…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.
[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.
…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 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.)
…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.
—no, wait! I’m not Eastern rite. I can’t just reorient the Twelve Days to suit my fancy, even if it does seem a bit ambiguous who really counts Christmas as Day One and who doesn’t. We’re going to have to acknowledge the Fourth Day of Christmas too. Hmmmmm…..
On the Third Day of Christmas someone brought to me:
When I met the woman who became my wife, I knew (vaguely) that she possessed triplet sisters. One of them sang in the choir with us, after all, and the day I got to know my wife for the first time, I also spent time with that sister and her fiancée. My new-found love interest wouldn’t let me meet her family for weeks because it’s large: one of eight children who by that point were all having children too. We’re nearing the 30th anniversary of that meeting. I’m used to the triplets now, and I like everything about them (almost–their ability to slip into a ‘triplet-speak’ that’s difficult to understand remains a bit off-putting). All three gathered on our back deck in 2018 with tiaras and T’s, firmly convinced the slogan on the front told the truth. At least it’s better than their 50th birthday slogan: “150 Years of Perfection”!
For “four” I’m going with “Four Day Creep” performed by Humble Pie on their album Performance Rockin’ The Fillmore: The Complete Recordings. I discovered this complete version this year to my delight. The original took performances from four distinct shows over two days and ‘smooshed’ them onto one album. “Four Day Creep” gets the billing here because it’s the first song of each set, there are four sets, and the song has a decidedly different treatment in each performance. Here’s one of the three other performances I experienced. Turn it up. No, really up. “upper” than that. There ya go. (you’re going to need a tissue–your ears are bleeding.)
Anecdotal backstory: my first real roommate at college–I ditched the first one–name of Motorhead, introduced me to the Humble Pie Performance album. Being from New Jersey, he had attended a Humble Pie concert. “They had these big Altec Lansing Voice of the Theatre speakers,” he said. “You know those? Just like the little ones with the two curved cuts to the front plates? These suckers were so big you could crawl inside of them…which the junkies did. The sheer volume of the bass would vibrate them out and they’d crawl back in!” Yeah. I remember stuff like that. As you listen to the song above, hopefully at a loud volume on a sound system with large speakers, imagine being inside a speaker while the songs were played.
…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.
…this blog gave to me…a discourse meant to bore me…
[a pastiche of thoughts as Christmas begins]
Yes, we’re into the Twelve Days of Christmas. Generally Twelvetide runs December 25th through the very end of January 5th, Epiphany beginning on January 6th. (This information primarily comes from Wikipedia.) The Council of Tours created it in 567 AD–and yes, I’m using AD not CE on purpose. For various reasons some Eastern churches celebrate the twelve days starting with the day after Christmas.
Our world generally has forgotten the distinction of seasons, of singular dates. Seasons orient around only the salient events. We don’t appreciate the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas–hell, between Halloween and Christmas–as anything but a lead-up to Christmas Day. I don’t think you have to be a Christian to acknowledge that there just might be something happening between those two dates nearly 60 days apart (besides Thanksgiving). As a Christian, it mystifies me when I try to figure out what Christmas means to the non-religious or non-spiritual person. It seems an inchoate, indefinite span of peace-love-dove (and don’t forget the shopping), marked primarily with traditions whose meanings have been lost to time. Ah, well. This old guy still enjoys pausing to remember all the examples of saints on All Saints Day and all the dearly departed on All Souls. I like to build up to Thanksgiving the way we used to, focusing on the stories (true or not) about how the day’s traditions came into being. I spend the days immediately after Thanksgiving focused on Advent, leaning into the promises of Christmas rather than a bustling, have-I-got-everything-done race to the 25th. This actually handicaps me because I tend to not get things done such as preparing the Christmas newsletter, setting up decorations outdoors, or getting the tree up. On the other hand, I don’t race to do so. Christmas starts on the 25th, and we are in celebration mode now for 12 days. The tree stays up until January 6th; the decorations too.
Christmas Day started at midnight with mass (see here). Two sleep-deprived adults, who retired at 3:30 a.m. and woke about 5.5 hours later, reached for adult beverages sooner than is rational. Fine brews, expense-be-damned, dominated the day: Duvel’s namesake offering; Chimay’s Grand Reserve (the blue label), inexplicably available from Costco every year about this time; N’ice Chouffe from Brasserie D’Achouffe; and Oakspire from New Belgium, a deep amber ale somewhat like a Scottish one, aged in bourbon barrels from Four Roses Distillery. My wife shies away from the dark end of the beer scale; when I shifted to the Oakspire, she went with Sierra Nevada’s Celebration Ale, which has evolved over the past 20 years into a red IPA. If you know anything about these beers, you’ll realize we didn’t have a lot of cares as we approached our festive but subdued meal. I offered up a standard ‘guy meal’ of wedge salad with a homemade blue cheese dressing, thin slices from a 3-inch thick ribeye (seared and minimally roasted), baked russets, and broccolini with pecan butter. (No we don’t do dessert. It’s just a thing.)
My wife and I quit exchanging presents about five years ago. We’ve found Christmas posseses a peculiar dynamic when you don’t have children. You’ve never built up that tradition of mesmerizing the children on Christmas Day. You’ve never sacrificed all year long for those children, welcoming a bit of liberal spending to get a few things you’ve wanted throughout that year. We finally acknowledged an obvious truth: we get what we want when we want it. (Example: my wife accidentally soaked her tablet on December 17th. We replaced it with a purchase three days later, and she set the new one up less than a week after she drowned the previous one. Retired people understand the concept of cash flow.) Christmas gifts are a superfluous thing, coals to Newcastle. Instead we work on intangibles such as vacation plans, entertainment, planning our elevated meals for Twelvetide, and…each other.
That’s where things stand on Boxing Day. We’re looking forward to a near-fortnight of special meals peppering our evening meal plans. Lurking like aspiring actors in the casting office: stuffed quail; a NYD menu of pork, collards, and black-eyed peas with a side of cornbread; a re-run of the Sicilian Swordfish Stew from Christmas Eve; and perhaps some holiday tamales. Okay, no, I’m not going to the effort of tamales, but enchiladas doesn’t sound half bad.
Merry Christmas, y’all!
From the choir loft of The Holy Name of Jesus cathedral in Raleigh. The photo above was taken minutes before the choir-and-brass-and-organ musical prelude began about 11:15 p.m. After those 45 minutes, mass starts at midnight–the first service on Christmas Day. We welcomed about 1800 worshippers. It’s wearing for old folks…especially when they return home at nearly 2 a.m. and crack some holiday cheer!
As I feared, no postings for 3 weeks while I scurried around with Christmas stuff and poured my creativity into this year’s Christmas newsletter. It was particularly aggravating this year (the newsletter), requiring nearly a week’s more time than planned. I learned some cool things though, like an artistic superimposing of text on photos.
Now begins the 12 days of Christmas which I passionately celebrate. Unlike so many these days, Advent is Advent, not “the Christmas season”. It’s nigh impossible to listen to only Advent music–“O Come, O Come Emmanuel” and “Lo, How A Rose” leap to mind. I therefore avoid most Christmas music until only a week or so before the 25th. Now I celebrate, all the way to Epiphany on the…5th or 6th of January, depending on how you count it! Lotsa time for writing and relaxing.
all the voices in my head 