Vigil, Day I

The first Memorial day weekend in years that I haven't done the Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit in NYC.  The general sense of everything being out of control, and the additional layer of logistics and cost in needing to rent a van for four days was just too much for me. I miss it. An elderly eccentric from the Village that I often speak to for hours while standing there not selling art phoned tonight to ask if I was alright. Its nice to think you are missed, and remembered, when you devote your heart to something so futile. That statement applies equally to art and the discipline of trying to be nice to everyone.  The little kindness was appreciated, never let anyone say anything against New Yorkers, at least of the old school.  

Jerseyites I'm not feeling so charitable toward at the moment.

http://www.nj.com/bergen/index.ssf/2013/05/independent_experts_agree_centuries-old_teaneck_tree_should_come_down.html

I don't know quite why this makes me think of Thoreau on the topic of shad, or if its truly the tree I'm thinking about, or egoist to the end like all artists, it's myself.

"Still patiently, almost pathetically, with instinct not to be discouraged, not to be reasoned with, revisiting their old haunts, as if their stern fates would relent, and still met by the corporation with its dam. Poor shad! where is thy redress? When Nature gave thee instinct, gave she thee the heart to bear thy fate?...
It will not be forgotten by some memory that we were contemporaries. Thou shalt erelong have thy way up the rivers, up all the rivers of the globe, if I am not mistaken. Yea, even thy dull watery dream shall be more than realized. If it were not so, but thou wert to be overlooked at first and at last, then would not I take their heaven."