                                             eagerly: when

she came back to bed.

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Reading

I read “Naples ‘44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy” by Norman Lewis, a 175-page memoir by a British intelligence officer, novelist and travel writer.

The book wasn’t published until 1978, although it was written in 1944 when Lewis was stationed in Naples after Italy’s surrender to the Allies in September 1943. German forces still occupied northern Italy.

The book has been hailed as a masterpiece, but it is a shocking masterpiece, with graphic descriptions of the privation of the Italians and the lengths to which they went to survive.

Lewis relates tales of grandmothers pimping their grandchildren and kids hunting cats for food with an ironic detachment that sometimes finds wicked humor in the human debasement caused by war.

His writing is lean and lucid and, despite the appalling details, humane. He liked the Neapolitans and admired their tenacity and generosity. He finds more to criticize in the unfeeling, nonsensical and often brutal behavior of the English and American forces than the Italian citizenry.

Cruelty and criminality are interwoven with kindness and good manners in the behavior of the Neapolitans, who bend very far but do not break in savage circumstances. “Naples ‘44” is an unsettling but captivating read.

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Bugg Bosford is a junior at Queensbury, where local people who want to ban a trans girl from the middle school locker room have been putting pressure on the school board.

Bugg identifies as non-binary or gender fluid, which, they said, is considered part of the transgender spectrum.

Biologically female at birth, Bugg started to notice in fourth and fifth grade they didn’t fit perfectly in a “girl” slot. They started to socially transition in sixth grade, experimenting with they/them pronouns.

“With friends, they/them is the safest option,” they said. “He/him is second. She/her is OK but not my favorite.”

Bugg has found a lot of acceptance in the Queensbury district.

“As a parent, I couldn’t ask for a better group of teachers and administrators,” said Bugg’s mom, Maria. “We’ve never felt the school didn’t have our back.”

Colleen Cowper, a school counselor, has been particularly supportive, Bugg said.

“She did a lot of the communicating with teachers. For the most part, teachers were very understanding and very cooperative. For some, it was hard for them to change how they referred to me,” they said.

Some struggled more with the shift in pronouns than their name change.

“I had done a Facebook post once Bugg was comfortable,” Maria said. “That covered a lot of our friends and family. For the most part, we had a really positive and overwhelming response.”

She wasn’t upset about losing the name she and her husband had chosen for Bugg, she said.

“I had seen the power and positivity that it brought them. That mattered more to me than not using the name we gave them when they were born,” she said.

Bugg competes on girls sports teams.

“I do present like a female most of the time. Some days it’s really hard for me to dress masculine or androgynous. I’ve got a feminine body and feminine voice,” they said.

They haven’t taken hormones.

“I’m not really interested in that, especially at my age. Sometimes, I do feel like I identify with the gender I was born with, sometimes I feel the opposite. I don’t want to make a decision that would confine me to one gender,” they said.

As with the trans girl in the middle school and all transgender people, Bugg’s choice not to stick to the gender associated with their sex at birth hurts no one.

Although they have felt supported in Queensbury, they find the national campaign to push trans people to the fringes of society “frustrating and discouraging.”

And the way the local locker room issue has prompted hundreds of abusive posts on Facebook has been awful, they said.

“I wouldn’t necessarily say it affects me directly. But the publicity and attention it’s gotten on social media, I find disgusting. The situation should have stayed private.

“There’s a lot of hate and disgusting comments being made. It honestly scares me — grown adults talking about harming the child and the board of eduction members.

“Are these people really that hateful and willing to do such a harmful thing to … even a child?” they said.

Brian Howard, the father of another middle school girl, has been voicing his displeasure at school board meetings, and his friend, Kayla Stone, has been making posts on Facebook that have received thousands of comments, hundreds of them ignorant and ugly.

I have heard that the girl in question finds a private place, like a bathroom stall, to change her clothes.

Other students could do the same, if they want privacy, as, I assume, kids have been doing for many years.

But adults like Howard and Stone simply must take a stand over a problem that wouldn’t exist if they just sat down.

Then the online rabble jumps in with tough-guy posturing and parental histrionics. I saw threats to beat up the girl, who is 11, and shoot members of the school board.

The board is following state and federal law.

Meanwhile, students like Bugg Bosford will identify themselves as they choose and look to the future.

“I do plan to go to college for pre-law and do plan to go to law school afterward,” they said. “I’m considering family law and representing foster kids, also being an immigration attorney.”

I do hope we end up in a few years with a lot of lawyers like Bugg.

