Compound prepositions

A plant’s leaf. In North Carolina. At Biltmore. May 2007.

Today’s photograph has about nothing to do with today’s topic, but I’ll try: some folks think (or rather don’t think) about how some things don’t belong together in all cases. Red and green for instance. On this plant it’s a natural thing. At Christmas it evokes the symbolism of holly and green leaves and all that. In July it says, “Who’s this freak that thinks it’s Christmas?” Today we’re going to talk about people putting words together which don’t belong together.

For newcomers to this blog: Once upon a time I taught English to 8th graders. Once upon a time I took a graduate-level course in grammar, most of which consisted of diagramming sentences. I killed that class–most of my fellow students were returning teachers who clustered around me after the final to learn how I had diagrammed the sentences on the test, even though these were sentences which we’d already diagrammed in homework assignments. I’m not bragging, merely establishing my credentials for the next paragraph.

There’s a grammatical distance between “on to” and “onto”. The latter one is a preposition. The first one, however, is an adverb followed by a preposition. Or some would say it’s a compound preposition. I disagree, but it’s debatable. What’s not debatable is when you put them together as if they’re one word but they shouldn’t be. Here:

Ken wants to turn his audience on to prepositions.
The turtle hauled himself onto the log.

“Onto” indicates position. In the first sentence you can see I am not trying to physically turn my audience and put them “onto” a preposition. Children, pets, and occasionally a frisky adult will get onto the furniture. A lace hem might be sewn onto a dress.

Prepositional phrases usually come in a three-word format of preposition-article-object/noun, and they’re often strung together one after the other. Here’s one: Susan got out of the bed, put her pajamas in the clothes hamper, and made her way to the shower. I boldfaced the prepositions. (If you’re really into the stuff, that’s a compound predicate where the subject “Susan” has three verbs to go with it, “got”, “put”, and “made”. It has direct objects, “pajamas” for the first verb phrase and “way” for the third. This looks really cool when you diagram it, but let’s hold that thought for now.)

Why am I doing this? Who gives a rodent’s rear? Here’s the deal: I see at least one writer who doesn’t know how to use prepositions, homophones, or those tricky complement/compliment words every morning when I read my news. I read (in this sequence) MLB.com to see if there are Phillies stories; The Athletic for Phillies stories and general baseball news; the Washington Post, primarily for the comics, but some headline always snags my attention; and the New York Times. All of these sites command highly respected writers. One assumes there are editors, at least a few. How is it something as basic as this can’t be understood by some of the top writers in the country? To wit:

She turned her father into the police. Perhaps she did, but only in her mind (parents behaving like cops sometimes). Dad never joined the force, though, and she has no magic wand to turn him into the police. She turned him in. To the police. See? Separate words.

Note to grammarians: yeah, I know this isn’t grammar. It’s not even usage. It’s mechanics and those are a slippery thing. Fifty years from now what I’m saying will be as anachronistic as railing against tomorrow because it’s supposed to be to-morrow indicating the link to its linguistic past, to the morrow. I don’t care. I will hasten e-mail by typing email wherever I can, which I did in the 1990s and 2000s. I will type awhile even when the algorithms in the software says “no-o-o-o!” I’ll even type alright because I think it’s alright. (And I wonder if anyone under 50 or 60 wonders what the heck I’m talking about.)

I will not give in to compound prepositions. (See what I did there?) There is meaning contained in the words the heathen are stringing together, and those meanings change when you join the two into one. I hope you’re turned into frogs. Or is it turned in, to frogs? I hope the latter, and that said frogs will thwwpt! your face with their tongues for eternity.

Look, I’m all about breaking rules. You need to know the rules before you can break them, though. Picasso said that, more or less. If you just ignore the fact rules exist, you’re just a hellion-without-a-clue.

And now for that diagramming I promised. I’m afraid that nearly 42 years later I have not kept every assignment but I kept the quizzes and the final. Below is the last page of the final. It’s a ditto, so the questions are faded quite a bit. (“Ditto”–look it up. They were as much fun to make as it was typing on a manual typewriter: every mistake basically was uncorrectable.) We can discuss this below in the comments. The little blue zero means no mistakes. Grant Smith, the chair of the department and teacher of the course (Eastern Washington University) graded this stuff like golf is scored: mistakes were 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5 point mistakes, and the more you got, the lower your grade. Thus, the highest score possible was “0”. (And another day, children, we’ll discuss why I put the period outside of the quotation marks. You may background yourselves by reading William Safire.) By the way, at 28 years of age I already exhibited the anal qualities which now circumscribe my life. Those lines look nice and straight because I used a 6-inch ruler on all of my assignments and on my quizzes and tests.

