The Music Goes On

Music claimed most of my waking hours last week and intruded upon the hours when I needed to sleep. Those of you who are fellow musicians likely know how that happens. Practice, whether vocal or instrumental, is all about repetition; it is about going over--and over--a problem phrase--in my case, trying to train my fingers to land on the correct combination of piano keys.

I hesitate to refer to myself as a 'musician.'

The term suggests a dedication, a degree of excellence, and perhaps most importantly, a consistant discipline which I have never achieved.

That fact honestly confessed, I can also honestly admit that what I possess is a gift for making--and enjoying-- music, a natural ability that has been generously passed along in the DNA of my mother's maternal line.

This musical heritage is confirmed both by family tradition and by news notes in the archived editions of The Ticonderoga Sentinel which describe church and social occasions where my great grandfather, his brother, his two daughters, son, nieces and nephews were the featured musicians.

That tradition was carried on by my mother and her cousins.

My mother played the church  pipe organ in the small New England town where she lived out her life, debuting at age 12 or 13, when she could barely reach the pedal board. [http://pipedreams.publicradio.org/gallery/us_northeast/vermont/orwell_first-congregational_hook.shtml]

I was not quite 5 when she began teaching me to read notes.  I was given a year or two of piano lessons by a lovely local lady--Mother's theory being that I would take the lessons more seriously from someone outside the family.

When Mrs. A. moved away from town, Mother undertook my instruction, fitting informal 'lessons' between her regular piano students.

I didn't enjoy playing scales and 'finger excercises.'

I wanted to make music.

I well recall the Christmas season when I laboriously thumped my way through a book of standard carols--as opposed to 'simplified' versions.  I can only marvel at my mother's forebearance as there was no escape in that small house from the sound of clashing chords and halting notes.

Christmas also brought a month of special choir numbers at church.

Junior Choir met early on a Saturday evening. As Mother was involved with the Senior Choir as well, I could linger and enjoy the preparation of the anthems. For a small town there was a goodly

amount of musical talent.

There was my mother's teacher and mentor, Mrs. Y. who shared the tasks of music selection, rehersals and performance.  Mrs Y.'s sister, Mrs. T. had studied vocal music in Boston as a young woman and added her precise contralto, as well as her pithy comments on the music choices.  [She scorned what she called 'tinkle music'--preferring numbers based on the classical model.]

Mrs. S. had a sweet soprano.  She didn't read music, but could be patiently coached as a soloist on special Christmas numbers.  She had a day job as a secretary in the large town 30 miles away, and came to choir rehersals still wearing her trim woolen skirts and soft pastel sweater sets, her dark hair waved, her careful makeup setting off delicate features.

Her plump prettiness and femine charm inspired much gallantry amongst the

tenor and bass sections of the choir.

Mrs. H. had a reliable alto and a fund of common sense that were welcomed.

Miss E.M. sang alto--heavily and a bit precariously as to pitch.

Sopranos came and went.  One family supplied a succession of attractive and musical young women--they sang until college and marriage took them away.

My pretty music teacher, Mrs. A. had a clear and beautiful soprano voice.

Young people from the junior choir, girls like me--boys whose voices had yet to change--were regularly drafted to fill out the soprano section and as Mrs Y. put it "sing the tune."

The tenors were a law unto themselves: Mrs. T's son [and later her grandsons] Mrs. Y.'s grandsons home from college at Christmas to swell the ranks;  Mr. A. who nervously fussed that he couldn't 'find the tenah note.'  There was our neighbor, Harry S. a farmer, who arrived dapper and voluable for choir rehersal.

He had a true and ringing tenor--a voice which we could sometimes hear in our own dooryard if he was working in a nearby field when the wind was right.

Anyone's husband who had been nagged into coming along as his wife's chauffeur was directed to stand in the tenor section.

Mr. B. was the bass section.  He was blessed with a deep basso voice and was fond of recalling the pastor who decades ago had taught him to follow the bass line in the hymnal.  He stood calmly by while the tenors had to be drilled, always instinctively knowing where his own notes were to be found. Mrs. Y. frequently stated that you could depend on G. B. [she always spoke of him by both names] to balance the choir, never drowning out the smaller numbers that showed up to sing on an 'ordinary' Sunday, but well able to anchor the larger holiday choir.

The music was traditional.  Some of the folders of anthems residing in the file cabinets had copyright dates from the previous century.  The hymns were the 4-square standards of Protestant heritage.

By the time I was in junior high I could read either the soprano or alto part from a score, could usually manage to play the accompaniment.  Mother drafted me to stand behind her at the organ when a score had many pages to be turned as she poured her soul and her skill into a Chrismas prelude from Bach or Handel.