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Aurin Chowdury, 28 years old and a member of the Minneapolis City Council, is a first-generation American whose parents immigrated from Bangladesh.

She is getting married soon.

“I have a total of 20 cousins just on my mom’s side,” she said. “There’s no way the guest list is less than 200. It’s probably the bright spot this year.”

She could use a bright spot and so could the rest of the residents of Minneapolis as they recover from the havoc wreaked on their city by thousands of federal agents sent there by our president.

“We’re going to have to learn to organize and self-sustain. Our budgets are limited. We’re hoping that people will come and visit and support us.

“The eyes of the nation are on the city of Minneapolis. It’s super amazing to get all this love and support from all over the world. But at the same time, people are scared to come. That impact is deep,” Chowdury said.

Immigrant-owned businesses are a critical part of the city’s vibrant economy, but many business owners had to cut hours or lock their doors as more than 3,000 border and immigration agents roamed the streets, smashing car windows to drag drivers out, confronting employees at their workplaces and casting a pall of oppression over the city’s neighborhoods and downtown.

Residents were targeted by accents and skin color and arrested regardless of their legal status. Hundreds of families have spent a month or more sheltering in their homes — never leaving, not to take out the trash or shovel snow, so they wouldn’t be seized.

Now a withdrawal has been announced, and city leaders like Chowdury are seeking ways to help small businesses survive and families pay rent.

“We are really proud of the corridors of immigrant-owned businesses that make Minneapolis Minneapolis,” she said. “We’ll have in the next few days information on the financial impact. It will be many many millions of dollars.

“Through this whole time I have just felt a deep, deep profound sadness that has turned into a need to act. I cried for my city.

“In the last few years of the recovery we needed to do after the Covid-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, we repaired ourselves.

“Now we’re in a new era of recovery that is going to take many many years,” she said.

Chowdury spent part of her childhood in Minneapolis, until her family moved to a city suburb, where she was “the one brown, Muslim, immigrant, poor kid in the whole classroom.”

She came back to the city to attend the University of Minnesota and stayed after graduation, working in behind-the-scenes political jobs and community organizing before winning her first race for Ward 12 representative in 2023. She was re-elected this past November.

She is a Democrat who advocates for progressive policies.

“The way systems operate leads to oppression,” she said. “Are you able to afford lunch? Are your parents able to afford a mortgage? Do your people have a say at the table? I felt that very acutely my entire childhood and adolescence.”

As a teenager, she became involved in political organizing after the fatal shootings by police of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Philando Castile in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area. Then in 2020, shortly after the start of the pandemic, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officers.

“It’s a helluva time in general, and it’s a helluva time to be coming of age.

“People are always so excited when young people run for office. I ran at 25. But there’s a real seriousness to it.

“Coming into this term and this crisis, I felt like a veteran to crisis, and ready to speak truth to the injustice we were seeing,” she said.

If you’ve been wondering why Trump singled out Minneapolis for his most aggressive and damaging incursion, take a look at the City Council by clicking on this sentence. Look at all the black and brown faces. Look at how young so many of them are.

Operation Metro Surge was not an anti-crime initiative. It was an anti-immigrant, anti-diversity strike, carried out by men in masks.

Minneapolis is a successful, dynamic, friendly city that has benefitted from waves of energetic immigrants, going back generations. Minneapolis realizes America’s promise as a land of opportunity. Minneapolis refutes this administration’s false portrayal of immigrants as dangerous.

ICE’s adventure in Minnesota backfired. Hundreds of videos from thousands of brave citizens exposed the abusiveness of Trump’s pseudo-soldiers. They were the ones sowing chaos. They were the criminals.

Against them, we saw neighbors standing in solidarity and nonviolent protest.

Now the city is coming together to fix the damage, which is extensive. The City Council has established a $1 million rent assistance fund for families in danger of eviction. Chowdury wants a small business assistance fund, too.

“I’ve been helping get cash assistance out to people. I’ve been talking to people who have been sheltering in place, women my age or younger.

“There’s something sobering and painful in buying diapers for people who can’t go out of their homes.

“I had to buy a pregnancy test for a woman, because she couldn’t go out. Her partner was detained,” Chowdury said.

When the federal agents leave, it will be like the day after a hurricane, she said.

“It’s going to be, if we actually see it end … You see the fog of it lift off and the aftermath is just going to be there.”

Even if Minneapolis can heal, the country is still suffering.

“One thing Tom Homan said that’s keeping me up at night, the surge will end and then agents will go back to their home stations or other areas of the country. It makes me so angry.

