June 2025 - Page 6 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

The B-word license plate

What does this mean?

unions.afl-cio.2013 A few weeks ago, my wife parked the car in our neighborhood. She ended up behind an old, dark SUV with what appeared to be a New York license plate. The plate “number” was the B-word.

Of course, it wasn’t a real license plate, as it lacked some of the accouterments, and the font wasn’t quite right. But it was white with blue lettering, with the word “New York” on the top. At a passing glance, it looked close enough. My wife was offended.

I was curious. What is the message here? Was the driver trying to say New York is a terrible place or that life is a terrible thing? Is it a comment about women, or does somebody think this was women’s empowerment?

Moreover, I’m puzzled why they would replace their license plate with it instead of putting it on a bumper sticker.

We saw it a second time about a week later.

You can’t do that!

A few days after that, I was being dropped off near my house, and the driver noticed this same plate. They said, “You can’t do that!” This wasn’t a question of what the messaging was. It was that, by law, you can’t replace a New York State DMV plate with this phony item. BTW, there was no front plate; NYS has plates on the front and back of the vehicle.

In the city of Albany, code enforcement will not allow a car without proper plates, even in your driveway. If not addressed, the car could be ticketed and eventually towed.

My friend looked at the registration sticker on the windshield with the real license plate number and immediately called the police on their cell phone. As a public service administrator with years of experience, they have a strong sense of what’s right and wrong. (I’m not a car person, so it would not have occurred to me to look at the registration sticker.)

The next morning, the car was gone. I don’t know whether the owner moved the vehicle or it was towed. A week later, the car returned with the faux plate, slightly crooked because it wasn’t screwed in very well. This has now become fascinating to me. I tell my friend that the car is back, they call the cops, and the car disappears. I haven’t seen it even with its correct plates since.

Pride Month @FPC 2025

Love is a choice

It’s Pride Month @FPC (First Presbyterian Church of Albany). Usually, I don’t get to attend Adult Ed because the choir rehearses at that hour; however, since the Albany Gay Men’s Chorus (AGMC) was performing the service music on June 1, I was able to attend.

The discussion was very meaningful. Some visitors were surprised that a conversation about LGBTQ+ issues, led by a member of Pride Center of the Capital Region, a/k/a the Capital Pride Center, “the longest continually operating Pride Center in the Country.”

What does coming mean? Who do you come out to? The answer to the latter question is, in part, to oneself. LGBTQ+ people in New York State tend to gravitate to places such as NYC, Buffalo, and Albany because they tend to be not just more welcoming but safer.

The Christian church has often been an unwelcoming institution, to the point that some folks cannot even walk through the doors. I understand this, and as a Christian, it frankly angers me. But it also pains me that folks have been subjected to such crap.

But it wasn’t all heavy. The speaker pointed out “we have been here,” and asked an audience member to pick a number and a continent, excluding Antarctica. I was introduced to Emperor Ai of Han (ruled 7 BCE- 1 BCE). “Traditional historians characterized the relationship between Emperor Ai and Dong Xian as one between homosexual lovers and referred to their relationship as “the passion of the cut sleeve” (斷袖之癖) after a story that one afternoon after falling asleep for a nap on the same bed, Emperor Ai cut off his sleeve rather than disturb the sleeping Dong Xian when he had to get out of bed.”

The service

The 10:45 service, which you can watch here, featured the aforementioned AGMC, as well as a great sermon by Pastor Miriam. Ater the scripture, 1 John 4:7-21, using “sibling” for “brother or sister,” she explained More Light Sunday.

“Our denomination in 1978 ruled that openly gay and lesbian people (the language of the time) could join and participate in the Presbyterian church, but not serve in official leadership of the church – not as deacons, elders or ministers. In reality many churches weren’t even welcoming openly gay people into their church, much less into membership.” She explained how First Pres and the PCUSA had changed.

FPC Albany’s More Light Statement of Inclusiveness notes that “we welcome all persons, regardless of sexual orientation, into the full life and service of the church. …

Last summer, when the PCUSA added sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of categories found in our constitution that may not be the basis of discrimination in the church’s life, it was… “such a bold witness… given that there is so much anti-transgender rhetoric and legislation in the U.S. – especially because it is allegedly being done in the name of Christian faith or justified by the weaponization of scripture…”

Siding with love

“When Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are being removed from public policy, we are standing up and saying, not in our church. When the laws of the human government obstruct the laws of our loving God in denying trans and intersex people both social and medical gender affirmation, we are standing up and saying, not in our church. This is not going to happen to our siblings…”

She borrowed from a 2015 sermon, Siding With Love, by Lisa Friedman called , particularly the paragraph that begins “Love is a choice.”