I was in my early teens when Grampa Mac [a tuneless fellow who had married into the family of musicians] purchased a neighbor's old upright piano, saw it installed in his square, lace-curtained parlor, paid for it to be tuned.  My uncle, rummaging in some dark cupboard, produced stacks of my grandmother's music.  There were  song books and hymn books, sheet music of numbers popular in the lead-up to WWI. There were yellowed copies of marches, waltzes and rags.  I hurried to that old piano after school, bringing my homework with me.

I spent winter afternoons there, hunched in a heavy sweater, my feet warmed by the tiny electric heater which Uncle Bill had plugged in, my fingers chilled as they dashed over the stained ivories.

During my last year of high school I was often excused from regular classes on music day to play for chorus rehersals.  When the chorus director informed me one day, "If ever Norma is ill on a concert date, you will play for the performance," I prayed fervently for Norma's continued good health.

While I played and sang constantly at home, once past my confident and untroubled childhood  public performance caused me to feel a bit rattled and clumsy.

To my mother's disappointment, I didn't tackle the pipe organ.

I didn't go on to what might be called a serious study of music.

I had discovered the family gift of 'playing by ear' as well as by note.

I could transpose a song to another pitch.

I found that I could play the old hymns after the manner of my great-aunt Minnie who added the flourish of runs and octaves and chords to the notes on a printed page.

Married and attending the church of my husband's heritage, I filled in whenever an extra pianist was needed.

Back in my home town after years away, I was once again pressed into service when Mother needed an alto who could sight read a choir score for a Christmas performance.

.

When in her late 70's Mother's energies flagged and she wanted to 'sit downstairs' during the church service she contrived an elaborate schedule of alternate musicians:  one of her former organ students lived in town; another woman familiar with pipe organ moved in and was willing to take on a Sunday per month.

Mother approached me to take up the slack.

"You could have learned the pipe organ," she grumbled, 'its still not too late if you would apply yourself!"

"If your congregation can deal with the piano, I will play for you," I stated firmly.

I played for my mother's church.  I traveled to play for other area congregations who found themselves temporarily bereft of a musician.

I played on Christmas Eve in the next town when the regular musician went down with stomach flu hours before the service. 

I provided the music for several family weddings.  I played hymns for funerals when my eyes were so awash that I couldn't see the march of black notes on a page and my tears fell on the keyboard.

I played and sang with an immensly talented and rather eccentric family of musicians who had family ties to my home church.  Red-haired G. C. and his family were never on time.  I would sense a rustle of movement behind me during the prelude, the snap of instrument cases being opened, the shuffle of music stands. During the invocation G. would slide onto the piano bench beside me, sheets of music were propped on the rack, while he jabbed a finger and hissed, "Piano here. String quartet alone for these measures.

You come in again here."

Music has memories.  I play from books which are marked in my mother's beautiful handwriting.  Other pages bear Mrs. Y's reminders of the organ stops to use.

Some of the frail yellow pages have scrawls so old that the ink is scarcely legible.

Last week I brought out G.C.'s mimeographed pages and realized with a jolt that nearly two decades have passed since I last made music with his family.

The voices that swelled the choir of my youth have, most of them, been silent for decades.

I felt besieged by memories of other Christmases as I struggled to perfect my selections for our church service. I determined to play the notes exactly as written.

Perfection eluded me.  At night, staring into the soft darkness, I heard alternate harmonies, snatches of melody replayed monotonously in an endless shuffle.

My fingers moved on the quilt, reaching for an impossible chord.

On the day, the music went rather well. I played with care, mindful of the spots that might trip me.

Our pastor's wife sat behind me, adding a flute descant to the well known Christmas hymns.

I fumbled a few notes on the last line of the postlude--when the congregation, released from the hour's quiet, wouldn't notice.

Bonnie and I sat on, turning pages, playing together, musicians of imperfect caliber, yet inspired by the music we were creating.

I am tired.  By Sunday afternoon I wanted only my chair in the untidy corner by the fire, my book, my beloved Teasel on my lap.

A friend from church phoned yesterday to confirm what J. and I will be singing as our contribution to the final Christmas program. We took turns lamenting our lack of perfection as musicans.

We took turns reassuring each other, "Its OK, really. We do our best, here where we are,

where we are needed."

The songs, the voices, the scenes of other Decembers haunt me, a tumbling kaleidoscope of color and scent and sound.

And--the music goes on.

Memory of Maples

Recognition of a tree as “maple tree” must have come early to me, one of those bits of knowledge so integral as to be dateless, absorbed with the increasing lexicon of names and terms which filter into a child’s mind from the conversations of surrounding adults.

Two maples stood in the front dooryard of my grandfather’s Vermont farmstead, one on either side of the graveled driveway, each spreading grey-black branches in a high, wide circle above tidy plots which I learned to call “lawn” as opposed to the rougher pastures which lay beyond the fences.

