…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….
…and multiply by three…
…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:
…gave to me…six geese a-swimming…
“…FIVE TA-A-A-AH-COS!” Okay, there are only three in the photo but I had five last night after wa-a-a-ay too much beer, and they were delightful.
…brought to me, two turtles of lassitude…
Yep, all that celebrating is catching up with me. So many more days to go! If one simply must attend to a few bills (as I did today), at least having a good soundtrack will help. Today we had The Night The Guitars Came To Play by Micky Moody and Bernie Marsden.
Yesterday four of us experienced the annual Chinese Lantern Festival at the Koka Booth Amphitheatre (which sits at the southern edge of Cary and the eastern edge of Apex in the Raleigh-Cary-Durham Triangle area). I entered with moderate expectations but left with a big appreciation for the spectacle. We purchased the “early twilight entry” tickets for a variety of reasons: chief among them being we’re old, and anything that promises an Early Bird special appeals to oldsters. We wandered for an hour, and then we fulfilled a sudden hankering for East Asian food by driving to a pan-Asian restaurant near our home.
I hope I didn’t post this last year, but I’m too busy to check right now. [Well, I checked a week later, and I did publish it last year just after Thanksgiving 2022…but it was edited slightly differently. Oh well.] Our friends’ family owns a place on Bogue Sound, a portion of the Intracoastal Waterway on the shores of North Carolina. When my friend is down there, he habitually walks to the end of the dock to capture the sun’s rising, no matter the time of day. Each evening he watches and captures images of it as it leaves the sky. This reminds me of a movie with Harvey Keitel (can’t remember the name of it) where every day he walks across a busy NYC street and shoots a photo of his deli to place in a growing library of scrapbooks. It’s a form of time-lapse photography, but on a different scale. In my friend’s case, I think it’s less “time-lapse” and more a capture of the moods invoked by each unique astronomical event. When I’m down there, I more or less attempt the same thing, except my body sometimes refuses to rise around 0500!
In the Roman Catholic Church tomorrow is The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. This begins the final week of the year…as far as liturgy is concerned. The new year begins with the First Sunday of Advent on December 3. This year Advent is three weeks and one day long, the shortest it can be, because the Fourth Sunday of Advent falls on Christmas Eve Day. It can be four weeks long when Christmas falls on a Sunday as it did last year. Thus the end of the year prompts a bit of reflection for me before falling into the seasonal frenzy.
All of this by way of saying too many things dance in my head this moment to make this a coherent piece of writing. One of yesterday’s posts prompted a request for more “soundtrack” postings, and I’ve decided to play with that for a little bit.
Today’s soundtrack
I’m a bass in one of the choirs at the Holy Name of Jesus Cathedral in Raleigh, NC. There’s a lot of music coming down the road right now. We’ve a special liturgy full of music coming up, Lessons and Carols, and then there is the tradition of a musical presentation preceding the Midnight Mass on December 24-25. (The music begins between 11-11:30 p.m. to make sure the mass itself begins on Christmas Day–“midnight” mass.) This year’s music packet for the choir is nearly 100 pages. I’m not telling this to brag, convert, solicit sympathy, or narrate information about the church. I’m telling you this to explain that the soundtrack began with a lot ME practicing my music!
The remainder of it has been finishing Yessongs by Yes. Released in 1973, it’s more interesting than good. Large amounts of the two-hour album are better on the studio albums where the group could overdub to its heart’s content. I’m particularly not fond of some of the improvised melodic changes. They’re just not as good as the originals they’re meant to bring to their audience. But considering the large of amount of overdubbing and the intricate work which went into making the studio albums, it’s illuminating to hear how well that is conveyed in concert.
Enough. It’s time to sip some cheer, consider stories for my annual Christmas newsletter (more on that later), and relax. For now I will leave you with an oakleaf hydrangea, a native plant in the southeastern USA (which I just learned!). Some lousy squirrels broke it off just above the ground last year because it’s almost directly under a bird feeder which they cannot reach. Thinking the entire thing was dead and gone, you can imagine my delight to see it sprout a small plant this spring. It has conical heads of white flowers which turn woody in the fall–literally, like little chips of wood. And of course the leaves! Worth trying to save.
I can’t publish a photo of Charlie without giving equal time to his brother Benny. It’s an FCC rule, I think.
[don’t think I’ll get to #3…]
Black Friday is Un-Leap Day. Unlike February 29th which is Leap Day and disappears three-quarters of the time, Black Friday always comes around, promising a beautiful day of absolute disassociation with reality. Not for me streets, crowds, stores, obligatory family walks in the park, online shopping, chores, responsibilities, or anything that smacks of “have to” and “well, I really should.” Black Friday for the past 40 years means I have a day where Conventional Reality doesn’t exist. It is a day of nothing, a day of meandering in a mental (and sometimes physical) sense.
Black Friday is to Fridays what Black Holes are to holes. They both suck up time like a temporal vacuum cleaner and spit it out. I’ve no idea where Black Holes spit their time, but I know that Black Fridays spit it out onto The-Saturday-After-Thanksgiving, the day when life begins to engage me again.
Black Friday gets echoed by New Year’s Day, but I can’t totally disengage on NYD. Its ridiculous premise that something new is beginning grabs me every time, makes me believe I should be resetting my life, cleaning out files, organizing my bills, planning how I will be a better person in the coming 365 days (or 366, yes, I know Leap Day, there, there). Both Black Friday and NYD invite introspection, or at the very least, the last grasp at annual goals still unmet–but only in a laissez faire manner.
One strives little on this day. Breakfast is leftover pie from yesterday. Dinner reruns the big turkey thing of the day before. All food in-between consists of noshing all of Thanksgiving Day’s appetizers, crudités, snacks, etc., before turning to that leftover Halloween candy or the box of chocolates someone forgot to take with them when they left yesterday’s feast. Beer makes an early appearance…or not. It doesn’t matter. It’s Black Friday.
all the voices in my head 