For Your Listening Pleasure

I had the pleasure of seeing Tim Eriksen about a year and a half ago. Our local Sacred Harp singing group brought him to town for a workshop, and his singing blew me away. I particularly like his rendition of this old song, Careless Love.

Enjoy!

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

Read today in WaPo:

NEARLY 25 million homes have at least one television set that will stop functioning in nine months [my italics], when the nation converts to digital over-the-air television. (Read the rest here if you want.)

Oh my god! The sky is falling!!

Ummm, wait ... aren't there a few things that are more important? I know, I know, I'm not a big t.v. viewer and some people are. But come on, 9 months is a good chunk of time and if it's important to people they'll do something about it. Before February.

My weekend has been great. How about you?

It has been a weekend of "my cup runneth over." We went to Minnesota on Saturday for the wedding of my second oldest nephew. Four out of the six of us siblings were there, along with our kids plus various spouses, partners, and a couple of their young children. We stayed in the same crappy hotel and it was a riotous affair of retelling the old outrageous stories about our mother, jumping on the beds, and eating stale Froot Loops for breakfast.

I hadn't seen one brother in several years, and he flew in from his new home (less than one week!!) in Austin, Texas just for the weekend. Seeing him would have been sweet enough, but he informed us that he and his long-time partner had gotten married about 6 weeks ago. (It's not the first time he's done this. Hopefully, however, it will be the last.)

I wish we had more time with my sister, but she was mother of the groom and had myriad responsibilities. (Like getting snockered at the reception.)

All of that should have been enough. My heart was brimming with love for my family as we made the long trek back home to Wisconsin. But we got home to a voice mail message from my other sister on the east coast, telling us that her son, my oldest nephew, and his wife had delivered their first child early yesterday morning, a daughter. Welcome to the world, little Zora!

So in a sense, this weekend my family increased by three: Heidi, my new niece by marriage; Laura, my new sister-in-law; and Zora, my great-niece. I have a big old goofy smile on my face as I write all of this. My siblings and I have our own share of baggage and dysfunction, but we don't have to dig too deep to find the love. It has been a very satisfying weekend.

Everything is Music

It was another musical week. On Wednesday I accompanied my family to see one of their favorite bands, Enter the Haggis. You can read all about the show and see a video that my daughter shot here.

Thursday night was the spring concert of my daughter's 6th grade orchestra, and I have to say it was pretty good. The strings section has come a long way and sounded pretty together. The wind section sounded avant garde -- or was it that they all played at different speeds? Doesn't matter -- I'm a fan of people making their own music.

Last night, on a whim, we went to see the Asylum Street Spankers. Oh. my. You can go to their website to hear a selection of their music. Check them out. They had an impressive array of instruments, all acoustic, and a repertoire that ran the gamut from old blues numbers to biting political commentary (of the right sort.) A lot of it was pee-your-pants funny. And I can't say enough how much it did my heart good to hear them being outspoken: about 9/11, about the Bush Administration, about the travesty otherwise known as "the war on drugs."

Maybe you've seen this video. Somebody posted it a while ago, but I didn't realize it was the same band until right now. The show we saw wasn't quite as theatrical, and they have some new members, including Charlie King, who does harmonic overtone singing -- very cool.



They tour a lot, so if they come to your neck of the woods I highly recommend that you go.

Book Review: Cider With Rosie

Cider With Rosie is the first of three autobiographical volumes by British poet Laurie Lee. Lee was born in 1914 in a small Cotswold village. He was one of eight children, raised by his mother after his father abandoned the family. He writes about the turning of the seasons, the small rituals of village life, school, his home and family, neighbors, first love, heinous crimes, and other events. Lee grew up on the cusp of a way of life that was dying. The book is suffused with the knowledge of that fact, making it bittersweet to read.

The writing is rich and poetic. I dog-eared many different passages, too many to include in this review. I'll give you a taste:

The village ... was like a deep-running cave still linked to its antic past, a cave whose shadows were cluttered by spirits and by laws still vaguely ancestral. This cave that we inhabited looked backwards through chambers that led to our ghostly beginnings; and had not, as yet, been tidied up, or scrubbed clean by electric light, or suburbanized by a Victorian church, or papered by cinema screens.
It was something that we just had time to inherit, to inherit and dimly know - the blood and beliefs of generations who had been in this valley since the Stone Age. That continuous contact has at last been broken, the deeper caves sealed off forever. But arriving, as I did, at the end of that age, I caught whiffs of something as old as the glaciers. There were ghosts in the stones, in the trees, and the walls, and each field and hill had several. The elder people knew about these things and would refer to them in personal terms, and there were certain landmarks about the valley - tree-clumps, corners in woods - that bore separate, antique, half-muttered names that were certainly older than Christian.