Why I can’t blog

…or “the dog ate my post”

Moon over my parents’ garden. January 2020.

We’ve had two (or is it three?) cold fronts move through. Friday’s came through late afternoon. The past two mornings have featured wind chills in the single digits. No big deal for a lot of folks, but in North Carolina the weather-folk told us to stay indoors. Apparently they either never lived in the north, or they realize many of us down here never have. Regardless, my fingers are too cold to type, my brain is too cold to think. I can’t blog.
I’m having a crisis with the beer fridge. I want it to chill the beer no colder than 40 degF, preferably 42. It’s giving me 32 on the middle shelf, and I’ve got the thermostat turned up as far as I can without turning it off. (Hmmm, unless it’s backwards–maybe it’s as cold as it can go…) I need to find an external controller. I don’t have time to blog.
My choir director headed to England for a week last Sunday. Texts me at 4:35 a.m. Tuesday to ask me if I’ll introduce the guest organist performing a concert that very night at our cathedral. Of course, it was past 9:30 in London. I said yes. It sucked up half an afternoon (for doing things I would have done near dinnertime), and all of an evening, plus it left me a zombie on Wednesday when I got home late, couldn’t get to sleep, and stayed up to midnight “to relax with a nightcap”. I can’t think, I can’t blog.
Shortly after that Tuesday text, I’m showering and realize, “crap, I’ve got a blood draw this morning!” Just in time to get dressed and go. (Rule: When it’s a fasting blood draw, schedule it early.) I can’t remember my appointments, let alone remember to blog.
Thursday we attended a luncheon meeting about forming a seniors group at our church. If you want to see some visual humor, take a look at the car parking skills for a bunch of 65- to 90-year-olds. I can’t blog. I’m still looking for a parking spot. I’ll blog when I do.
I rose at 4:44 a.m. today to get myself going for a 7 a.m. mass where I was the scheduled cantor. I’m a bass. It normally takes until noon to get my voice warmed enough to hit middle C. I did it today in less than two hours. I think I strained something. I can’t blog.
I finished Roger Daltrey’s autobiography early in the week. Roger revealed that one of my top bands fit the definitions “irresponsible miscreants” and “jackasses”. Removing my admiration left me emotionally untethered. I can’t blog.

Or maybe it’s just that planning some very special vacations to Europe and points beyond, getting my profligate ways under control, dealing with life’s vagaries (bills, groceries, cat vomit, completely unscheduled propane deliveries), and trying to figure out how to exercise, meditate, study scriptural sources, pay bills on a near daily basis, cook, read for pleasure, write (outside of the blog), and still find time to be a husband to my wife–all of that takes more time than the day has granted me. The blog sits too far down the list. (Saint Frances de Sales, patron saint of writers and journalists, pray for me.)

Storm damage

Leaning Tower of Cypress. Raleigh, NC. January 2024.

Storms have ravaged the country this past week. Still do. Four days ago I discovered the easternmost Leyland cypress in a row of them had taken a tumble from the stiff winds we endured Tuesday night. If you’re thinking, “hey, Leyland cypress, that sounds like a cool tree to grow” do yourself a favor and find out about their root system, their gangly nature, and whether they’re meant to be grown in your climate region. The folks we bought the house from (or maybe the folks before them) didn’t. To quote Wikipedia:

…because their roots are relatively shallow, a large leylandii tends to topple over. The shallow root structure also means that it is poorly adapted to areas with hot summers, such as the southern half of the United States.
Wikipedia, “Leyland cypress”

Theoretically they should die within 10-12 years in North Carolina. And hey, are you thinking, “Well, I live in the north so it would be okay?” How about this add-on: “In northern areas where heavy snows occur, this plant is also susceptible to broken branches and uprooting in wet, heavy snow.“

We’ve owned our house for almost seven years. The folks before us, about eight years. Using the timeline feature on Google Maps Street View, I can see that the row of cypress were planted as early as 2011 underneath larger trees which then were removed at a later date. These cypress grow really fast, like one-meter-per-year fast. All I’m saying is…13-15 years and these trees are doomed. I wish the black fence there at the bottom wasn’t holding it up. I could have used a chainsaw to take care of this myself. But for a sense of scale, consider that the branches I would need to limb (so I could cut it down safely) are the ones just up the trunk from the black fence and that’s 5-6 feet above the ground. I would be holding a chainsaw at face level and over my head. Not gonna happen. Instead I’ll pay hundreds of dollars for some professionals to do it.