My parents, my younger sister, and I lived until I was nearly five in three rooms at the north side of Grampa Mac’s house. The room where we did everything but sleep had two windows facing out into a strip of perennial garden over-shadowed by one of the huge maples. I recall a summer morning, spoon clutched forgotten in one hand, while I watched a bird bounce about in the nearest branches, a flit of black and orange.

“A Baltimore Oriole,” said my mother, and added pragmatically, “If you’ll finish your cereal, you can go out in the yard and watch them.”


That particular slideshow of memory slips into darkness, leaving me with the brilliant colors of the bird outside the window—and the congealing bowl of soggy cereal which must be dealt with before I could gain the relative freedom of the chicken wire enclosed “play yard.”

A few years later when sister C. and I were in the early grades of school, Grampa Mac hung swings for us in the maples. Mine was in that large tree which brooded benevolently over the front of the house, C.’s dangled from a branch of the maple across the drive, well within shouting distance. Two lengths of stout rope were purchased from the farm supply store; Grampa Mac sawed lengths of salvaged plank, bored rope sized holes with his hand auger, sanded the rough edges which might snag a vulnerable bottom.

I was impressed to learn that the maples were there, seemingly as old and towering, when my mother and Uncle Bill were children. Our swings were the continuation of an older tradition.

I can’t know the year when the maples were set in place, twin guardians of the home, yet beside me on my desk lies the enlargement of an old photo showing the farmhouse, the familiar bell perched in its wooden cradle on the shed roof. The resident family stands posed about the dooryard, all faces turned toward the unseen photographer, and into the edges of the picture intrude the leafy branches of the maples. Tracing the names shakily written on an accompanying scrap of paper, I’ve placed the date circa 1887.

The growth of a sugar maple declines after 140 to 150 years, but an old-growth maple tree can live for several centuries in favorable conditions.

[Vintage photo supplied by Christy Alger]



The maples of my Grampa Mac’s dooryard stood silent witness to many generations before I arrived to dangle in my rope swing and stare up into their lofty crowns.

Even now, I can’t begin to calculate the hours spent in that swing, under the maple tree. It was a homing point in all seasons.

In winter I brushed snow from the wooden seat, gripped the cold-stiffened rope with mittened paws, drifted slowly, head back, to take in the tracery of dark branches and twigs against the blue sky of a February day. In March I hovered at Grampa Mac’s heels as he “tapped” the old tree, setting the metal spigots, hanging the sap buckets, pointing out the small scars of past seasons that marked the years of making maple syrup.

Springtime was a dreamy time in the swing, delighting in the warmth of afternoon sun filtering through new maple leaves of palest green, hearing the busy chirp of robins as they selected nest sites along the sturdier branches.

In summer the shade of the old tree was heavy, darkly and thickly green. Swinging created a small welcome breeze through my hair even on the scorching afternoons of July days. In all but the heaviest rain the dense canopy of leaves provided a shelter, only the occasional splatter dripping from the green layers to land on my shoulders or trickle down my neck. Birds chirped and muttered in the high branches while beyond their circle the grass shimmered with wet.

In autumn the dooryard maples warmed to a blaze of yellow and crimson leaves, an echo of the trees ranking the rise of woodland beyond the west pasture. An overcast day scarcely dimmed the golden light beneath the tree. Leaves drifted down day by day, to be raked into great heaps each crisp afternoon when school was done—inviting me to swing high and launch myself with a well-timed leap into the crunchy depths of the pile.

Robins and orioles departed, but the autumn cry of Canadian geese bugled overhead. Finally, when only a few crumpled yellow-brown leaves still clung to the branches, the blue sky of October rode above the black etching of limbs and twigs which drew the eye up and up into dizzying clear heights.

I missed the maples of New England during the twelve years of living in Wyoming. There, in autumn, the aspens shivered, gold-painted against dark spruce in the mountain passes, the delicate spade-shaped leaves flying before fierce winds and early snow. The leaves of the cottonwoods which crowded close to the looping irrigation ditches turned rusty, rattling in the gusts and plummeting down to decay on frosty grass already turning to the brown of winter.

A dear friend sent me a maple leaf from a tree growing in the dooryard of her house in Maine; a leaf carefully pressed with a hot iron between sheets of waxed paper, the quintessential autumn craft recalled from childhood. The edges eventually crumbled, still I treasured it.

I ordered a book of essays, tore open the padded envelope and felt a sharp stab of recognition and longing: the book cover was a collage of leaf photos by the author, the center image that of a red maple leaf, so finely captured that it seemed I could catch the autumn scent of a dew-dappled leaf, run a finger along the delicate veining.

Maples grow in Kentucky, the eastern central state we chose for a retirement home. Viewing this little cottage on a March morning, Jim instantly identified the maples standing about the dooryard. These are not the “sugar maples” [acer saccharum] of New England, but more likely a variety of “red maple”[ acer rubrum] the ones we called “soft" or "swamp maples” there for their habit of growing on low ground where they flamed into glory early in September, weeks ahead of their stately cousins towering in forest and sugar bush.