Miriam ended: “Let us pray – Holy God, at this moment, help us to see who needs us to stand with them on the side of love. Help us to choose that side; help us to make a stand; help us to take action. Help us to love others as you have loved us. Amen.”

Upcoming

And then, on Sunday, June 8, the church will be decorating this year’s “float” for the Pride Parade. You can either join the parade in Washington Park or join as the “float” passes the church after the 10:30 service.

I’ve mentioned that there was a time when a Pride Parade seemed passe to some, that we had overcome. But the current political climate makes it, I would argue, more necessary.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

“unlimited growth, an unrestrained cancerous sort of creation”

I was watching JEOPARDY Masters for Tuesday, May 27, probably on the following day, because I don’t watch television in real time. The clue above pops up as a $600 clue. This hit me because, on May 27, I attended a book review at the Albany Public Library of Braiding Sweetgrass, that very book by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Moreover, it was reviewed by Elaine Garrett, who had appeared on JEOPARDY in 2011. I had met her, likely at a Capital District JEOPARDY gathering.

Robin’s father, Robert Wall, was from the Potawatomi tribe in the Midwest. But he was shipped to the infamous Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School, which “opened in 1879 and operated for nearly 30 years with a mission to ‘kill the Indian’ to ‘save the Man.’ This philosophy meant administrators forced students to speak English, wear Anglo-American clothing, and act according to U.S. values and culture.”

He eventually moved to the Syracuse, NY, area and married Patricia. That’s where Robin was born in 1953. Robin attended the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, where she received a bachelor’s degree in botany in 1975. She later attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, earning her master’s degree in botany there in 1979, followed by her PhD in plant ecology in 1983.

Science or spirituality?

But Robin got some pushback. She was told to pick a lane, either science or natural methods, essentially. But she opted for both/and. As Jane Goodall wrote about Braiding Sweetgrass: “Robin Wall Kimmerer has written an extraordinary book, showing how the factual, objective approach of science can be enriched by the ancient knowledge of the indigenous people. It is the way she captures beauty that I love the most—the images of giant cedars and wild strawberries, a forest in the rain, and the meadow of fragrant sweetgrass will stay with you long after you read the last page.”

One of Elaine Garrett’s slides described The Sacred and the Superfund about Nanabozho’s twin, who is “committed to imbalance. He had learned the interplay of creation and destruction and rocked it like a boat on a choppy sea to keep people out of balance. He found the arrogance of power could be used to unleash unlimited growth, an unrestrained cancerous sort of creation that would lead to destruction.” The sacred Onondaga Lake is one of nine polluted Superfund sites in the Syracuse area.

Elaine said reading the book changed her tremendously, emotionally and spiritually. Elizabeth Gilbert wrote of the book: “Robin Wall Kimmerer is a writer of rare grace. She writes about the natural world from a place of such abundant passion that one can never quite see the world in the same way after having seen it through Kimmerer’s eyes. In Braiding Sweetgrass, she takes us on a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise. She is a great teacher, and her words are a hymn of love to the world.”

I need to add it to my never-ending pile of books.

ROGER GREEN INVITES is a virus

Vanillagift

ROGER GREEN INVITES is a virus. If you receive an email from me with that heading, please DO NOT open it.

Wednesday, May 28: I was working on my book review for the following Tuesday at the Albany Public Library. My wife got an email, supposedly from someone we knew from church, with a graphic, [NAME] INVITES. She couldn’t open it, which is not unusual.

So she sent it to me, which I could open, and like a distracted idiot, clicked on the .EXE attachment. It didn’t seem to have any effect.

But a couple of hours later, my computer froze. That “Windows is at 11%” didn’t change. I Googled the situation, attempted some remedies, but nothing worked. I called a good friend who was more tech-savvy than I, and he suggested some solutions that didn’t work. Ultimately, I went out to dinner with my wife. By the time we returned about four hours later, everything seemed to be working again. HA!

I didn’t buy that!

Friday, May 30: I check my messages in the morning and discover that $1,013.90 has been charged to my PayPal account. I called them. They said that, initially, they had rejected it, but then that “I” had contacted them to assure them that I had purchased it. But I was asleep at the time . They backed it out.