Did I mention I hate these trees? I do. There’s a whole row of them planted as a property screen by former owners of this house. We parked our car Mr. Lincoln beneath them, and I cursed a lot from all the sap and tannin-juice I had to wash off the top of the car. Percy the Aviator gets parked in the upper part of the driveway where he isn’t underneath them. They’re ugly at eye level. You can see from the photo above the tree has no branches on one side of it, the side which faces its nearest neighbor–yeah they planted them too close together too. Here’s most of the rest of them (four of six):

A row of disasters waiting to happen. Raleigh, NC. January 2024.

You can see my eye-level view here: nothing but bare branches which do nothing to screen me from the neighbor’s house to the south. (That’s it in the background of these photos.) You also can see I’m about to lose another one. That one in the center leaning way in. The only beings who like these trees are the large number of birds who use it as cover from the Cooper’s hawks so they can safely hit my bird feeders just across the driveway, and the squirrels who of course just go where they want to.

In December 2018 I lost my first one. There were two in the backyard. My guess? Whoever bought and planted these had more than they needed for the driveway screen and said to themselves, “well, where should we plant these two?” They wound up, incongruously, between the azaleas in the bottom left of the photo above and my tool shed. In fact, you can see the one which still remains on the left side of that photo there. We caught 9 inches of wet snow in early December that year. I knocked a lot of snow off of the branches, a successful attempt to save them from breaking. (In fact, I think one of the worst hit trees was the one now lying on my fence.) What I couldn’t do was save the Leyland cypress in the backyard which bent down nearly to the ground. Apparently I didn’t take a photo of it.

Friday’s wind dealt far less damage. Those of us on the North American continent know we’re in for a lot of intense storms this winter. Hope y’all ‘weather’ them better than this!

Epiphany 2024

Boy, do I miss the Musical Heritage Society.

A very happy Epiphany to y’all. I’ll refer you to many other sources online which will explain all the nuances of the day–suffice to say it generally is associated with the Three Wise Men/Three Kings who visited the Christ Child a bit after his birth. Think gold, frankincense, and myrrh. For me it means I listen to Amahl and the Night Visitors, a one-act opera by Gian Carlo Menotti. In it, Amahl is a young boy, lame, who no longer watches sheep because his mother and he are so poor that she has sold the sheep to buy food. There is no father. They are visited by the three wise men who are on their way to Bethlehem. Amahl’s mother is unable to withstand temptation with all that gold, and she takes a piece whereupon she is caught. All is quickly forgiven, Amahl experiences a miracle healing, and he receives his mother’s permission to accompany the three kings on the rest of their journey so that he can pay homage to Jesus (and presumably give thanks for being healed).

This opera amazes me, not because of its performance (which I love) but because in 1951 NBC commissioned it, by the “director of NBC’s new opera programming” no less! Imagine that. Today reality TV masquerades as intentional, thoughtful programming; 70 years ago, NBC not only telecast an opera but commissioned it. I have listened to this on or around Epiphany every year for more than 30 years after I purchased it from the Musical Heritage Society in the late 80’s. My version is the 1986 London production which occurred under Menotti’s supervision, and which I digitized during the Great Musical Digitization Project I performed on my music from 2006-2014. (Eight years? In my defense there was a lot of music, and I kept buying more. In fact, I have a few hundred recordings which never made it, mostly jazz and classical.) Imagine my distress when I couldn’t locate this file on my computer today. Something must have happened–files do corrupt for various reasons–and I deleted it? I had to ‘make do’ with the version I found on Tidal which featured the original cast of the NBC telecast shown on Christmas Eve in 1951. I couldn’t determine if it was the actual broadcast or just “featured” those performers. If you go looking for it, the director of this recording was Thomas Schippers. It was very good, but not as good as the one I purchased in 1987 or 1988 from MHS. The latter has clearer vocals which make the words easier to understand. In my opinion, it also features a bit more drama in the performances.

This is an opera for children because it tries to recapture my own childhood. You see, when I was a child I lived in Italy, and in Italy we have no Santa Claus. I suppose that Santa Claus is much too busy with American children to be able to handle Italian children as well. Our gifts were brought to us by the Three Kings, instead.

