And the winner is..

[Roshan]

I found a book on a park bench the other day and I opened it and it was inscribed to someone as a gift in 1913; then the recipient inscribed it to someone else in 1949. I got to look into it today.

I didn't realize until today that it was first inscribed by the author and that's why the recipient gave it to someone else. It took some looking but here is the author.. This is a reissue of her book.. It's not the only one. This is the original.. (Mine isn't the only one she ever signed). She was a member of The Council of Women for Home Missions.. The Interchurch Center uptown seems to have the archive for the Home Missions who issued this book as part of its youth educational series. There is also an archive of her family's publications with the Vermont Historical Society. It contains a short bio blurb for her. I'm trying to find a home for the book. Someone cared enough to put her signed picture on Find a Grave. I wonder who.

[Roshan]

She married A.W. Dimock who made this book about the exploration of Florida with his photographer brother Julian There is a picture of her and her future husband canoeing in Florida in 1908.

[Roshan]

Look what I just found. Read the entry from 1918. That's where she wrote the inscription, Happy Valley, in New York State.

To Ms. (?),

who has made Yanna Farms a garden of delights, I send this last product of my own farm.

Leila Allen Dimock

The Happy Valley
Peekamose, NY
Oct. 14, 1913

* * *
I couldn't read the name of the hamlet until now though I could see it began with P and ended with ose. I found it here but I couldn't find it before because google gave me a (former) farm town called Happy Valley in Oswego County. But 'The Happy Valley' was just the name of the Dimocks' place in Ulster County. I also saw here that she lived in Denning, NY (and New Jersey) but all I got at the time was a Denning Street in Woodstock, New York. Now I see that Peekamose is a hamlet in the township of Denning, Ulster County, New York.

Ms. (?) later became Olivia Seaman.

36 years ago Mrs.Dimock gave me this book and I now have the pleasure of sending it to Roger Friedenbruch

1949
Olivia Seaman

I think I may try to give it to the Ulster County Historical Society.

[Roshan]

It's not Yanna Farms, it's Yama, and I found it. In Ulster County.

https://omeka.hrvh.org/exhibits/show/ya ... troduction

[Roshan]

And it's not Olivia. It's Olive. Olive Sarre. Ms. Sarre is the person Leila inscribed the book to in 1913. Olive signed herself Seaman in 1949 but it's not clear in the article that she and Frank Seaman ever did marry.

EDIT: Yes, they did. And her maiden name wasn't Sarre, it was Brown.
https://casetext.com/case/matter-of-seaman-10
EDIT 2: And t was clear later on in the exhibition article that the 'companions' married eventually, if you clicked on the 'Founders' page.

But elsewhere she is Olive B. Sarre.

EDIT: She was Olive Brown Sarre Seaman.

Yama Farms was certainly all the rage.
https://nyheritage.org/collections/yama ... collection
EDIT: This is the digital collection that records the exhibition that was at the Ellenville library,

[Roshan]

Leila gave Olive the book the same year Yama Farms opened.

A book was written about Yama Farms in 2006.

A bitter complaint was posted in 2010 that Yama Farms is falling to wrack and ruin, and this even after the fire.
https://archive.shawangunkjournal.com/2 ... 08120.html

That being the case, why should the book I found on the park bench outlast it?

But what choice do I have?

Maybe Ashley Bell will want the book.

[Roshan]

Here is Olive.

[Roshan]

Leila's husband wrote a book about fishing that was also reprinted.

Union Theological Seminary, affiliated with my alma mater Columbia, has archives on the Missionary Education Movement.. I already called the Interchurch Center library yesterday but they did not call back. I'm going to have to do it all in writing, I'm sure.

The Hudson River Valley Heritage should know who would want the book I found, if no one else does. I feel like it should go back to the Catskills because that's where Leila and Olive were together. I really have my eye on the Ulster County Historical Society.

I'm considering just writing everybody in one email, 'Dear Archivist'.

This is Si role.

[Roshan]

Dear Archivist:

I went to the rare books exhibit, Treasures, at the main branch of the library, the one with the lions. This library is 'kitty corner' from the one where I take the computer classes, which is now called the Stavros Niarchos Library. The pigeons on the stairway seemed to have a point to make.

I couldn't print out my reservation but I had the confirmation number. It turned out you didn't need a reservation (I thought they might still be limiting attendance due to corvid)--you could make it right there on a machine on the spot--but the guardian at the entrance made a show of how it was fine I don't have my smart phone or a print out, he found the confirmation number I wrote down. I question the wisdom of concocting reservations. It was the same with Lucky Lucy.

It wasn't just books and the first treasure I saw, the first anyone would see if they turned to the left when they walked in (which is, after all clockwise) was a poster for the original Earth Day in 1970. The attentive reader of long standing may recall that the right arm to the senator who founded Earth Day, Gaylord Nelson (at least throughout his gubernatorial campaign and tenure and first year in DC) was the father of The Philo-Anti-Semite.. It just goes to show you. But what?