Then I contacted Discover because the purchase rolled over to them. “My” purchase of the same amount went to PayPal Vanillagift around 12:44 a.m. when I was asleep.

They said my card was compromised and then I’d have to cancel the card and have to get a new card. this is always a complicated issue when I lost my wallet in November 2023 I had to contact all the vendors for whom I had paid my discover my payments to vendors automatically to my Discover Card and it’s so the stuff that was automatically paid notably my cable bill phone cable bill this was OK because they were just rolled over to the next thing for anything that was irregular I can’t let them more of a hassle and I had to change the numbers anyway

I didn’t send that!

Starting at about 2 a.m. and going on for the next three days, I began receiving emails (at least 60), occasional texts, and at least two phone calls with the same message. “I can’t open this invite,” or “I’m not sure if I should open this invite.” I replied immediately that they should delete it.

The interesting thing was that at least a couple of people were very disappointed that it wasn’t the real invitation. They were looking forward to finding out what the big news was. Obviously, I need to throw more parties.

Saturday, May 31: I took my computer to the Best Buy Geek Squad. Evidently, my antivirus software worked, albeit after the fact. Still, I removed it permanently.

Sunday, June 1: I asked a techie I knew what I might do. He suggested sending an email to the folks from my Sent folder. But there is no Sent item from that time frame.

So, this has been an enormous time suck, enervating, not to mention a bit of self-loathing for being inattentive at best, and, at worst, stupid.

Albany politics: June 24 primary

Corey Ellis, Sam Fein

Here’s something that you folk who live elsewhere may not know about Albany politics. The city along the Hudson River hasn’t had a mayor who wasn’t a Democrat since 1921. There is a Democratic primary on Tuesday, June 24, with early voting from June 14 to June 22.

Here are the candidates for the nomination:

Dorcey Applyrs, the current city auditor. She was born in Washington, D.C., but has lived in the city for several years, serving on the city council. She has been winning the endorsement race. The incumbent mayor, Kathy Sheehan, who is not running for reelection, recently donated $10,000 to the political action committee supporting Dorcey, Albany Forward. One of the points Applyrs has consistently made is that she is not Sheehan 2.0.

Dan Cerruti, who was born in Albany but moved away. According to the Applyers supporters, they are “extremely concerned” about Cerutti’s campaign, since he was reportedly “formerly registered as a Republican living in Texas and only in 2023 re-registered his party affiliation as a Democrat.” And accepted MAGA money. Yet one of my reliably progressive buddies, whom I’ve known since college, vouches for him. Dan has recently been endorsed by former mayor Jerry Jennings, which honestly is not a plus.

Corey Ellis, born in Albany, is the president of the Common Council (city council), who didn’t enter the race until January.

Carolyn McLaughlin, born in Albany, served on the common council for many years and was president for seven of them. She’s now a member of the Albany County legislature. She is a cousin of a church friend of mine.

After watching a couple of debates where they all say, more or less, the right things, I was no more enlightened.

It’s just a primary

Then Corey Ellis came to our door a couple of weeks ago. I asked him why he entered the race so late, and he explained the timing in terms of his position with the state nurses’ association. He discussed some of his less visible achievements in the city. Did he see himself as a spoiler? No.

I decided to vote for Corey. Years ago, he spoke at my daughter’s class, and she was impressed. He was a speaker at a Friends and Foundation book review a couple of years ago.

My philosophy, not one I originated, is that I vote with my heart in the primary and with my head in the general election. That’s how I have voted in Democratic Presidential primaries for decades.

The interesting twist in this contest is that Dorcey already has the Working Party’s line for the general election in November. If Corey or Carolyn were to win the primary, I suspect, although I don’t know, that she might step aside in favor of them or at least not actively campaign. If Dan wins the primary, she would have another bite at this political apple.

Count my money

In the city auditor race, there are three candidates:

David Galin is the Chief of Staff of the City of Albany. Previously, he served as an attorney at the Legal Aid Society and with the United Way.

Sam Fein serves as an Albany County Legislator and is an Analyst in Albany’s Office of Audit and Control. He has worked as Policy Director in the New York State Senate.

John Rosenzweig is a public school math and attendance teacher, and he has coached baseball and soccer. He was a member of the Albany Common Council for two terms.

I wrote about my noncommitment. Sam wrote to me asking for my support, so I’m giving it to him. I’m sure David would be fine, even though his dog “talks” in his print ads. Incidentally, Sam is nominated by the Working Families Party.