Pozzi Franzetti

My mom and I went to a celebration of artist Pozzi Franzetti's life at the Taos Country Club today.

Pozzi (pronounced Posey with a long o)  died on November 26th, 2012.   If you didn't know her or if you did know her, you might want to click on this 2-minute video about her.

I knew Pozzi because when I was a young teenager, my little brother Andrew took welding classes from her, and our house began to fill up with the amazing creations he made in her studio.  He was about eight years old, and he would put on all of her welding gear, the leather, the goggles, the gloves, and after teaching him the basics she would basically let him loose to create.

Those objects still fill my mother's house.  They are light-switch covers and sculptures in two and three dimensions, space-ships and rockets, and dancing clownish figures with motorcycle chains for legs and musical notes for mouths.

Pozzi was a lot of things to a lot of people. Jo Carey told a story about how she used to be a barmaid with Pozzi back in 1974, at a bar on Taos Plaza, run by (who else?) Bill Whaley.

Mr. Whaley got said that bar was "Rated R for violence" and one of the main reasons he'd hired Pozzi was because of her "stature."  She was a big, strong woman.  "She could handle the drinkers," said Bill.

The word at the memorial service was that nobody could beat her at racquetball.

I don't know if I knew that Pozzi had ever waited tables, but I remember back when I was about 16, around the same time she was teaching my brother to weld, when I was bussing tables at a fancy restaurant that had stone floors and heavy, pewter plates, and somehow I dropped a tray full of plates and glasses on that stone floor in a crowded dining room, it made an insane crashing sound and made a horrific mess and the pewter plates kept resounding and doing this spinning thing on the floor making these wah-wah-wah sounds for what seemed like forever, and I was mortified, and Pozzie put her hand on my shoulder and talked to me and told me some kind of a story that made me feel a lot better.  I can't remember exactly what she told me but I suspect it may have had to do with her own experience as a server when something that seemed catastrophic occurred but really in the end it was no big deal.

Around that time, Pozzi was hitting it pretty big on the national scene with her sculptures, which she was mass-producing in her own factory that she'd designed and built herself, literally with her own hands, and the sculptures were available in Robert Redford's Sundance Catalogue.

In fact, one year they were the top-selling item in the catalogue, and yet she was still intensely involved not just in her own daughter Jessie's life, (she designed and hand-sewed every one of Jessie's Halloween costumes, Jessie said) but in the lives of all of her daughters' friends (my brother was in that same age group with Jessie, and that's why I got to know Pozzi) and she took the time to work individually with him, at the age of eight, and she brought out some kind of genius in him.

It goes without saying that there were a LOT of people at the service.  The country club was standing room only.

Jessie is a mom now, her newest was born before Pozzi passed on, and Pozzi got to play with her youngest grandchild and hold her before she went.

Hibernation

This time of year has always been hibernation time for me.  In chimney world, the busy season is over.

The phone doesn't ring much.

Yesterday, for example, all I did was one dryer vent service job.  Today I have no jobs on the schedule.

The dryer vent job took me about two and a half hours, working by myself.  I took my time.  There was snow all over the roof, and a nice sheen of ice outside of the hot-tub.

The job was to clean a clogged dryer vent and replaced a crushed, torn, disconnected transition duct with a periscope transition (for dryers with not enough room behind them for a traditional aluminum transition from dryer to vent.)  More on dryer vents later--they deserve their own blog post.

It's been really, really cold lately.  Instead of moisture and water droplets on the insides of the windows (and I have double-paned, good windows) there is actual ice around the bottom and the edges of the glass in the morning when I pull the curtains aside.

I wipe off the liquid condensation with a towel and make some coffee.  The cat gets fed.

Yesterday it was negative 15 at my house when the sun came up, negative 30 in some outlying areas, negative 35 in the ski valley.  That means people are using their chimneys a lot and the phone will start ringing soon when chimneys start clogging up.

But for now I am enjoying some down time after a hectic busy season.  Sleeping till 8 a.m. is a luxury.  Taking the time to write this blog is nice, and now on day five (that means its January 5th today) its starting to seem a little bit like a routine.

I realize there will be plenty of days this year when I do not feel like writing the daily blog post.  Today was one of those.





 

Things I sell

I'm a chimney wizard.