“What we have suffered through, it’s just so inhumane. I don’t want it for anyone else. If it ends here, it doesn’t end everywhere else,” she said.

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Poems

Here are three poems from Hudson Falls poet Richard Carella:

Allegation

There are                                                                                                                                  those who

accuse him

of not liking                                                                                                                         “anything”;

his ready

response to                                                                                                                                them is–

“I don’t dislike

everything:                                                                                                                                    I like nothing,

for instance.”

Constant

Say what                                                                                                                                        you

will                                                                                                                                           about nothing;              

but it is never                                                                                                                                not:

there for us.

Nothing Progresses

Everything                                                                                                                                     is                                                                                                                                                    a disaster;

nothing                                                                                                                                           is                                                                                                                                                  going

according                                                                                                                                       to                                                                                                                                                   plan.

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Readings

I recently finished reading “Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy, a book that took me a month at least, not only because it’s more than 700 densely filled pages long, but also because it’s so full of life and feeling, I found I had to limit myself to a few chapters at a time or feel overwhelmed.

The chapters are short, sometimes only three or four pages, I assume because the novel was serialized in the periodical The Russian Messenger from 1875 to 1877 before being published as a whole in 1878.

It is often referred to as one of the greatest or the greatest novel ever published, although Tolstoy himself reportedly hated it, and by the end was working on it only grudgingly.

The book is more full of life and truth than any other I have read. Every character is deeply flawed, contradictory, lacking in insight into themselves and others, emotionally vulnerable and at times prideful, spiteful, delusional and cruel and also generous, kind, affectionate and charming.

Every character is frustrating in their self-destructiveness, tragically human, stumbling and falling on their faces, living moment by moment and snatching at happiness.

Tolstoy never resorts to cheap solutions. Every dilemma lingers, no conflict is fully resolved, no character transforms, no one lives happily ever after.

The plot involves four love relationships, two of which include Anna, which must be why she was chosen for the title. I won’t list the other main characters, since all are called by several names throughout the book, without any obvious pattern, and some of the names overlap, so it is often unclear who is present and whom is being discussed.

Both men with whom Anna is involved are, at times, called “Alexey” and that is also one of the names of her son and of another important character.

Many of the characters have titles, such as “prince” or “count,” in addition to their multiple given names. Several also have nicknames.

Tolstoy will frequently identify a female character as “princess,” even though that could mean one of at least four people.

My strategy was the same one I use when reading English mysteries, which some people but not me can solve before the end — ignore the confusion and enjoy the ride.

I knew which characters were which when it mattered, when love was being sworn or despair embraced.

Various translators have tackled “Anna Karenina.” The version I read was translated by Constance Garnett, who was English and translated “Anna Karenina” in 1901 and numerous other Russian works early in the 20th century, often being the first to do so.

Critics have generally praised Garnett but criticized her tendency to smooth out the prose of Russian authors, making their work more readable but less true to the original. That criticism makes me want to seek out other translators, even though I was enthralled and amazed by her “Anna Karenina.”

I also read another book by one of my favorite authors, Alan Furst, in the middle of reading “Anna Karenina” and another one by him immediately after I finished “Anna Karenina.” The first Furst I read (not my first by Furst but my first Furst over the last month) was “Kingdom of Shadows.” The second was “Dark Star.”

“Dark Star,” published in 1991, is Furst’s second novel out of 15 in his “Night Soldiers” series, and is notable in that it is less formulaic than the others and longer — more than 400 pages while the more recent ones are about 300.

It could be, as the second in a long series, “Dark Star” establishes his formula rather than following it, but it also feels more substantial than the others — broader in scope, deeper in exploration of character. All of his books I’ve read, about 10, are well-written, gripping and historically illuminating, but “Dark Star” has more poignancy. The main character, Szara, is a classic Furst protagonist, a worldly but not old man, resourceful but with a moral center, who comes from outside the world of espionage but gets drawn into it as Hitler advances.

Furst puts a lot of effort and a lot of pages into setting the scene in “Dark Star,” not just sketching Szara’s character but coloring in its shades. At one point in the elaborate plot, Szara departs entirely from the world he has inhabited until then, living as someone else, moving from one place to another in Europe for at least a year or two while the plot awaits his return. This book has space for a tangent like that, and the admirable thing is, after pouring so much effort into making Szara a full and charismatic character, Furst shuns the easy route many writers before him have chosen and abandons him at the end of the book.

