Anyone else have that regular moment of panic when you’re logging on to a familiar website and you have to try to remember the right password?
Like exactly where am I now?
Tag: Life
Vampire
instead of sleeping late as planned, awoke about 8, brewed coffee, stared at the penicillin growing inside my refrigerator, and returned to bed, hoping to figure out what to do the rest of the day eventually showered but went back to the prostrate meditation then launched into one of those days of starting on one pile, jumping to something else, jumping to something else, then realizing I’d done nothing with the first pile or my routines so I finally escaped down along the river to check on ripples and wildlife, at least anything that’s moving besides traffic
Some of my most memorable folk music events
I’m also quite fond of folk music. Here are some concerts at the top of my list.
- Peter, Paul, and Mary in Dunn Meadow, Bloomington, Indiana, 1968. Also performing were Phil Ochs, Tom Lehrer, and a raft of others.
- Bill Harley and friends at Friends General Conference, Kingston, Rhode Island. The friends included Sally Rogers and Reggie and Kim Harris.
- Joan Baez, St. Louis, 1964.
- Fiddler Lissa Schneckenburger. She blew us away when she sat in as a teen guest with the contradance band Yankee Ingenuity in Concord, Massachusetts, and later in concert, Rollinsford, New Hampshire, when she also sang.
- David Francey at Mill Pond, Durham, New Hampshire. Also on the billing were Bill Staines and bluegrass band Lunch at the Dump.
- Pete Seeger in Akron, early ’80s. Charlie King was part of the show.
- Peter Blood and Annie Patterson, sometimes just sitting down together after dinner at yearly meeting.
- Mike Seeger in a survey of the development of roots styles in America, Bloomington, 1969 or early ’70.
- Patty Larkin, Prescott Park, Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Twice.
- In the chorus at the Revels equinox concert along the Charles River in Boston, five years, if I’m counting right. It’s impossible to describe the joy of working with Noel Paul Stookey, for sure.
A big family like theirs needs a big house
In my novel What’s Left, Cassia’s extended family revolves around a big Victorian house, one that’s undergone extensive restoration.
Do you ever dream of living in a big old house? What most attracts you?
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Ten ancestors I wish I could meet
As a genealogist, I’m not alone in facing situations where key questions are unlikely to ever be answered. If only we could go back in history and ask the individuals themselves, hoping they might know. (Dealing with more recent situations, I’ve found three different people often have quite different recollections. Take that as a caveat.) And that’s presuming we could even understand each other, considering the differences in dialect and customs.
So, back to the ancestors. They had to be dead before I was born, right?
- George Hodgson, 1700/01-1774. I want details on the ill-fated ocean crossing, including the names of his parents and siblings, who perished on the trip.
- His wife, Mary Thatcher, 1712-1764. There are enough hints to make me suspect she was far more independent, even rebellious in the face of her tyrant father, than we might expect of a Quaker maiden. In addition, I imagine she would have much to add about their relocation to the Pennsylvania frontier, in what’s today’s Adams County, and then on down to North Carolina’s Piedmont region as one of its first English-speaking settlers.
- Someone on his mother’s side. For now, their neighbor Moses Harlan, 1683-1749, seems a prime candidate.
- George’s father himself. So far, this is the weakest link in taking the family back to Cumbria, England. I want confirmation for my circumstantial argument, or at least correction.
- Peter Ehrstine, . Who were your parents?
- Elizabeth Ehrstine, if she is indeed his mother.
- Pleasant Hodson, 1827-1908. I would especially like to his account of “bushwhacking” in the wild rather than serving in the Confederate Army.
- Pleasant’s mother, Delilah Britton, 1794-1883. She was born to an unmarried mother and apparently orphaned between 1800 and 1804, when she was recorded as 10-year-old and assigned to the Eleazor Hunt household. While her surname was often reported as Hunt or Rayle, I am left wondering about a child born before her marriage to George Hodson. Her father, meanwhile, was Matthew Rayle. She lived through a lot, including the Civil War.
- John Hodgson, buried 1675, Pardshaw Meeting, Cumbria, husband of Eliner. Apparently the first of my Quaker Hodsons, he could clear up much of the early line in England. Was he, in fact, the same John Hodgson was wrote, as a former Parliamentarian army officer, a Quaker tract addressed to other soldiers or the John Hodgson imprisoned for his faith in 1660 or 1664.
- My grandfather, Cecil Munroe, 1903-1945. From everything I’ve seen since turning my attention to him about 30 years ago, he was the affectionate, even artistic, male figure who was missing in my childhood. I suspect my life would have been much different had he survived beyond his early forties.
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How about you and your roots?
Right time, right place
The hippie movement brought tensions to the family before Cassia’s future father showed up on the scene. He had no idea he never would have been welcomed by everyone even a year or two earlier, much less encouraged to stay.
Have you ever been welcomed in a situation where timing was everything?
Cutting to the core about Wagner
Is the German Romantic opera composer the biggest successful egotist in the history of art? (He couldn’t even compose an effective symphony, yet look, he couldn’t trust anyone else with a libretto, either.)