I actually never met the Three Kings—it didn’t matter how hard my little brother and I tried to keep awake at night to catch a glimpse of the Three Royal Visitors, we would always fall asleep just before they arrived. But I do remember hearing them. I remember the weird cadence of their song in the dark distance; I remember the brittle sound of the camel’s hooves crushing the frozen snow; and I remember the mysterious tinkling of their silver bridles.
Gian-Carlo Menotti, from the liner notes to the original cast recording (Wikipedia)

I miss MHS. It would usually take obscure or under-appreciated (but very decent) recordings, add its own liner notes, and press them. In addition to Amahl and the Night Visitors I purchased many wonderful albums of Christmas music alone: A Tapestry of Carols by Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band, listed first because it is my absolute favorite Christmas album; Christmas Carols by the Scottish National Orchestra, rated by several critics as one of the best Christmas albums ever; Christmas Now Is Drawing Nigh by Sneaks Noyse, an attempt to recreate what the carols sounded like centuries ago; Carols from New College by the Choir of New College, Oxford; Merry Christmas by the Vienna Boys Choir; and A Festival of Christmas which appears to be a combination of two commercial albums, one by the Huddersfield Choral Society and one by The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir.

And so we bid goodbye to Christmastide and Epiphany. In a moment, I shall pray for all those who enter our house and chalk that blessing on the lintel of our front door. I’m not worried about getting the decorations down before sundown: they will start to come down tomorrow. And we will segue into Ordinary Time, an odd naming for the time which is neither Lent/Easter- or Advent/Christmas-oriented. Bless you all who come through the virtual doorway to this blog.

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas…

Ah, here we are–Twelfth Night! The crazy Americans, as represented by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), have screwed up the whole 12 days of Christmas thing because Twelfth Night also is called Epiphany Eve. Tomorrow is Epiphany…except in the United States because hey, it’s more convenient to celebrate it on a Sunday and there’s a Sunday the day after so…. They do this every year. Last year Epiphany was on January 8th. In 2022 it was on January 2nd, an exceedingly horrible choice because we were just 8 or 9 days into Christmastide when it occurred. It seems to me–though no one consults me in these matters–that if one wants to insist on celebrating Advent (not Christmas) in the leadup to December 25th, then one ought to celebrate Epiphany on its appropriate day, January 6th, regardless of the day of the week. It’s important because of the Twelve Days of Christmas, i.e., Christmastide. It shortchanges Christmas to stick with the full leadup to it (Advent) only to cut more than half a week off of it for convenience’s sake. It’s not like the church doesn’t celebrate certain dates no matter where they fall: Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary; Immaculate Conception of the BVM; Ash Wednesday. Our parish just celebrated our feast day, The Most Holy Name of Jesus, on Wednesday–where it belongs.

According to the USCCB, tomorrow is a “Christmas Weekday”. Not in Twelvetide, unless you’re Orthodox. Maybe they’re just giving back one of the days stolen in previous years?

Twelfth Night has various traditions including eating king cake, chalking the door (with a set of religious symbols intended to bless all who enter during the year–see photo below), singing carols, and of course, in some countries, going to church. It’s been considered unlucky to leave Christmas decorations up past Twelfth Night, but I tend to favor Epiphany for this. I base this on the idea that Epiphany celebrates when the three kings, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, visited the Christ Child who still resided in a manger in Bethlehem (according to our tradition). Still, if I adhere to the superstition, not removing the decorations by sundown tomorrow (or tonight if we’re going to strictly observe Jan 6th as Epiphany) means we have to leave them up until Candlemas which occurs on Feb 2nd. That would be overmuch, don’t you think?

We chalked the doors at the start of 2020. In our local tradition, the initials for three kings was placed in the middle of the year. As you can see, we’ve not been real good at keeping up the tradition. January 2020.

If you’ve followed all of these entries, you have my sympathy. After Epiphany I will return to more poetry, essays, and photography.

On the Eleventh Day of Christmas…

…gave to me…we’re going with drummers drumming which have occupied ninth through twelfth places in all versions of the past century. In 1980 I attended a Japanese Festival at the Seattle Center. The highlight for me occurred with a show of taiko drumming which had been preceded with a film about the religious origins of the drumming-based music. It’s impossible to describe it other than to say it was a lot of drumming.

Small and medium-sized taiko drums with drummers. Seattle, 1980.

Largest taiko drum with two drummers who do not always beat the same rhythm if I recall correctly. Seattle 1980.