Like Dick Francis (for the most part), Furst creates a different protagonist for each novel. Also like Dick Francis, except even more so, Furst sets each of his “Night Soldiers” books in the same world, during the lead-up to World War II and its unfolding in the 1930s and ‘40s. One of the great pleasures of his novels is the feeling you’re learning a lot about that period’s politics and, especially, its espionage. Also its geography — as Furst’s spies creep back and forth across the continent, even casual readers will absorb some vague notion of where its countries, seas and mountains are located.

It’s his characters’ emotional geography that forms the heart of his novels, though. Furst’s books are not primarily plot-driven, the way, for example, John Le Carre’s are, which is why Furst’s endings often feel anti-climactic. No great disaster is averted or goal achieved. Any triumph is quiet and personal.

Furst always includes some love-making or, at least, gratuitous sex in his books (usually both) and a love affair or two. In “Dark Star,” Szara shows off his 40-something stamina with three romantic entanglements while also smoking and drinking a lot, barely sleeping and suffering various physical and emotional torments. A list of what happens to him in this book would seem impossible. But it was a time of impossible-seeming events, and Furst does a wonderful job of capturing it.

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SAIL again

Ken did a full column a year ago on Southern Adirondack Independent Living and all the excellent programs it runs to help people in various ways, but after receiving help myself recently from SAIL, I want to reiterate what a lifesaver it can be.

I’ve gone to the organization several times for medical equipment — crutches twice after hip replacements, along with other helpful equipment, like a device that helps you put your socks on. It’s a homely looking thing — a slab of curved plastic with short lengths of rope coming off either side — but it works. I’ve also gotten a shower chair for Bella.

SAIL health insurance navigators have guided me through obtaining coverage for myself and Bella several times and, in the recent instance, are helping me with the laborious process of qualifying Bella for Medicaid coverage. This will be critical in getting her more care at home, which I believe we will need soon. I could probably do these things without help, but it would take much longer and I wouldn’t be as confident as I am now about doing it correctly. That peace of mind is invaluable and yet SAIL charges nothing for it.

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I took a lot of dance classes in college and even dropped out for a short while with the intention of making a career out of dance.

After a couple of semesters, I realized I wasn’t close to good enough and didn’t want to ever again dry heave in an alley while cleaning out the grease trap of the restaurant where I was working.

I quit the job, returned to college, stopped taking dance and signed up for all the required courses I’d missed. But I kept dancing at campus parties, mostly to student bands or local unknowns who may not have been headed for stardom but knew how to get a room or a lawn rocking with hundreds of 18- to 22-year-olds jumping and shaking.

What I sought were the moments of sweaty exhilaration when I stopped thinking and moved without self-consciousness to the music — a dancer’s high.

Three and a half years ago, my back issues went from chronic to acute, so bad suddenly I had to sleep sitting up for months, swallow 20 or so over-the-counter pain pills a day and use the motorized cart in the grocery store.

Natural healing and physical therapy brought me slowly back to mobility, and after a year, in September of 2023, I danced in celebration at a good friend’s wedding.

Now I’m 65 and feeling healthy. I stretch out almost every day and run up and down the stairs and do planks and pushups.

Meanwhile, Alzheimer’s disease has eroded the mental and physical capacity of my wife, Bella, to the point she can’t leave the house or walk up to the second floor. I feed her, dress her and wash her.

She takes eight pills a day, climbs into bed at 4:30 p.m. and gets up at 7 a.m. The rest of the day she spends on the couch, napping or staring at the wall or resting her head on my shoulder, or wandering the downstairs, picking up items from the shelves and the tables and dressers and moving them to new spots.

The disease has aged her. At 60, she was still strong and youthful, but now at 67, she’s gaunt and haggard, the skin loose on her bones, hair thin and gray.

Sometimes I cook in the afternoon, making chicken stir-fry for us to eat for a few days, tossing broccoli and asparagus into the wok, baby bella mushrooms and chunks of butternut squash, onions and garlic and marinated chicken, stirring and stirring, adding oil, covering it and waiting for the rice to finish.

It takes an hour, and while I do it I listen to music, mostly women, like Nanci Griffith, Lucinda Williams, Iris DeMent, Susan Tedeschi, Patty Griffin, Ellen Jewel and Brandi Carlisle.

Bella continues to wander around, passing back and forth through the kitchen, and sometimes she looks at me and her face wrinkles into a smile and her eyes gleam with pleasure, because she sees I’m dancing.

“I love you, I love you,” she says, reaching for me.

“I love you,” I say and for a few seconds we embrace.