Haskell Rogers, the elderly gentleman who lived here before us, tells us that he brought maple saplings from the nearby woods shortly after the small house was raised in 1980. There are at least two, possibly three, variants of maples among those set closely around the dooryard. One resembles the silver maple which my father lovingly tended in Vermont---slimmer, pointier leaves, turning late in the fall to greeny-yellow. Three of the slender, silver-trunked maples have already given up their rusty red leaves. Only one tree still clings to its billow of brilliant burnished foliage.

I gather individual leaves, laying them out to compare. I snap photos, bring them up on the computer screen, puzzle over the descriptions and photos in on-line articles.

[I like knowing the precise names of trees—and flowers—and birds. With the maples, as with so many other searches, I fail to pin down the subtle shapes and markings that could differentiate one from another.]

 I stand at the kitchen window and watch as leaves of gold and russet spin gently down.  The maples lure me from the house on these late autumn days, drawing me under the arc of their spreading branches, as faraway maples did for so many decades.  I go outside to stand still, listening, as leaves swish and scud along the ground before a wind that nips out of the north.

High above the silver maple the trumpeting of wild geese rings through wood smoke scented air, their dark wings and stretched necks appliquéd against a sky of autumn blue.

Another autumn; another turning of the season toward the chill winds and grey skies of winter; autumn also in my own span of years; autumn to live in a little house on a gentle hill, in a dooryard set round with maples.

Sleeping Over

Branches of a maple against the evening sky.

I know my grandfather's world in the daytime. In the summer, if I wake early, I can be next door with him just as he finishes breakfast. He eats alone in the dining room of the old farmhouse, accustomed to his aloneness through the many years since my grandmother's early death.

Usually the dog is with him there, waiting silently with begging eyes for the last doughnut crumb to fall, for the last curl of bacon to be offered.

My grandfather takes the last sourdough pancake from the covered blue and white serving dish, spreads it thickly with maple sugar from the crock, folds it, oozing soggy sweetness and presents it to me.  Lapping maple from my fingers, I follow him through his mid-morning chores.  He comments on the size of the Hubbard squash rampaging over a mound of composted horse manure, one of his experiments with saved seed. 

I trudge behind him up the uneven stairs to the shed chamber to sort through saved bits of old harness.  We recall when last summer the calico cat hid her two kittens up here, nursing them in an old barrel softened with grain sacking.  We had discovered them together--or so he let me think.  They were people-leery; when I cuddled one to my cheek it cried and spat, tearing at my skin with tiny sharp claws.

Back downstairs, my grandfather mends harness, sweeps out the granary, sharpens a scythe.  I tag him, contentedly listening to his measured talk, stowing away his tales, resting in the familiar ease of his steady pace.

"When can I stay overnight?" I ask, as I have many times before.  The answer this time is a surprise:

"You can stay tonight if your Ma doesn't care."

My mother, petitioned at home during lunch, agrees as long as I come home first for supper and to bathe, since the indoor plumbing at my grandfather's house consists only of cold running water in the kitchen.  In the early evening I appear, newly washed, trailing my seersucker pajamas over one arm.  I find my grandfather seated on the edge of the back "stoop" his feet soaking in an enamalware basin of cool water which rests on the uneven slab of granite which serves as a step.  He has shed his blue chambray shirt and his striped galluses dangle at his waist. His shoulders and upper arms which seldom see the sun, emerge palely from his white undershirt  in contrast to his browned  hands and wrists.

We sit together while small night creatures tune up unseen in the garden.  Moths flutter against the screen door, swallows dart after insects.  It is not quite dark when my grandfather rises stiffly and pads to the end of the porch to slosh the remains of his foot bath over the small peach tree which has taken root there.

The screen door slaps behind him, slaps again as I follow him into the dimness of the house.

I stand about, waiting, curious, as my grandfather carries out his bedtime rituals, a part of his day I have never witnessesd. A trip to the "outhouse" in the far corner of the woodshed; a dose of baking soda and warm water for indigestion; the winding of the old clock on the shelf.

Upstairs the spare bedroom waits for me. The bed looms hugely, its painted  headboard reaching toward  the low ceiling.  The one light in the room is an old fashioned fixture hanging over the bed, a length of saved string is attached, one end to the pull chain, the other to the bedpost.  A "one-eared kitty" [my uncle's name for a chamber pot] squats discreetly on a rag rug near the washstand.  Everything in the "spare room" is white and stiffly clean in tribute to my house-keeping uncle's fondness for bleach and Oxydol soap powder.

Leaving my door ajar, my grandfather scuffs down the hall to his own room.  I lie alone beneath the towering headboard, small in the crisp white sheets, savoring the strangeness, slightly awed by the reality of my long-cherished wish.