These are some of the things I sell.  

Double-wall and single-wall sections of stovepipe in various telescoping lengths, and elbows, 45 and 90 degree. Class A insulated chimney sections from 18' to 48' in galvalume or stainless, caps, flashings, roof supports, connector-adaptors, flue extensions, storm collars, support boxes, round ceiling supports, dryer vent parts, periscopes and transition ducts and rigid 4" galvanized and aluminum venting, close clearance elbows, heat resistant caulking, fatwood kindling, ACS creosote destroyer in spray and powder, furnace mortar, stove gasket.   

Why not sell something big--like cars or RV's or airplanes?  Why not sell something small and expensive, like jewelry, diamonds, contraband?  Or something etherial that doesn't have to be picked up and carried around, like words, information.   

I don't know: I sell chimney stuff, mainly because I'm really good at installing it, I'm like the fastest gun in the west with chimney stuff, a cordless drill in each hand when I'm putting that stuff together, my tool belt on.  I know exactly which pieces match up with which other pieces, and which brands, manufacturers' parts have which characteristics, and what makes it work.  

Or if in your case and it isn't working, I know exactly why, all I have to do is come look at it, and I know which parts from which companies you can match up with with which parts from other companies if something from the other company is too expensive or unavailable for some reason.  

Sometimes customers just stand there watching me work. 

And it doesn't matter how high your chimney is or how high your roof is, I'll get right up there.  I'll hang ladders from the peak of a pitched roof.  I walk across the ridge of an A-Frame house like a tightrope walker, chimney rods for a balance pole.  

Plus I'm organized.  I know exactly where all of my tools are so I don't waste time looking for stuff.

My workers are covered by worker's comp insurance.  

I have $2 million worth of general liability insurance.  

I can pretty much glance at your chimney when I drive up to your house and know exactly who manufactured it, in what country, what its missing, what size diameter it is, whether it vents a wood stove or a fireplace, or a woodstove inside a fireplace, and whether the fireplace is factory built or masonry, and after a closer look I can maybe even tell you who installed it if its a wood stove or built it if its a fireplace, if its located in Taos, NM.  

If everything is just right, and was installed in the 80's, and its Canadian made Security brand Stainless Class A Chimney installed with a roof support and ceiling trim collar, and the double-wall louvered black stovepipe has faded from a sparkly black color over the years to a dusty dark-gray, it would have been installed by my grandfather. 

If you have a chimney that needs to be installed, swept, inspected, cleaned, or repaired, the name of my company is Bailey's Chimney Cleaning & Repair.  I have offices in Taos and Santa Fe and we service all of North-Central New Mexico.  

We are the only company in New Mexico certified in BOTH chimney and dryer vent technology by the Chimney Safety Institute of America.  



Taos office: 575-770-7769

Santa Fe office: 505-988-2771

When I Started Writing

I've only just begun this project and it almost feels like it did back when I used to really write, when I started writing.  Thousands of words a day came out of me, sometimes.  Smoking cigarettes nonstop, I myself some kind of a living chimney with a pulse, teeth, and hair--in a cloud of smoke--I was a human vent. 

My Salt Lake City friend used to write poetic lines about all the smoke and the flames.  What did she write?  I wish I could remember.  She made it sound so interesting.  She didn't smoke, nobody in her life smoked or drank except for me, so to her my vices--despite being commonplace in the world--were exotic. 

The stuff poured out of me, smoke and words on pages.  I wasn't even writing it.  The pen would just move across the page.  The typewriter sounded like a machine gun in my garret at the top of the red stairway up the back of the house, where I slept on a mat on the floor and typed on a makeshift desk made of a pallet set upon cinderblocks, blue smoke winding its way up from the cigarette in the ashtray, tobacco resin on my fingers, or I would sit in bars and write with a pencil, back when you could smoke in bars, and I would write slowly, sharpening the pencil with a knife. 

For years, my excuse to keep smoking cigarettes was that if I quit smoking, I would stop writing.  

Then later I quit writing and kept smoking. 

And now recently I quit smoking and then started writing.

Thomas Merton was a Trappist Monk who wrote some books.  He wrote of deep things.  I found one of his books recently in a place called the Friendship Club in Santa Fe, a book called New Seeds of Contemplation, it was in the shelf they have there where you can just take any book you want.  I opened it and started reading and it was one of those moments it feels like a certain book comes into your hands at the exact moment you needed it.