Then she continues doing what she was doing and so do I. Life is sad but also glorious, and while I am alive, I’m going to spend some time dancing.

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Speaking of music

I drew hope from a video someone I don’t know recently put up on Facebook of a country music singer-songwriter from Indiana named Tim Grimm, performing in a cowboy hat and boots in a Texas bar called The Pigpen, singing his song “Broken Truth” to a full house that, at the end, gives him a standing ovation. A few diners, red-faced and uncomfortable, don’t get out of their seats.

The song is an understated but powerful indictment of Donald Trump, and the scene has a bit of the feeling of “the Marseillaise” scene from “Casablanca.”

Granted, the bar is in San Antonio, a traditionally Democratic city, and The Pigpen offers gluten-free and vegan dishes along with brisket nachos and crispy wings. Still, we need all sorts of Americans to stand up and resist Trump, and in this performance of this song, I see hope that is going to happen.

Scroll down on Tim Grimm’s website to listen and watch:

"Broken Truth"

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Poem

Here is a poem by Hudson Falls poet Richard Carella:

Entry

I open my heart to you;                                                                                                       though it’s,

somewhat,

unkempt–                                       
and it’s been a long

time since

we’ve entertained guests;                                                                                                       you enter expectantly:

looking for what?

–sending shivers-of-life...                                                                                                 through the cobwebs,

and dust.

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Embroideries

My daughter Tam, who oversees the manufacture of large industrial appliances at her day job, also creates embroidered artworks. She recently brought several home in preparation for a show she plans to take part in locally later this year. Here are three of them:

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Black & Banned

Frederick Allen Elks Lodge #609 and Mary A. Carter Temple #302 of the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World, the two oldest black civic organizations in Saratoga Springs, along with Our Lodge Foundation, are shining a light on banned books either written by Black authors or illuminating racism and Black American history.

Essential American literature by and about Black Americans is systematically being removed from library shelves and school curriculums. The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has noted an increase in challenges to books about racism and black history, and black authors are banned at a higher rate than white authors.

Invited readers will share passages from these banned books, with personal insight into why the book has been targeted, from 1 to 4 p.m. today (Sunday, Feb. 8) in the Frederick Allen Lodge #609 at 69 Beekman St. in Saratoga Springs. Attendees will also have the opportunity to read from chosen material.

This event is meant to celebrate the freedom to read what we choose, without government or public interference — an essential right for creating a better world for everyone.

Banned books by Black authors include “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings,” “Beloved,” “The Bluest Eye,” “The Color Purple” and “The Hate U Give.”

Banned books exposing racism include “To Kill A Mocking Bird,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “Black Like Me.”

This event is free. Donations are always appreciated.

While the lodge’s bar will not be open, soda and water will be available for purchase.

Faith leaders holding forum

“Welcome the Stranger,” a conversation on faith and immigration led by Fr. Scott VanDerveer from St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Glens Falls, Rev. Dr. Natalie Wimberly from First Baptist Church in Hudson Falls and Pastor Michael Plank from First Presbyterian Church in Hudson Falls will be held from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 28, in the United Methodist Church at 227 Main St., Hudson Falls.

The event is sponsored by Adirondack Regional Immigration Collaborative.

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Laura Garrant went to therapy for a few years, starting in 2020.

Things were weighing on her, the isolation and alienation of the Covid pandemic, the horrible murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by a police officer. But her talk often turned to her father, Michael McDonald.

“I would often leave my counseling session sobbing just from talking about it,” she said.

She was very close to her father growing up. Her parents split up when she was 11, and she chose to stay with her father in their family home in Hudson Falls through high school.

She worked at Sears when she was a teen.

“I’d be working until 9 p.m. at Christmas time. I’d come home and my dad would be pulling fresh brownies out of the oven,” she said.

“He’d make me breakfast before school. I was very much doted on and loved. I wasn’t spoiled with finances, I was spoiled with love,” she said.

Her father sold the house and moved to Fort Ann after she graduated from high school, and she moved in with her mother and went to work at Bard.

But she talked to her father every day, and after she got married to Bryan Garrant in 2006, she and Bryan would drive to her father’s house every Sunday for dinner.

“He was always very kind to Bryan,” she said.

Laura is white, Bryan is multi-racial. That wasn’t an obstacle. At her insistence, Bryan asked for and received her father’s blessing before their marriage.

Their son was born in 2016 a few months before the election of Donald Trump. Laura, a Democrat who believes in democratic ideals, had been working to register people to vote. She never asked her father who he voted for, but she came to believe it was Trump.