There is no sound in the house of other people, no rattle from the kitchen, no muted voices from TV or radio.  My uncle walks the hills of the farm alone in the evening dusk.  He will return to read in the kitchen with his small radio perched beside him, turned low for company.

Much later, still awake, I hear his light quick tread on the stairway.  He pauses at my door, somehow aware that I am not asleep, asks softly, "You alright, Bunny?"  His footsteps fade into the shadowy stillness, his bedroom door creaks gently open and then shut.

I wait for sleep, comforted by the small sighs of the old house enfolding me.  A light breeze ruffles the branches of the maples outside the west windows; the starched curtains scratch along the sill as they billow inward.  From the dark regions below the mantle clock announces the hour--eleven--and soon the half hour;  it's dinning, almost unnoticed in the daytime, rolls in hollow tones up the stairwell.

Down the hallway the even rise and fall of my grandfather's snoring falters and breaks for a moment. He belches loudly and comfortably.  The bed springs creak as he resettles and his snoring resumes, rising and falling, measured breath, in and out.

A bird in the maple utters a muted squawk, then the night hush creeps back.

The breeze freshens, moving through the open windows of my grandfather's quiet house, and we sleep.

Written at Writers' Retreat

Wentworth, N.H.

1997

Old Hopper

Those of you who follow the blogs of artist and writer, Jackie Morris, may already have read her tribute to her Kiffer Cat who so quietly died this morning.  Reading of Kiffer's early perilous life before he was rescued by Jackie, has put me in mind of a strange  feral cat who visited our Vermont home for several years.

We met Old Hopper as he came to be called, through the noise he was making outside our small log house in Vermont. Working in the kitchen late on a grey and cheerless winter afternoon I heard a series of thumps and scrapes drifting up toward the kitchen window from the area near the basement door.
Going down, I encountered the sight of a cat's striped rear view and shoulders.  His head was thrust inside an empty tin can which he had rootled from the garbage bin.  He lurched forward, bumping into various obstacles, reeled backwards in a crazy attempt to free himself from the can. I managed to get within reach as he bumbled about and in one quick wrench freed his head from the tin.  Slightly dazed, he glared at me as though I had been the cause of his dilema, rather than his rescuer. Then he scuttled toward the bottom of the garden.  As he hobbled away, I saw that one back leg was only a stump--the paw missing.


I didn't want him there.  He was a tomcat, he was wild.  He had surely never been vaccinated.  But--it was cold, he was certainly hungry, and it didn't appear that anyone else wanted him either.

Resignedly I found an old shallow pan, put in a cupful of kibble with what I hoped might be an appealing assortment of leftovers and placed the pan near where he had been raiding the garbage bin.
Nearly every day that winter we saw him.  He approached the house with his hobbling gait, peering anxiously about. If I opened the door or window he retreated. As the winter advanced his retreats became less hasty.  He limped to the edge of the frozen vegetable patch, humped himself around to face me, squatting in the snow.  His eyes were wary, his thin body tense, but sometimes he allowed himself a tentative meow.  Once in a great while, if I inched toward him while he was eating I could lay a cautious hand on his back.


With the coming of summer Old Hopper's visits were less frequent.  We saw him sometimes crouched in the rough grass of the pasture or at the edge of the meadow.  We assumed his hunting must be productive.
When the days grew short and cold, again he accepted the offerings put out in the battered pan.


During the second or third summer of our acquaintence with him, Old Hopper began to stay closer to the house and garden. We were outside a good deal, working in the garden, taking tea on the porch, strolling around the yard.  Old Hopper would venture cautiously near, twitch and glare, mew in his rusty voice, back away, then inch forward again.  We had the impression he would prefer that we go inside--away--leave him the yard and the porch to enjoy in solitude.

"We're not going," I told him firmly.  "We were here first."

If I was alone and carried a book outside to read, Old Hopper began creeping forward to take advantage of the shady spot beneath my chair.  He could never relax, was always alert to spring away.  Cautiously I began to reach toward him at such times, lightly stroking his bony spine, patting his head.  Sometimes a croaking purr rumbled from his throat, sometimes he raised his head almost eagerly to my trailing fingers. Sometimes, perhaps overcome by his own termerity in accepting human affections, he would suddenly growl, hiss and run for the edge of the porch, where he would huddle, staring at me in a wild manner, before creeping slowly closer again, almost as if he recognized his own lack of social graces.

I never attempted to pick him up.  To do so would have frightened him horribly and I knew he would struggle and claw.  He seemed to be resigned that during warm weather he had to share the dooryard and the gardens with the humans who kept his dish supplied with food.

Through that summer and autumn Old Hopper followed his pattern of short-term disappearances and frequent visits.
As cold weather came on perhaps he was relieved that he had the yard and the garden and the woodpile to himself more often.