He was definitely stuck in a Madonna/whore complex regarding women and, more specifically, women within further Roman Catholic entanglements like relics and grails and a sword or spear or two. Where was Freud? Talk about symbolism? It all gets pretty lurid, even before we get to the serious limitations regarding his immortals. I wouldn’t call them gods, exactly, but rather something more like today’s tainted celebrities and political hopefuls. What losers! So badly dressed, at that.
He definitely wouldn’t have gone for today’s fashion supermodels, either. Everything in his world is hefty, leading to some of the most sumptuous music ever. Seems nobody ever asked how he really felt about his mother. Give me some more sumptuous scoring, please.
And yes, he goes way over the top, including the seemingly endlessly boring stretches of boredom.
As Mark Twain said, he’s not nearly as bad as he sounds.
Not that he can apparently help it.
But then, as critic Alex Ross has elaborated, he’s also the foundation of Hollywood, from the plots and scenery all the way up. Think of the thousands involved in each movie and then the music.
For years now, I’ve been explaining opera as the movies of their time. Turns out to be more accurate than I imagined.
Tootsie, Lena
it’s autumn when the nine-volt battery for my clock radio keeps time in a power outage so the alarm will go off when it’s supposed to rather than umpteen hours later died in the tropical heat wave during my absence and the warning light kept driving me nuts so I walked to the corner grocery for a replacement and on the trek home stopped at the farm market and picked up a quart of fresh cider full of Vitamin C (how rational!) overlooking the windy interplay of sunlight and clouds just down the street of shape notes with the earlier version of “Morning Star” lyrics
As for the best newspaper editors
These are ten I’ve personally learned from.
- Hugh Macdiarmid, city editor, Dayton Journal Herald: A Princeton alum and former young flash at the Washington Post, he brought his own flair to the Midwest in the mid-’60s. I remember him standing at his desk at the head of the newsroom, a twinkle in his eye and a cigar in his mouth, shirt-sleeves rolled up (a then-trendy striped shirt, not the bland starched white like those folks at the rival Daily News), as he barked out orders to someone at a far-back desk. He went on to prominence at the Detroit Free Press as a political columnist.
- Jim Milliken, his right-hand man: Even handed and patient, he was insistent on detail, clarity, and class. He also seemed to preside at the midnight gathering after work at any of several nearby bars.
- Harry Perrigo, copy desk chief, Binghamton (N.Y.) Press Herald: A veteran of the Journal Herald before moving to Upstate New York, Harry usually had a pipe in his mouth and a cool regard for the headlines being submitted by the copy editors sitting at the horseshoe around him. If they passed, he put them in a small clear-plastic canister and then the vacuum tube that whisked them to the Linotype operators. He was a stickler for the accurate headline, including a host of arcane rules of what was and wasn’t acceptable, and he hated puns. Standards have really slipped since.
- Russ Warman, sports desk chief in Binghamton: His approach was cornier than I would have preferred, but he was a great guy in an otherwise dour workplace. Someone else wore the title of sports editor, but the actual job was essentially all his.
- Doc Bordner, editor, Fostoria (Ohio) Review-Tribune: Retired Army sergeant hunkered down in a small town with a skeleton staff to cover five counties. It was a tough assignment, and he had his nose to the ground. His periodic columns, run on the front page, were always lively and often controversial.
- Steve Kent, managing editor, Yakima (Washington) Herald Republic and then the Dubuque (Iowa) Telegraph: A former Associated Bureau chief, he believed in hiring talent and running with it. He certainly turned Yakima into a sterling newspaper before the company brought in a chief officer who seemed intent on scuttling everything. Coming across a photo of Steve the other day, I’m surprised how young he was – and we looked to him as our older, wiser guide!
- Bob Mellis, executive editor, Warren (Ohio) Tribune Chronicle: Again, I was in a situation where we were in pursuit of quality, and Bob brought with him a solid track record at some big papers. He had been the lifestyles editor at one, and he moved me over into that role and all of his expectations.
- Bernie Hunt, city editor, Warren: A lively sparkplug from northern England, he rode herd on a mostly young crew, often with a humorous twist. He also had a fondness for beer after hours, which added to his following.
- Peter Swanson, Sunday Editor, New Hampshire Sunday News: Quirky, sometimes cranky, he took an aggressive stance toward covering the Granite State in an unconventional way, whenever possible, sometimes even with flashes of brilliance.
- Sherry Wood, night editor, New Hampshire Union Leader: Nobody could rival her for her calm under pressure or the range of skills demanded in the position.
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Looking back, let me add that all of them were in high-stress situations.
If we were looking at the top tier nationally, I’d have to name paragons at the New York Herald Tribune in its final years or some of the outstanding pros I called on during my stint at Tribune Media Services.
Expectations of normal?
In my novel What’s Left, they aren’t a typical Greek-American family. Not exactly. But they’re not like Cassia’s classmates’ homes, either.
How would you say yours differs from a “normal” family?
~*~
Jnana's Red Barn 