They continued to speak on the phone but avoided politics. She saw the social media posts he and his brothers put up, however, that mocked things she believed in, like the Black Lives Matter movement and Covid prevention measures like social-distancing and mask-wearing.

“He’s the one who taught me morals. He taught me financial responsibility. He’s the same person who taught me to be the person I am,” she said of her father.

But she couldn’t follow him into following Trump.

“Because I believe in human rights, I believe in women’s rights, I believe in Black people’s rights.

“I can’t align myself with someone who has no morals.’

Her father had liked Bill Clinton and disliked George W. Bush. She’s not sure what drew him to Trump.

“I think that he sees it as a big F-U to the establishment. He was always into, like, Bill Maher

“I don’t see it as politics though. I see it as human decency. I see it as people’s lives,” she said.

Jade Eddy who is 40, lives in South Glens Falls and runs MT Returnables in Queensbury, feels the same way.

“A certain group of people still sees it as politics, but other people see it as humanity and morals,” she said.

Although Eddy and her mother had differences for years, her mother’s infatuation with Donald Trump made their split irreconcilable.

“I personally haven’t had a relationship with her since 2012 for personal reasons,” she said.

“But she’s lost her noodle and gone down the rabbit hole with QAnon and everything. It’s unfortunate. She doesn’t have a relationship with any of her children.

“She moved to Kentucky, we think she’s joined a cult,” Eddy laughed. “My sisters have shown me her social media activity.”

Her father started the business Eddy now runs and they worked side by side for years. But their closeness meant Eddy couldn’t make a clean break with her mother, because her father kept in touch with her mother and continued to help her even though they were divorced.

“It got to the point where this was really affecting my health. It’s terrible to say but my mental health has improved since 2020 after my father died,” Eddy said, explaining she was finally able then to put her mother from her mind.

“I separate Republicans from MAGA,” Eddy said. “I have friends and I have family who are Republicans and they’re amazing people and they will help you in your time of need.”

“My opinion is, no matter what party you’re with or who you voted for, you always have the option to say this isn’t for me. You always have the choice to walk away.

“But with MAGA people it seems they are always moving their line with Trump. I’ve asked friends, ‘What is your line?’ Then he crosses it, and they say, ‘Well, you know, he had to.’ At that point, you don’t have a moral compass.

“Although I am proud to say I have friends who have walked away. Some of them are more vocal about what is going on than anyone I know, which is kind of refreshing and comical at the same time.”

Her relationship with her aunt — her father’s sister — has also deteriorated because of her aunt’s admiration for Trump, she said.

When Trump supporters were turning out regularly at the roundabout to cheer for him, her aunt joined them, marching with a Donald Trump cardboard cutout.

She also decorated her Christmas tree as an homage to Donald Trump.

“She got mad at me, she said ‘You made fun of me.’ I said, ‘If any of my friends had decorated their tree for Bernie Sanders, I would have made fun of them.’ It’s just bizarre. There’s no politician on this earth who would ever have my total devotion.”

That unquestioning support for Trump, beyond party or policy, has split the country and many families into warring factions.

In January of 2016 at a campaign stop at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa, before he had been elected to any office, Trump said the following: ”I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”

A decade later and a year into his second term as president, Trump has had numerous people murdered on his orders, from boaters on the high seas to U.S. citizens on our cities’ streets, and still his base of support is solid.

Americans won’t be safe from Trump’s violence until he is out of office. The invasion of blue cities continues, and the longer it lasts, the more his hatreds infect our lives.

Garrant was elected in November to the Moreau Town Council and took office last month.

“When I won the election, I honestly had an overwhelming feeling I wanted to call and hear him tell me how proud he was of me,” she said of her father.

“I honestly cried many times and my heart ached and sometimes it still aches.

“I mourned the loss.”

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Wintry stroll

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Poems

Here are two poems by Hudson Falls poet Richard Carella:

Man In A Snowstorm

He awakens before daylight                                                                                                      to the sounds of a plow’s

working against a storm–

the heat flooding-up                                                                                                          through the register

in the floor...

the hum of the aquarium                                                                                                      outside

of his door and,

(even before these),                                                                                                                  the unspoken thought

that compelled him

to switch on the overhead                                                                                                     light: and lie listening.

The Unheard

When we are dead,                                                                                                                  and haunt the world...

we will still talk to you–

as we talk to you here;                                                                                                              and because you won’t

hear us,

(as you don’t hear us now),                                                                                                           it will be as if:

nothing has changed.