Sometime mid-winter I realized that it had been nearly a week since we had seen him. Days were short and  bleakly cold, nights were long and frigid.  As the weeks wore on, I suspected that we had seen the last of Old Hopper. His dish was untouched, his unique footprints no longer marked the snow at the back door.
Feral cats don't live long, harried as they may be by dogs, foxes, other territorial cats, or by humans who won't tolerate their skulking presence.

We couldn't invite him in, but we could feed him. We never knew his story--where he came from, how his life ended. I remember his uneven gait, adapted to  his three and a half legs, his precipitous arrival and his desparate maneuvers with the empty tin. I remember that, however reluctantly, he was finally able to accept my touch--in exchange for a meal.
Drawing a line in time: Earth, ashes and song  The story of Jackie's Kiffer Cat is here, with a eulogy for him at the ginger cats' blog here. http://wethreecats.blogspot.com/2010/06/thanks.html

Memorial Day, Part Two

On the left, my Dad and our daughter, preparing to ride his "bicycle built for two" in Orwell's parade in the mid 1970's.

On the far right is our son with his younger cousin, also set to trail up Main Street displaying the "red, white, and blue."

The paths of memory zig-zag through unmapped territory, stopping here, darting there, winding up in some unexpected place.

I had no intentions of composing a post, let alone two, in honor of Memorial Day.  I was inspired to do so after reading Al's blog on May 31st.

crivens, jings and help ma blog

Go there to view his photo of red poppies. [Incidentally, he writes fine essays!]

Red poppies.  Of course.  Crepe paper poppies on wire stems, sold along the parade route for a few pennies, tucked in a buttonhole  and worn in remembrance.

My Dad always hustled us through breakfast and out to the car on Memorial Day so that he would be in time to snag a decent parking place  in Brandon where the parade took place.

Our town did not have a 4 year high school and most of our students attended the high school in Brandon about 12 miles away.  A goodly number of those students were outstanding musicians who played in the schools' marching band, so recognizing these teenagers made the parade more our own.

The parade was led by a gentleman in immaculate riding gear astride a beautifully mannered horse.  It was a serious affair--no Shriner clowns, no amusing floats.

Those war veterans who could march, did so--solemn, intent, their faces giving nothing away.

The American Legion and the Women's Auxillary followed, carrying their flags.

Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts--slightly out of step, faces flushed, important.

And there was the high school band. Majorettes in twirling short skirts; the brasses blaring through a Sousa march as the sun glinted off the horns. Woodwinds that trilled and twittered, and always the boom of the bass drum and the rattle of the snares marking the cadence.

I marched with that band in my turn, tootling away.  The uniforms were the same as the ones on view when I was a mere child on the sidelines. Wool.  All wool. Skirts or trousers of grey wool, worn with a long-sleeved white shirt, bobby sox and "white bucks." Topped with a wool cape and a stiff military-style cap. They were hot and scratchy.

As thrilling as the Brandon parade might be, it was always the hometown ceremony, held in late afternoon on the village green, which touched my heart.

I was in the grade school band there for a number of years.  No uniforms, no marching. 

We packed into the bandstand, or if it should rain, onto the dusty stage of the town hall to play our little repetoire.  Sometimes our bandmaster imported his own kids--brilliant musicians--to bolster our numbers.

The yearly duty of sounding taps was assigned to the best trumpeter we could muster.

How I agonized as he or she strained for that top note.

The highlight of our towns's ceremony came near the end when Mr. Glenn Bishop stepped to the front to read the honor role.

Mr. Bishop had a resonant deep voice [the only bass in the church choir!] and he gave full and respectful weight to each name, starting with those from our town who had served in the Revolutionary War.

I waited, ears tuned to hear the name of my great uncle Lawrence, a casualty World War I.

I like to think still of Memorial Day as it was observed in years gone by--without the contrivance of four-day weekends.  It was a time when folks were not ashamed to feel patriotic, a day when flags hung from white front porches, a time when real flowers were laid on graves old--or more recent.

It was a good time to be a young person growing up in a small town.

Memorial Day

Photo by Cathy Alger

Memorial Day 2008

Orwell, Vermont

My Dad was the honored Grand Marshall

Surely it must have rained on Memorial Day at times during my childhood. I don't recall that a shower or a deluge ever threatened to cancel the parade, or that the Memorial Day "exercises" at school were carried out under a sullen cloud.

Memorial Day as it was observed in the 1950's was one of the two holidays for which a school "program" was planned, practiced for, and produced for the edification of parents and neighbors. [The other holiday was Christmas.]

Every grade school teacher of the time cherished back issues of a magazine which held a storehouse of plays, pageants, drills and recitations for any season of the year.

Poems were assigned according to the memorization capacity of the dozen or so children attending a one room rural school in any given year.

In the school I attended for the first six years, the available candidates for public speaking was narrowed by the fact that half the students were from one large French Canadian family, all in various stages of struggling to learn the English language.