I just loved this description of two neighbor-women:

Grannie Trill and Granny Wallon were rival ancients and lived on each other's nerves, and their perpetual emnity was like mice in the walls and absorbed much of my early days. With their sickle-bent bodies, pale pink eyes, and wild wisps of hedgerow hair, they looked to me the very images of witches and they were also much alike. In all their time as such close neighbors they never exchanged a word. They communicated instead by means of boots and brooms - jumping on floors and knocking on ceilings. They referred to each other as "Er-Down-Under" and "Er-Up-Atop, the Varmint"; for each to the other was an airy nothing, a local habitation not fit to be named.

There were a few references reflecting the racism of the time that I had a hard time reading. Otherwise, I am a sucker for memoirs. I also enjoy -- somewhat perversely -- letting my imagination dwell on the time that immediately preceded the enormous changes of the twentieth century. It always seems to me that I should be able to reach out, grab it, and somehow slow it down.

I liked Cider With Rosie quite a bit. I see that it has been reissued, along with its two companions -- As I Walked Out On A Midsummer Morning and A Moment Of War -- in a single volume entitled Red Sky At Sunrise. I'm going to keep my eyes open for a used copy to buy.

It may not be for everybody, but I recommend it for sentimental old so and so's like me.

(Cross-posted at the Spring Reading Challenge)

How Do YOU (Or Your Wife) Rate?

(Click image to enlarge)

Hmmm. Somehow the scoring system doesn't make sense to me. (That's probably what they all say.)

book review: The Ark by Margot Benary-Isbert

I just reread an old favorite. Published in 1953, this is a children's book translated from German. I first read it and loved it as a child. I got it from the library for my older daughter when she was in middle school. Then a few years ago we found a copy of it to buy in a used bookstore in Maine. According to this biography of the author, The Ark is at least partly autobiographical.

The story takes place in (I'm assuming) 1946-47. World War 2 has ended, Germany has been partitioned, and the Lechow family -- Mrs. Lechow, 15-year old Mathias, 13-year old Margret, 10-year old Andrea and 6-year old Joey -- is one of thousands of displaced families trying to survive in postwar Germany. Their father is in a POW camp in Russia, and has been out of touch with the family for some time. Margret's twin brother, as well as her beloved Great Dane dog, were shot and killed earlier in the year. Mrs. Lechow had been imprisoned for a time, but was released an reunited with her family at the end of the war. Since that time, they have been moved all over the country, from refugee camp to refugee camp. Conditions are brutal.

As the story opens, they are arriving in a strange city where they have been assigned housing in the home of an unwelcoming elderly woman. The story unfolds somewhat predictably. As the family settles in, they begin to win over their reluctant host. The members of the Lechow family are almost unbearably good at times. (But why are we always suspicious of people like that?)

By a stroke of luck, the family meets a somewhat eccentric farm woman named Mrs. Almut. Mrs. Almut raises a variety of livestock, as well as champion Great Danes. She hires both Mathias and Margret to come and live with her, to help with the farm. She already shelters a handful of elderly refugees in her home, so the two children are housed in an abandoned railway car, which they fix up and call "The Ark." (This may seem clichéd in children's books, but apparently it is historically accurate. Anyway, I think living in a railroad car is the part that really sparked my imagination. I remember writing a story at age 11 about a family living in a train. Thankfully, it no longer exists!)

I think that the author of The Ark manages to paint a realistic picture of the suffering during that time, but also presents a family that is strong and loving in the face of extreme adversity. It is a testament to the value of community, as well. I just found out that my library has what I assume to be a sequel to The Ark. I have some predictions about what will happen to the family. I'm looking forward to reading it to see if I am right!

This is well-written and compelling historical fiction. One thing that sets it apart from more modern fiction about the same topic is that the author experienced it firsthand, and when the book was published, it was only 7 years after the end of the war! (Jeez, when I first read it, it was probably only 20 years after the end of the war.) I recommend it.

