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 |   Thoughts destined to be washed away by the tides of life. |
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I've been studying my cover photo for a while now, and it seems to me that it is more than just a photo of what is there that can be seen, more than just three white rocks stacked on a beach. It contains an important question about the future, about what happens long after the photographer has gone. What will happen to our pile of stones when the tide comes in? Will it topple or has the architect built this structure at a safe distance? I don't know what will happen to these words that I stack here on the sand. They may prove safely distant, or they may be swallowed up by a rush of self-doubt. They may be here for a season. They may lose their balance and be scattered by the shoreline, or be hidden away under shifting sands. Perhaps someday, the tides of life will reclaim them. Or maybe that's just a bunch of poetic, romantic nonsense. After all, this is just a blog. |
| These are two of my favorite things to do: 1. Falling asleep in front of the TV. An old sitcom that I've seen a zillion times with comfortable characters who are like family friends and whose voices will lull me to sleep is a perfect choice. Or Midsomer Murders. I always fall asleep somewhere between the first and the third murder. 2. Drinking a hot, freshly brewed cup of coffee so I won't fall asleep in front of the TV. |
| So, Spring was here for a few minutes. Spring usually shows up in March for just long enough to get you to put away some of your winter clothing, to stop knitting mittens, to take the heavy comforter off the bed and put the Spring comforter on instead, to get you to turn down all the thermostats and start thinking about how you'd love to plant some flowers and then, suddenly in the night, Spring sneaks off and Winter creeps back in. Well, sometimes it creeps. This morning Winter is wailing outside my windows. I tried to warn people. You don't put away the snow shovel before May. To do so is flirting with fate. How's your Spring going? |
| Most people in the US will be celebrating St. Patrick’s Day today. It’s the day when everyone searches their genealogy for Irish ancestors and wears green to work. Nowhere is this day celebrated with greater enthusiasm than it is in Boston, MA. Yet, it’s not the only notable event on the calendar today. In Boston and all of Suffolk County, it’s also Evacuation Day. Evacuation Day commemorates the evacuation of British forces from the city of Boston in 1776. During the night of March 16th, Washington had installed an impressive amount of artillery on the ridge of Dorchester Heights. On the morning of the 17th, the British, finding themselves in full view of this well-armed fort, quickly decamped to Nova Scotia. It wasn’t a battle, but it was a win and it preceded the Declaration of Independence by nearly four months. Evacuation Day is only an official holiday in Suffolk County with only some State offices closed but the kids in Somerville get the day off from school and if you’re a kid you’ll celebrate anything that gets you a day off. I think it’s just a good way of teaching history, which is made up of more events and battles than are generally in the list of memorized dates. History is people and decisions and consequences - and days off from school. |
| I am not big on chanting. I like political discussions. I like debate. I totally love historical context, experience, data, insight, apologetics and perspective. Give me some persuasive argument, logic all over me. I might not be converted, but at least I will respect you and feel respected. If you chant at me, I am going to doubt you have anything to say. If you shout me down, I am going to know you fear the power of my speech. I don’t accept your labels. Sometimes it seems that in order for some people to feel they belong, they have to create groups to be excluded, to be labeled and targeted. And I know that everyone who reads this, regardless of which side of the political spectrum they are on, will think this is about how good they are and how bad the other side is. |
The biggest problem with maintaining a blog is finding something interesting to write about. Unfortunately, most of my brilliant insights into life occur to me when I am nowhere near my keyboard. Right now, I am hovering over my keyboard, unable to see the letters because I am sitting in the dark. I don’t turn on the light so as not to wake a sleeping toddler grandson. A toddler grandson is staying with me for a few days, so I don’t know if I will be able to maintain any 7 Day Streak, not even one for sleeping. So, there are enough excuses to cover me for the week. |
| Do you ever look at your Facebook memories? That page where Facebook shows you what you were doing or thinking on this date through the years? Are you ever surprised? I am often taken aback by my own status updates. Some seem to be from a wittier me, some from a more caustic me and others are just the obligatory reporting of what I cooked or ate that day. Now and again, my memory is missing. It’s not enough, apparently, that I forget my own memories, Facebook is actually forgetting some for me. I haven’t removed posts or links or content, which means Facebook did. I assume this is back before Zuckerberg got scared and revealed that the government told him what to censor. Before they admitted that they didn’t just censor what they deemed to be “disinformation” or “misinformation” but also “malinformation” - that is, information that is factual and true but they don’t want you to mention it. Apparently, he’s changed his ways. Right. Not too long ago, someone on WDC asked if anyone was afraid to post on social media? No, I am not worried about what I write. I am more worried about the posts they won’t let you read. I want my memories back. |