Using fluent English was difficult for them, but they could learn "flag drills."

I wonder now how on earth the formations of a flag drill could have been written out or illustrated.

I recall that we were lined up according to ascending heights, marched left and right, dividing and intersecting, a few moves added and practiced each day.  Our feet thumped on the old wooden floor, we were admonished to keep in straight lines, to set our feet down squarely, not toeing in or out.

Eventually we learned to do the drill with the music of a scratchy victrola record and ultimately, when the teacher no longer had to watch us and bark out the measures, she played a vigorous marching tune on the old pump organ. Not til a day or two before the "program" did we get to carry the small limp American flags mounted on thin wooden dowels.

Memorization came easily to me then. My mother had been a rural school teacher herself before taking some years off to raise her daughters. I was allowed to take a copy of my "piece" home to practice, to chant as I helped dry the supper dishes. From my mother I had learned early on to stand up straight and still, to read aloud or recite clearly and [so important!] "with expression."

I was in 6th grade the spring that I undertook to learn "The Blue and The Gray."

I knew in some vague way that the poem referred to the dead of the American War Between the States, The Civil War, it was called in our history books.

I had no idea at the time that England, France, Europe, had been wracked by civil wars as well.

I had no concept of "battle-blood gory"  nor yet of the anguish of conflicting loyalties which could persuade the division of states, of families, of a whole country.

I knew that filling baskets with branches of sweet-smelling lilac, watching while the biggest boys moved desks and tables to create a "stage" and a sitting area for our parents was a welcome diversion from the usual arithmetic class.

I knew that those of us who lived near the school would go home at lunch time and return for the afternoon's program.  I delighted in the fact that I would wear my Sunday best summer dress with its starched bell of a skirt on a weekday.

Some of the words of the poem created mind pictures well within my grasp. I knew about "morning sun-rays" and spent my summers wandering "forests and fields."

I regularly experienced the "cooling drip of the rain."

I stood in my pretty pastel dress with my hair brushed smooth and "spoke my piece" flawlessly,  unwittingly, with no concept that the poem's references must have wrenched at the hearts of any listeners, those who had served in the most recent war, who had bitter memory of "the ranks of the dead," or those who had lost a father, a brother, a sweetheart or a husband.

I can no longer recite the poem.

A few lines floated to the surface of my mind yesterday as I weeded down the long row of stringbeans, enough words so that I could readily search it out.

It is copied below.

The Blue and the Gray

By Francis Miles Finch

By the flow of the inland river,

Whence the fleets of iron have fled,

Where the blades of the grave-grass quiver,

Asleep are the ranks of the dead:

Under the sod and the dew,

Waiting the judgment-day;

Under the one, the Blue,

Under the other, the Gray.

These in the robings of glory,

Those in the gloom of defeat,

All with the battle-blood gory,

In the dusk of eternity meet:

Under the sod and the dew,

Waiting the judgment-day;

Under the laurel, the Blue,

Under the willow, the Gray.

From the silence of sorrowful hours

The desolate mourners go,

Lovingly laden with flowers

A like for the friend and the foe:

Under the sod and the dew,

Waiting the judgment-day;

Under the roses, the Blue,

Under the lilies, the Gray.

So with an equal splendor,

The morning sun-rays fall,

With a touch impartially tender,

On the blossoms blooming for all:

Under the sod and the dew,

Waiting the judgment-day;

Broidered with gold, the Blue,

Mellowed with gold, the Gray.

So, when the summer calleth,

On forest and field of grain,

With an equal murmur falleth

The cooling drip of the rain:

Under the sod and the dew,

Waiting the judgment-day;

Wet with the rain, the Blue,

Wet with the rain, the Gray.

Sadly, but not with upbraiding,

The generous deed was done,

In the storm of the years that are fading

No braver battle was won:

Under the sod and the dew,

Waiting the judgment-day;

Under the blossoms, the Blue,

Under the garlands, the Gray.

No more shall the war cry sever,

Or the winding rivers be red;

They banish our anger forever

When they laurel the graves of our dead!

Under the sod and the dew,

Waiting the judgment-day;

Love and tears for the Blue,

Tears and love for the Gray.

 

A Cat in a Window

Katydid, a beloved feline companion of my Vermont years. Katy's mother was a Tortie-point Siamese called Sukey. I gave her to J.'s mother--who didn't beleive much in spaying. We moved as an extended family to Massachusetts for a few years and there Sukey, the promiscuous wench, met a fitting mate in the huge polydactylic tabby who lived up the street near the bakery. Katy inherited her dad-cats' many toes and his ringed tail. She combined great intelligence and charm with a formidable sense of mischief, which included bringing me live garter snakes. Back with us in Vermont she loved to walk for miles, either on her catly own, or with me. She didn't like heading for home. I usually hoisted her over my shoulder while she grumbled in my ear, protesting that there were still miles we could go in the opposite direction.