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That’s nothing

Mark Frost, owner of the Glens Falls Chronicle, continues to pretend that saying nothing means something. In the past, this has meant straddling issues, or pretending to straddle them while favoring the Stefanik/Trump side. This week, it meant offering a mix of opinions from various far-ranging sources on the murders in Minneapolis committed by federal agents.

One of his sources is Temple University geography professor Jacob Shell. I don’t know where Frost dug him up, but Shell starts by proclaiming, “The approximate 50 percent of the country that voted for Trump in ‘24 did so in large part …. blah-blah. “

But nowhere near 50 percent of the country voted for Trump in 2024. About 32.5 percent of voting age adults voted for Trump and about 31 percent for Harris. About 36 percent did not vote.

Trump got soundly beaten by the “can’t be bothered” vote, a bloc that is large in every modern presidential election. The point is, Shell can’t get even the most basic figures right, and Frost can’t be bothered to correct him.

Taking his own stand on government agents gunning down innocent citizens is another thing Frost can’t be bothered to do. Worse, he presents his lack of conviction as a virtue, headlining his piece “Comprehending other views” and stating, “I’m talking about trying to understand viewpoints of people you disagree with.”

Many of us, like the hundreds who periodically show up outside his office in City Park to protest tyranny, understand those viewpoints perfectly well. We find them reprehensible. We believe it’s our duty to condemn abuse of civil rights, unjustified beatings, brutal incarceration of toddlers and cold-blooded murder. And we see no value in providing a platform for “other views.”

Worth freezing for

I made it to the line for the Crandall library quarterly book sale by 8:30 a.m. on Friday, and since it was -10 degrees at the time, only three other people were there and two had gone into the coffee shop. A handful more showed up the next minute and by 10 of nine, the line was stretching down the sidewalk and library staff let us in to the lobby to warm up for a few minutes before we plunged into the offerings.

Vigil for Alex

Glens Falls Queen Team will be hosting a vigil at noon today (Sunday, Feb. 1) in City Park for Alex Pretti, the intensive care nurse murdered recently in Minneapolis by federal agents from Customs and Border Protection.

Guest speakers will include New York State Assemblywoman Carrie Woerner; Debra Dudas, a nurse and manager of Glens Falls Hospital’s intensive care unit; Victoria Rexrode, a family nurse-practitioner; Fifth Ward City Council member Sean Palladino; and others.

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On Jan. 14, Amber Frederick was tuned into the patrol chat on the Signal app for her neighborhood group in Minneapolis when she heard fellow observers talking about a chaotic confrontation between residents and ICE agents at 24th and Lyndale.

“They pulled up and said MPD (Minneapolis Police Department) was on the scene, and ICE officers were on the scene,” Amber said.

“Over the call, they said, ‘We’re trying to get as close as we can. It looks like MPD marked off the streets.’ Then I heard the shots, and ‘Oh my God, Oh my God, they shot into the house.’”

The shots were ICE agents firing tear gas canisters through the windows of a house that had two small children inside with two young women, one of them pregnant. A man who had just run into the house had been shot in the leg by an ICE agent.

“I got there shortly after they had gassed the house,” Frederick said. “There was a responder on the call who was attempting to assist the pregnant woman inside. She was afraid she was going to go into labor. They were attempting to connect her with a doula.

“I could hear the cries of children. I heard the man on the radio, he could see the woman coming out with kids.

“I arrived at the scene as the ambulance arrived.”

Frederick works at a local Y as a youth support specialist, helping young adults experiencing homelessness find safe and stable housing.

She was sworn in earlier this month to the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, after winning a citywide campaign for one of three at-large seats on the nine-member board.

She’s 25 and handling three jobs — the Y, the park board and rapid response with her neighborhood patrol.

“I’m very busy. I’m just trying to do what I can for the community that I love. Right now the ICE occupation is such an immense need,” she said.

The park board is independent, funded through a separate tax levy and a foundation.

At Frederick’s first meeting on Jan. 7, the board decided to put up signs, prohibiting ICE agents from using city parks as staging areas.

“ICE has been showing up and taking neighbors from parks,” she said. “It is unlawful for federal agents to violate the ordinance.

“Now the role of the park board is to decide how we can support our staff to feel comfortable and safe responding to ICE.

“Being a constitutional observer is within their rights as an employee.

“I’m hoping that, through all of our collective action, we’re going to be able to really meet the moment right now and keep our neighbors safe because that’s the most important thing,” she said.

I asked her if this is what she thought she’d be doing at her age.