This song is bound to become THE wedding song of the year. It touts traditional fidelity and optimism about the married state. The line about not being afraid to say “I do” is going to be very popular with about-to-be brides as they plan the music for the big day. Of course, the culture has told us for years that men fear marriage, but I am not sure that is true. After all, for every woman who marries a man, there’s a man willingly marrying a woman. The title “Carry You Home” and the sentiment behind it says everything about a relationship. “I will carry you home”. Home becomes where you are together. Home is now a place you find in your partner. Home is in your love's eyes. Home is the way your hand reaches for your spouse’s hand in the middle of the night for that brief moment when you both wake slightly, then finding comfort in each other’s presence, fall back into a secure rest. There’s one line in this song though that says more than all the others. “I choose us every time”. There are lots of people and influences that can divide loyalties in a marriage - parents, kids, culture, careers - but the successful couples put the marriage first. It’s going to sound really unreasonable in this age of self-love, self-sufficiency and selfies, but it means preferring your spouse above everything, including yourself. I hear you say “Wait a minute! What about my needs? “. Here’s the crazy thing - if both partners are putting the best interests of the other person above their own in love and honor and respect, then both partners have a strong ally and all their needs met. Choose each other, every time. |
| I find it very disappointing each day when I gulp down a cup of black coffee so I may bring my consciousness into focus, only to realize that the world has gone mad and a clearer understanding of this is not going to improve my morning. Time for a second cup, I discovered this morning that Agatha Christie was my sixth cousin. I really had no idea. We share a fifth great grandmother. I remember when I bought my very first Agatha Christie book. I got a couple of them at a church rummage sale. One of them was "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd". I am not sure how old I was, probably eleven or twelve, that kind of age (I now imagine David Mitchell quipping “a numerical age,that kind, rather than iron or bronze”). I had read all the books on our shelves at home and was thrilled to discover some new characters that I could obsess over. At that time I was more of a Miss Marple fan and I didn't really like the fussy little Belgian detective. But in later years, David Suchet changed my mind about him with his brilliant portrayal in the television series "Poirot". I am a bit picky about my choice of Jane Marple portrayals, and though I love both Julia McKenzie and Geraldine McEwan, I am most definitely a Joan Hickson’s Marple fan. She’s so right for the part in every way. Besides, I really dislike the updating that is done on the stories to make all the situations and characters seem more modern. I want the stories just as Christie wrote them. When you’re dead, they’re likely to do anything to your writing and you can't stop them. Thank goodness, I am in no danger of being published. Well, that’s enough blog for today. |
| On This Day in History On March 3, 1931, President Herbert Hoover signed the congressional act that made The Star Spangled Banner the official national anthem of the United States of America. Since then it’s been the cause of many a case of vocal strain, laryngitis, earache and broken glass. All kidding aside, I love The Star Spangled Banner. I tear up whenever it is played and sing along. Considering I have absolutely no revolutionary patriots in my ancestry - only loyalists - and my parents were Canadian and Canadian-adjacent, I am a staunchly patriotic American citizen. Worse than that, I am proud of it and resist efforts to shame me for it. Oh yes, I do love The Star Spangled Banner. It makes me wish I had more of a vocal range, but perhaps it wouldn't be so special and meaningful if I didn't have to put in an effort to sing it. It's a sacrifice that I and those within earshot of me make for our country. |
| Way back in the early eighties (the 1980s for those who didn't come about until the 21st century) I worked in a small room that adjoined a larger room. The large room was filled with industrial-sized laundry machines. There was spinning and swishing and running water, occasionally punctuated by the shout of "bag coming!" followed by the thud of a large sack of soiled laundry landing in the bottom of a huge plastic bin. The walls of the small room were lined with metal shelving that held stacks of linen. The small room also had a table and a chair, and a boom box. A boom box was a portable radio/cassette player with decently-sized speakers. And in those days, one turned on the radio, tuned into a station and listened to whatever music they played because it was really too much trouble to change the station to find a better song if one didn't care for the current selection. Do they do that anymore? It was a matter of finding the radio station you found least objectionable and letting it play. In this way, I became familar with many songs from many artists even without buying one album (buying individual songs was pretty much phased out by the advent of cassette tapes and the fading away of 45 vinyl records). In this way I became familiar with U2 and many of their songs, this one included. Even though we had MTV at that time - and they still played music videos back then- I had never seen this video for New Year's Day. I was always vaguely aware that much of U2's music was political but I didn't always subscribe to their political opinions. This was different, because it referenced the worker's struggle in Poland led by Lech Walesa. Who couldn't get behind that? But still, the song played on the radio all the time and I barely noticed, The words went in my ears and were memorized by my brain without any attempt to assign great meaning to them. I was working, I was young. Music was background noise meant to preserve my sanity. Listening to this song again reminds me that music doesn't have to be about drugs and sex or be written to appeal to the most base aspects of human nature. Over the years, many artists have tried to raise political awareness through their lyrics. Before U2 we had Bob Dylan. Now there are songwriters like Oliver Anthony. I won't try to name all the artists who used music to express the populist political opinion, every generation has them. And that's how it should be. There have to be dissident voices and expression in art. Not all may agree with the views expressed, but that's the beauty of free thought and free speech. We learn from each other, we learn from history, we learn from those who disagree with us. We might even learn from the music. |
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