On the Tenth Day of Christmas…

[I was too exhausted to post anything, so I’m making it up this ~~morning~~ evening…]

…sent to me…let’s see…”pipers piping”…(sigh)

Today brought out my darker side of anger, depression, and fear for my health. Or perhaps it’s a side effect from our beginning a Damp January (as opposed to Dry January which would actually less difficult than “dampness”). Regardless, when your really cool cat gets on your nerves simply because he is, after all, a cat–then you know you’re seeing some kind of stress bubbling out of the nearest weak point like magma seeks a weakness in the earth’s crust. I think many of us who blog have at least a small mental-health reason for doing so. I tell you things as I would a psychotherapist. In doing so I see myself, I discover things about myself, and it’s cheaper than engaging the real thing. (What do they do anyway? “How did this make you feel?” Really? I would like to think they’re like a baseball hitting coach: they say little of note except “attaboy” and “you really caught that one!” until with just one deft comment they say, “hey, are you dropping your lead shoulder a little more on purpose?”)

But to continue our theme: we are now one day behind and the pipers piping remind me of my days at Shadle Park High School in Spokane, WA. Our mascot was the Highlander. Our marching band wore kilts plus those cool tight jackets up top over white shirts and ties, and the drum majors (maybe the whole band?) wore sporrans which are those horsehair things that hang in front of the kilt and seemed designed to keep the front from flying up in the breeze. Our drum majors wore those incredibly tall, fuzzy hats on their heads. And we had bagpipers…piping.

I co-edited the newspaper in my senior year. I also edited one section of the yearbook, and when I couldn’t get a good [expletive] photo from the photography staff, I bought a 35mm and became a photographer myself. I had a period for each, which meant half my day was spent in the journalism room. Seniors only had two required classes anyway, a couple of social studies type classes spread over the two semesters, and English. Like many college-bound seniors, I took Senior Humanities which combined the Current World Problems/World Geography classes with English to give us a more challenging venue (and to earn us advanced credit in college which now has become common but back then was innovative). We rolled with the times. 1971 segued into 1972. We looked forward to graduating as we protested the Vietnam War (or not), indulged in the licentiousness of the times (or not), frequented the rather new thing called McDonald’s (everyone), went to dances, protested the ridiculous rules which are always foisted on high school students because, frankly, adults are afraid of near-adults, and we looked forward with eager anticipation to exercising a newly-won right as citizens: we were going to vote for a president in the fall. Nixon won. Figure it out.

This is a photo of my journalism teacher at the beginning of my junior year, except I don’t have permission to use his photograph, so you’ll have to imagine a guy that looks a bit like Dickie Smothers complete with a curly-ended handlebar mustache and a page-boy haircut. The photo was taken for some kind of promo thing for the yearbook company. He left us at the end of that academic year to go teach cinema studies in Edina, MN. I stayed, dithered, took journalism, veered to creative writing, and wound up doing neither when I went to college at the end of 1972. Ah well.

Me, aged 16. Note really cool leather band for my wrist watch. Note cool floral pattern in the bands of the T-shirt. (Hell, note that I’m wearing a T-shirt at all.) Fall 1970.

On the Ninth Day of Christmas…

…oh a-dither, a-dather! Do we riff off of “pipers piping”? Or go with the 1909 version of “ladies dancing” (now moved to number 12)? Or “drummers drumming” in a competing version from 1907? Or, my personal favorite, “bears a-beating” from a 1900 version? And there are others involving other barnyard animals. It’s my little conceit, this 12-day run of posts: I’m picking the bears. I don’t have nine of them in one photo. So….

Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the Tennessee side. May 2004.

Grizzly bear ponders life beneath his fountain. North Carolina Zoo, February 2006.

…and multiply by three…

On the Eighth Day of Christmas…

…it should be something to do with maids a-milking, but the only thing that got milked on my New Year’s Day was time as I tried to recover from over-celebrating New Year’s Eve on top of staying awake for about 20 hours. A formula for slow-maneuvers the next day. Let us then ponder this:

Plato’s cave wall has nothing on my hallway–or on my sense of reality yesterday. August 2023.

On the Seventh Day of Christmas…

…it turns out to be New Year’s Eve (every time), so we turn from symbolic seven’s and instead offer you up a NYE photo from the end of 2006. That’s Cole exhibiting the disdain I feel for such things as ushering out a year with a party. It’s about as logical as saying “hooray!” when you use a 12-inch ruler to measure something that’s just a bit over 12 inches or when a 10,000-meter runner completes a lap. On the other hand, any excuse for a party, right? Ours will start and end early. I just hope to catch at least an hour or two of Andy and Anderson before I conk out. I took the 7 a.m. mass as cantor this morning, so the chances of making midnight seem slim. “Blow the noisemaker, Cole! C’mon, dude, it’s a party!” (In actuality, Cole, an FIV-positive cat, was just starting his turn into poor health. Everything started failing in 2007, and he went to the catnip fields in the sky on the next NYE.)