In that book, Merton says a few things about writing that I think are probably true. 

I'm not a religious man.  But this stuff rings true.  Merton says:

 "If you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy. If you write for men--you may make some money...and make a noise in the world, for a little while.  If you write only for yourself you can read what yourself have written and you will be so disgusted that you will wish you were dead."

One of those paradoxes.  If you want to reach men and give them joy, then don't write for men.  Write for god.  

There is a trunk full of notebooks and manuscripts and published clips, stuff I wrote back before the internet and so now I'm asking myself who did I write that stuff for, those million or so words I wrote when I was in my twenties.  

Maybe I should be asking God that question.   Merton says that each of us is a word written by God.  A question in the form of a word.  And the way we live is our answer to that question.  

I've been tempted, for years, to dump the trunk out and burn those writings of mine in a bonfire out in the snow somewhere in a sagebrush field in some private ceremony to clean the personal slate.   

My friend Dorie Hagler once posted on face book that she burned 20 years worth of journals.  

She actually did it.  

I never asked her if she read them before she burned them.  

Its not really a trunk, that container full of words on pages.  Its more like a plastic tub the size of a trunk.   Biggest one I could find at Walmart, and its full.  Its in my warehouse, the plastic tub is, which warehouse isn't really a warehouse but is actually a room on the other side of my bedroom wall with a bare particle-board floor and bare sheet rock walls where I keep chimney parts and pipe.  

But anyway so there is this blue purple plastic tub in my warehouse full of chimney stuff, and the tub is  full of manuscripts, and in trying to decide what to do with it I am thinking of Thomas Merton, and what he said about who are you writing for.  

What did I write and who did I write it for?     

I wrote theater plays first, starting when I was around 21.  Did I write them for  men?  Or for a woman who would help turn me from a boy to a man?   Certainly not for God, unless those fucked-up plays were sort of like protest letters to Him, a shaking of a young fist at the sky. 

Has anybody asked Thomas Merton if its possible to write for all of the above: God, Men, and the Self, at once?  Only a few of the plays I wrote were ever performed by actual actors on actual stages for actual audiences. And most of those plays have, I hope, been forgotten.  

Living in Salt Lake City, of all places, going to the university, walking around with a full-blown theater going on in my head and these actors would come out onto that make-believe stage in my mind, and they would do and say crazy things, and I would write it down as fast as I could.  

My first little play was produced there in a barn-type building in some park near the University.  The audience was all dressed up.  That shocked me.  Their nice clothes.   These people were somebodies, and I was nobody, and they got dressed up and sat together, tears in their eyes because the whole play was two guys talking and chopping onions and the onion fumes went out into the audience, until there wasn't a dry eye in the place.  I got my first royalty check.  

I had no skill or technique. 

I was a long way from being ready for any kind of success. 

Increasing Lung Capacity on the Slopes

Jan. 2

Skiing yesterday...missed the 9 a.m. shuttle so I decided to drive to the ski valley.  Driving up that last stretch, the road was pretty snowy and a few cars on their way down had hats of snow on their roofs a foot thick.  It looked sort of comical and I started to get pretty excited about the snow.  The trees were loaded down with it.

I decided not to take the parking lot shuttle even though my parking spot was at least a half mile from the base.  My legs were feeling tight and I wanted to warm them up a little bit before I got on my skis.  And its a good thing I did, because I ran into my friend Stefan in the cafeteria in the a.m. while getting ready...he already had his ski boots on and he waited for me.  He'd driven all the way from Albuquerque to Taos Ski Valley--three hours in the car that morning.

It was a little bit of a late start we were getting for a powder day--about 10:00 a.m. before we were on the chairlift.  Nevertheless hearing that he, though he works in Burque, bought a season pass and regularly drives 3 hours each way, to ski Taos for a day, made me feel pretty lucky.   I live a little over 1/2 hour from the slopes of a great ski mountain.  Taos was selected by National Geographic Magazine as one of the top 25 ski towns in the world.  Up there with the best.