“No,” she said. “In a way it’s super disappointing, but also, this is all I’ve known, my whole adult life. Their tactics have been disappointing me since I was 15 years old.”

It’s terrible that a generation of young Americans has grown up with the grasping, petty, dishonest and cruel influence of the Trump movement.

But it’s wonderful that the response from people like Frederick has been to fight in defense of the best American principles: freedom of expression and opportunity, embrace of democracy and rejection of tyranny.

I’m sick of Democratic members of Congress expressing their useless disapproval. Every one of them should be marching in the streets with the patriots in Minneapolis.

Federal agents have swarmed into the city, and as they kick in doors and smash car windows and gang-assault people in the street, no one is coming to residents’ defense, not even their own police department.

Historians will try to answer why the response of powerful people to the current authoritarian abuses was so weak.

I don’t know why.

But I do know historians will praise the people like Amber Frederick who threw off apathy and fear and stood up for our country while Trump and his legion of bullies and sycophants tried to tear it apart.

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No, Dan, you don’t

Dan Stec’s statement last week to the Chronicle that he “has experience standing up for our shared values” captures the willful blindness to their own loss of integrity demonstrated by so many Republican politicians. You can’t represent our shared values when you support a president whose values of greed and dominance and bigotry are everything that most of us reject and abhor. You can’t stand up for us when you stand up for him.

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Poem

Here is a poem from Hudson Falls poet Richard Carella:

Unworlding

You drift through                                                                                                                  walls you could                                                                                                                         not breach...

when you were flesh;

and then,                                                                                                                                       (at last) outside them,                                                                                                                you find,

again,

and linger near,                                                                                                                         the ones you loved–                                                                                                                   or meant to love,

or to love better;

until life,                                                                                                                                      as you knew it,                                                                                                                           and you:

disappear.

(Mr. Carella’s last week’s poem here, “The Expectancy,” was published as a book last fall, in both English and its French translation [“L’Attente”]. Like his first book, Digital-Dreams [2005], it was published in Canada.)

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Parwana

Mike Parwana of Lake Luzerne continues to capture the absurdity and poignancy of the moment we are living through in his Substack newsletter, Under Occupation. That’s what it is called now. He used to call it Mike Parwana Said What? and I think it had another name, too, along the way. But it has been the same mixture of smart-ass tomfoolery, rambling and hilarious personal tales, irony, sorrow and rage the whole time. This week’s installment is an outstanding example of his form.

Parwana on protesting

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ICE agents have shot and killed another person in Minneapolis, this time a man reportedly in his 30s. The shooting happened Saturday morning and now, early Saturday afternoon, few details are available.

One video is up online, filmed from across the street and showing six or seven agents surrounding a man on the ground and beating him. Then a shot is heard, and the agents scatter. Reports I have just seen say the man was shot more than once.

My cousin Georgia lives a few blocks from the site of the shooting and was on her way to that area Saturday morning to buy supplies at a Mexican grocery store for a family that is staying inside out of fear of ICE.

“I was just getting ready to go and I got a notification on my phone there was a shooting right near there. I decided I would go down anyways to see what was going on.

“When I got there, there were a few community members already engaging, a couple of officers milling around, some disgruntled people on the scene.

“Pretty quickly when I got there they started backing people up, physically pushing with their hands, and cordoning the area off with tape.

“I was there about hour and a half.

“Twenty to thirty additional agents showed up, so about 35 guys were there, walking around, not engaging with people. They would whisper to each other, take out some pepper spray, put their hands on their guns.

“People were really angry. There was constant noise of people shouting stuff at them, chants.

“Eventually this random person next to me picked up a big chunk of snow and threw it at one of them, immediately people dispersed, agents came over, people started running, including agents.

“I thought this was time for me to go.”

“When I was leaving there were a series of four or five explosions, I think were flashbangs.

“Everybody is in their random pajamas or their work clothes, these are nurses, lawyers, community members. There’s still a bunch of people there.”

While she was at the scene, a couple of people chatted with her in a friendly way and she started crying, Georgia said.

“It feels like every day there’s another worse thing. It feels like it’s escalating which is hard.

“It happened on a street that I’ve been so often. To see this level of disregard for humanity, when people are literally pleading with them to do the right thing, it just makes me really afraid for all the community members.

“It’s totally changed the quality of life in the city for everyone.”

Here are four videos Georgia took while she was at the scene:

Also, the Status Coup News, a Youtube Channel, is on the scene right now (2:05 p.m. as I post this) with live coverage. Things are worsening.

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