(Sorry, I cannot locate a picture of the book cover. My own copy is without a jacket.)

Tagged! From 20 Feet Away

My esteemed husband has tagged me for this old saw of a meme, and because he is a Promise Keeper and I am a submissive wife, I have no choice but to respond. Ha! As if ...

Rules:

• The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
• Each player answers the questions about himself or herself.
• At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.
• Yadayadayada

Ten years ago:

I was teaching first grade at Hawthorne Elementary School, struggling through the fog of both grieving my daughter's death and taking care of my other two young daughters. Motherhood is not for the fainthearted!

Five things on today's "to do" list:

• Prune the dead branches from the cherry and redbud trees
• Weed the flower garden around the redbud tree
• Go to Meeting
• Walk in the arboretum for mothers' day, remember to take the binoculars!
• Dinner at Atlantis Taverna with my mother-in-law

Things I'd do if I was a billionaire:

• Get out of debt
• Pay for my kids' college
• Buy myself a new guitar (I'm fixated on the Gibson CJ-165, because it is an overall smaller-bodied acoustic guitar that supposedly has a big guitar sound; I have very small hands and sometimes the stretch is a struggle.)
• Send a great big donation, TOMORROW, to Shirley Golub in her bid to replace Nancy "I'm rich and impeachment is off the table" Pelosi
• Donate the several millions of dollars needed to restore the theater at Madison East High School (and I'd be in good company because actor Bradley Whitford has donated money to the same cause. It's his alma mater.)
• Remodel the library at my school, and while I'm at it replace all of the toilets. Really. They are ridiculous.
  
• Set up an endowment for the American Friends Service Committee
• Buy the Camp Woodbrooke land outright (that's the Quaker summer camp on whose board of directors I sit)
• Buy my husband an upright acoustic bass

Three Bad Habits:

• Procrastination
• Being something of a loose cannon
• Spending too much time on the computer

Five Places I've Lived:

• Terre Haute, Indiana (birthplace of me and Eugene Debs) -- 3 years
• westside of Madison, Wisconsin -- 16+ years
• Fannrem, Sør Trøndelag and Rauland, Telemark, Norway -- 1 year
• Spofford, New Hampshire -- 1 year, when I went to Keene State College. Why? I don't know!
• eastside of Madison, Wisconsin -- 25+ years

(The eastside and westside of dinky little Madison might seem like one and the same place, but to a local they are worlds apart. When I first moved over here, it was skid row and blue collar land. Gentrification is making too many inroads, sadly, but the realtors still steer newcomers to the westside and seriously, there are long-time residents who are afraid to come to my side of town! And if you listened to some people, you would never know that we also have a north and a south side!)

Five (or so) Jobs I've Had:

• Detassling corn
• A&W counter-help
• Laborer in a nursery (plants, not kids) in Norway
• Teaching in many child care centers
• Assistant/docent in fledgling Madison Children's Museum
• not to mention being a nursing assistant at a nursing home and at a "Happy Home for Handicapped Children"

Five People I'm Tagging (Please don't hold it against me and feel free to decline ...)

• Poodle Doc
• Sacred Suzie
• Yearning For God
• Sorghum Crow
• Sminthia

Another Book Review

I Am The Messenger is another book by Markus Zusak, the author of the wonderful novel The Book Thief. (If you haven't read The Book Thief, I'll say that I consider it worthy of having a permanent spot on a shelf next to To Kill A Mockingbird and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It is stunning.)

I Am The Messenger is about Ed Kennedy, a 19-year old cab driver living in a suburb of Sydney, Australia. Ed and his friends are from the wrong side of the tracks. They're pretty aimless, going nowhere fast, and working in dead end jobs, if they have jobs at all. Then one day Ed thwarts a bank robbery, after which he finds his life taking some unexpected turns.

I loved this book! Really, really loved it. The story had elements that reminded me of A Christmas Carol or It's A Wonderful Life. In another way it reminded me of a book that I read a number of years ago: The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder. But I Am The Messenger is utterly original and beautiful. It is labeled a young adult novel, but please don't let that keep you from reading it. Zusak is a gifted writer and this is an outstanding book.

(Cross-posted at, yup, the Spring Reading Challenge.)