I will talk in another post about why I haven't bought a pass or skied in over 20 years but for now, meanwhile, winter is steady in the chimney business--I have work most days but not all day long--and so this year I can ski often and keep my phone with me and if somebody has a chimney emergency I can get there to help them that afternoon.

Anyway, yesterday.  First day of 2013.  First day the double black diamonds, the super steeps, the ones where when you are first starting to ski you can't even imagine how anybody could get down something that steep--they were open.  The famous Al's Run was open.  Reforma, etc.  I had my first wipeout of the season on Als, on the steep part at the very top, with a chair lift full of people watching, when a ski popped off as I was heading into that next soft bump.  Sort of humbling, since I'll admit I skied Al's, like most people do, to show off a bit.  And there I was doing a face-plant.  I was relieved that the ski popped off tho, because at least I know my bindings release.

Stefan ran a marathon about a year ago and is in pretty amazing shape.  I couldn't keep up with him hiking the ridge.  (Taos has a think called "The Ridge" where you ride the lifts all the way to the top of the mountain and then you take off your skis and hike for a while.  There are actually two ridges.  But so you hike along the ridge and you can see a hundred miles or off to the West across the desert if you there are no clouds hanging around the mountaintops, and so you hike along carrying your skis or snowboard and then you ski down the avalanche chutes the descend down off the ridge.  Stefan insisted we hike it, twice.  And I couldn't keep up with him hiking due to reduced lung capacity which I'll explain in a minute.

But anyway, personally, as a middle-aged man myself at the age of 42, I like to take a few easy runs to start the day off to warm up but young Stefan wanted to head straight into expert terrain.  We compromised by warming up a little on Bambi, about two minutes of easy skiing and then we cut off into the long, steep run called Longhorn.

There are lots of skiers better than me, but nevertheless I am an expert skiier, and when you put a steep field of soft powdery bumps in front of me, I go for it and don't hold back.  So far this year, there hasn't really been any expert terrain open, due to lack of snow, and so New Years Day was sort of a grand opening of a lot of steep stuff, and after the recent snows it was fresh and soft and delicious.  But the physical exertion required of hitting those bumps hard, one after another, over and over, and even catching a little air and taking flight and adjusting position in the air to improvise a landing and transition back to bump-skiing, and keeping balance in all four directions  (left right front back) with poles planting between turns like little exclamation points or maybe more like semi-colons between each turns, and legs acting like stiff springs, at around 12,000 feet of altitude, is serious exertion.  A minute or two of that and I stop to catch my breath and my heart must be running 175 beats a minute and I'm sucking in air as fast as I can.

Because I was a smoker until 5 months ago, and after yesterday I'm pretty sure my lungs aren't even close to full capacity yet.  Stefan quit smoking years ago, and he said it takes years to regain full breathing capacity.

"But don't think of how long it takes to get back to normal," he said.  "Think about the fact that every single day you get stronger.  Every single day."

And so I will, for the rest of 2013, every day I will think of that.  Especially after the kind of exertion yesterday, where I could actually feel and smell some of the old smoker crud coming loose from my lungs and for the first time in months.  This seemed odd to me, that it would suddenly happen yesterday when I've been regularly working out cardiovascularly at the gym, and skiing easier stuff for a month now at altitude to the point where my legs got worked out hard enough so that when I returned to the gym during the ski-pass blackout period and did squats I found it a lot easier to lift a lot more weight that I could just a month ago.  So I thought I was in pretty good shape.  I can run 4 miles no problem, I can handle serious exertion for hours at the gym or at work, carrying ladders up ladders, hauling wood stoves around, etc.  But those steeps, that powder, at that altitude-- took me to another level of exertion.  That kind of skiing, as Stefan said, is "100 percent or nothing."

By the afternoon we were both pretty wiped out after skiing those steeps all day with only a couple of cruisers in between.  We quit a little after 3 p.m. and he had to drive all the way back to Burque to his lawyer job and his pregnant girlfriend.

I wish I could go skiing today again but I have too much work to do.  It is January 2nd, officially the first non-holiday of the year.