After that it was a melange of treasures, very obviously put together by people of the Internet Age, because there was very little organization to it and you could find a medieval manuscript next to a modern poster. It was a lot like surfing the web. After a while I decided there were too many treasures in too little order and that I would not view them all and come back.

I asked the guard on the way out (not the guardian) when it ended and she said it doesn't but I don't believe her because I made the reservation because they said it was closing. I asked her what was her favorite treasure and she said 'the walking stick'. Very down to earth guard, not surprising. Except I hadn't seen the walking stick but I told her I'd catch it when I came back.

On the way out a sick, maybe dying, brown and white pigeon was nestled into one of the top steps right next to the most main entrance door.

tbcd

[Roshan]

Packed Day

A bus to the Alexander Technique groupon appointment at 200 Vesey Street. It's a new route for me. New bus. New old things to see. The line ends in Battery Park City. I was there when they were building it above the landfill; I had a one day temp job in a shed on a construction site in the late 70's, but I've barely gone there since although it's so close to where I used to work at BMCC. This time I really get to see it. I have to walk around a colossally huge brown building where it ends to get to Vesey Street via West Street. It's cold and raining. I wind up in the middle of the Oculus. The Oculus is a huge pretty new shopping center I've only been to once, with parts underground I believe exactly where parts of the World Trade Center were. It's humming. There's lots of tourists and also corporate people. So many sober shiny signs announcing elegant corporate headquarters. You would think there had never been a lockdown.

They won't let me upstairs. I call Mona, the Kuwaiti woman. Am I at the right address? No, It's 100 Church Street. 200 Vesey was the address on the groupon. It's about ten minutes away. Now I'm away from the river and back in the north part of the regular financial district. She is a Kuwaiti babushka. I did not expect this. The session went well and it was long too. Missed classes at the Y but anyway she doesn't want me to exercise after. Then went to Pret A Manger, soup and coffee and read more of 'Trans'. On the way to the subway I stumbled onto a church I never saw before.

The reason I never saw it before was it's on Barclay Street and Barclay is a street I apparently would ignore because Park Row flows into Broadway at the intersection (and end) of Barclay so it always felt like a no man's land. so I guess I rarely took it and for whatever reason, the few times I did I missed this church. But this time the doors were open and I noticed it and went in. It's a Catholic Church (St. Peters and Our Lady of the Rosary) and it's also the Catholic memorial to 9/11. But it's more. It's the oldest Catholic Church in New York State, from the 18th century and there are all kinds of plaques. Spain gave a plaque in like 1962 to commemorate helping to fund the church when it was built. Stuff like that. And 9/11 stuff and the usual stations of the cross and stained glass and some more interesting stuff like iirc Our Lady of Guadalupe for all the peones that died in the twin towers, mentioning the maintenance and wait staff, etc. Reminding me starkly of the paper I wanted so badly to take that day and did not, among the hundreds of signs looking for missing people and commemorating the Towers, this sign with a hand drawn flag of a Central American country, commemorating the staff from there that died in Windows on the World and saying in an unsophisticated scrawl that it wasn't worth it. It felt it would be wrong to take it but I wanted to so very much.

Anyway, I enjoyed the church. The subway is under City Hall and City Hall park was open so I went in and saw a new sculpture exhibit in the rain. The exhibit was called Abstractions or something like that and he made big metal or metal-looking sculptures out of mathematical shapes that were also small daily objects he has. One of them was an old school phone. For example. There were like eight pieces. I didn't look at them all because of the rain. Then I got a gyro which I ate in the subway, most of it not on the train. I sat on the bench in the subway and ate it and waited for another train. Food is getting insanely expensive, however I had not had breakfast. The gyro stand was right across the street from and in front of the Brooklyn Bridge. You could see the people going on to the bridge behind the flames from the grill where he made my gyro. I wanted to photograph it.

Subway back to the East Village. Went to the Ottendorfer Library and read a bit more of 'Trans', then at 5 pm, Charade, the last of the Walter Matthau series, which is why I went to the library. Only a handful of people watched it but they don't expect more. I saw Charade before but worth seeing again. I am absolutely right that Audrey Hepburn was a sp/so 2w3. Someone tried to get me to go to another movie uptown, a French one (since Charade takes place in Paris) but I declined.

I've never changed. Experience is shapeless to me. It's too big for me to understand and all I can do is try to ride its waves without drowning. I enjoy the shapes and colors; they exhilarate me, but to forge something out of it wouldn't make sense, it wouldn't do it justice. The thought of mastering all that phenomena makes me weep. It and the people in it are why I'd get off the bus to summer camp and just sit and cry. No, I haven't changed much. I've always been both under it and outside of it. It's really too bad I was too fearful and crazy to stick with music and theater. It made sense to me.

Different weather, and my deserts tend to be colorful and wet, like Marsha's polychromatic underwear riding the waves, yet the sentiment captured is very close.