Which brings me to: Big news--Congress finally decided to do something besides obstruct the governing process, and actually sort of did a half ass job a little bit, voting for a deal to avert the "fiscal cliff."  Which means payroll taxes are going up, as far as I know, for my employees.  And it means, as far as I can tell, that I will have to pay a bigger chunk on top of what they pay.  Which means, even tho the prez said taxes aren't going up on the middle class, taxes are going up on the middle class.  Meanwhile, according to Forbes,  hedge fund managers get the best deal out of the thing.  Nevertheless, it was a supposed victory for the president, because he supposedly stared them down to the very end.  And so the prez is supposedly turning out to be a little tougher and shrewder in his second term than he was in his first one, when it comes to dealing with the domestic political opposition, though the political progressives, as usual, are very very upset and pissed off saying he caved in completely. 

Though I'm not actively involved in politics at the moment, I am still paying pretty close attention to the national and local news if not the statewide political gossip blogs.

As the year plays out, I'll be using this blog to tell some stories not only about being a chimney sweep and a skier and a recovering smoker, but also about being a political organizer and campaign manager.   So stay tuned.

For today, at 7:53 a.m. that's a wrap.

First Day, 2013

2013, Day One

Early in the morning on this cold January 1st day of 2013, with the light starting to creep in around the curtain on my bedroom windows, I had the laptop open and I noticed on face book in an old friend's post that she had blogged every single day in 2012.

I haven't seen this friend for many years but we used to share our poems with each other a long time ago, and for some reason we found each other to be mutually inspiring, literarily and perhaps in some other ways, when I lived in Salt Lake City as a college student at the U of Utah.

I've long since stopped attempting to write poetry.  And honestly, I haven't written much of anything for about five years.  Back then I had a newspaper column, which when I joined the a national presidential campaign staff in 2008 I--very reluctantly, in fact I was practically kicking and screaming--gave up my column because they (the campaign) said that was the deal and I had to sign a piece of paper saying that I wouldn't publish anything at all as long as I was working for them, and then after the campaign I was too tired to get it going again, and one thing led to another and I haven't had any sort of regular writing gig since then.

The experience of working as a political operative changed my life, and I went on to work for several other campaigns after 2008.  Since then, my writing has mostly consisted of memos, Ra-Ra-Let's-All-Get-Real-Excited-About-This-Campaign-emails, talking points for volunteers, press releases, and even the occasional public statement for a candidate.

That kind of writing, while quick and sort of gratifying in a way that is the exact opposite of thoughtful or insightful, isn't really the way I ultimately aim to express myself.  And for several reasons I have declined a full-time career as a political operative, and I restarted my chimney business in 2011.

Yes.  That's Right.  I am a chimney sweep.  I install wood stoves, clean chimneys, inspect, repair, troubleshoot, etc.

And I suppose this would be as good a time as any to mention that when I got into the chimney business I thought I was in the dirtiest business in the world.  And then I got into politics.

Anyway, it is New Years day, 7:30 a.m.  and I am still in bed, as it turns out, it is my first day blogging.

The cat is next to me on the bed.  There is snow on the ground outside.  I already got a fire going in the wood stove from last night's embers.  My tiny house is nice and warm.  

I open the curtain.  The glass sweats against the cold outside, and condensation droplets and moisture fog  it looks like it'll be a clear day, and there is snow, snow, snow on the ground, because it just kept coming down yesterday, and I was outside shoveling show when the phone started ringing and sure enough on the day of New Years Eve there were some folks whose chimneys had clogged up, and so off I went in four-wheel-drive with the snow coming down steady and slow, and it was fun to climb around on the truck in the snow, wearing snow boots, getting the ladder down off the rack and carrying it over to the house and carrying another ladder up the first ladder and walking across the snowy roof (people ask me how I walk on pitched metal roofs with snow on them--I say "very carefully") and set that ladder, and adjustable stepladder, on the roof so I can climb up it in the snow and take the clogged chimney cap off to unclog it and then one step at a time, and a while later the customer is all sorted out with a clean chimney, a clean stove, on New Years Eve.

And but today my ski pass is valid again after the xmas-new year blackout period, and so--even though I have work to do in the office, mail to sort through, and filing, and a couple of work proposals to figure up and write--I am going to take today, New Years Day, as a holiday and get my ski gear together, pack some lunch, and hit the slopes.  But I will have my phone with me, and I will be checking voicemails and text messages on the chairlift, so if you have a chimney emergency I can probably take care of you this afternoon.