Katy was killed one morning in her 10th year by a neighbor's dog who should not have been in our dooryard. I opened the window for her to take her early outing and within moments heard a dreadful cry, abruptly strangled. She lay utterly and forever still, only yards from the windowsill, the dog pawing at her body, whether in mis-judged playfulness or intended malice, who could tell? Hot tears streaming, I folded her into a shoe box and dug a bury hole near the foundation of the house, the only bit of earth that would respond to a shovel on that dreary winter day. Katy had been my companion in many a gardening task, so in the spring I tucked roots of a sweet bergamot mint where they would cover that small patch of ground.

This morning I picked up a book I appropriated from my late parents' home. In the later years of my Mother's life, I often gave her a carefully chosen book for her birthday or at Christmas, or a gift certificate from The Vermont Bookshop in Middlebury, Vermont--a wonderful place to browse and part with one's money.

"Under My Elm" by David Grayson was originally published in 1942. My mother's copy is a paper back 1986 reprint and the inner cover bears her initials, written in her still elegant school teacher's script. [I had, maybe still have in the boxes in the storage shed, a hard cover copy purchased second hand.] I recall that Mother enjoyed the guilt-free pleasure of spending a gift certificate and I beleive this book would have taken her fancy with a first glance at the title. Elm trees have special meaning in our family.

I opened the book today to a section headed "A Chronicle of Small Joys." The paragraph below, titled "A Cat in A Window" gave me a "small joy" to cherish.

"I wondered today, walking slowly along the road, how it was that so many simple things give me such exquisite joy. I saw a gray cat curled on a window ledge in the morning sun, and stood looking at her with such a sense of fitness, such an understanding of comfort, I cannot describe. Why should a cat in a window please me? Why should I care to stand and watch her there luxuriating in the sun? Why should I recall the experience for several days afterward with a warm sense of remembered delight?"

I can't answer David Grayson's rhetorical queries, yet this is the very sort of small observance in which I have always delighted. It seems that the books I enjoy, the people whose words and company I cherish, are those who also have this gift of noticing and gathering--and sharing--small glimpses of nature or of some homely, comforting detail. This is a gift which I hope I nurtured in my children and grand children, even as my Grampa Mac and my father instilled it in me, perhaps without their deliberate intent, simply by spontaneous sharing. Seeds of joy, sown and tended, resulting in a harvest of small blessings.

Dusk

Pasque flowers blooming on the dry lot
Cat tails at the edge of the pond

Pebbles waits at the fence

Another century; New Vermont cemetery, Bolton, NY

I don't often write poetry--when I do it is debatable whether it should be shared, but this is among friends. These words tumbled into my mind more than a year ago in a moment of nostalgia. I tried to capture a barrage of impressions, both immediate and far removed.

Dusk

6-18-08

I walk at evening’s dusk along the cracked-clay track,
Past red-winged blackbirds swaying on last year’s mop-head cat tails.
At the dip in the road coolness swirls, pond scented,
Layered with the sun-warmed purple sweetness of matted weed.
Fragments of a bird’s egg, brown-freckled blue, lie, delicate, in a cup of dry earth.
Ahead, doves mourn softly from the cottonwoods lining the ditch.
Near the house the bay horse whickers from her pasture.
A snipe plummets, winnowing down darkening sky.
The screens of memory shift and slide across my mind;
Another path, another century.
For a moment I wonder where—and when—I am.

"He Was A Man Who Used To Notice Such Things"

My Dad, Larry, With a Freshly Caught Trout!

Afterwards
Thomas Hardy
When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
“He was a man who used to notice such things”?
If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
“To him this must have been a familiar sight.”
If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, “He strove that such innocent creatures should
come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.”
If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at
the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
“He was one who had an eye for such mysteries”?
And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s boom,
“He hears it not now, but used to notice such things?”

Independence Day Retrospective

Planters on the rain-drenched porch

Rain splashes against a north window

Moon at midnight

We didn't do anything out of the ordinary to honor the 4th of July this year. Other years we have jostled for a spot among the sidewalk crowds to view the parade, admiring the floats, the horses, the cowboys and Indians, the high school band. There is an annual evening rodeo. One attendence there was enough for me--an incredibly raspy loud speaker--clouds of dust, and suddenly awakened small children who bawled with a vengence when the firecrackers exploded.

Our family next door collaborated on a fine dinner: rib-eye steak which our son-in-law grilled to perfection [although he was a bit suspicious of the raspberry chipotle barbeque sauce which I bought!] potato salad, three-bean salad, corn on the cob, and a lemon meringue pie to finish-- a traditional and timeless feast.

When my sisters and I were growing up, it was our bachelor uncle who for many years organized a 4th of July picnic. Our guests were a beloved couple the age of my grandfather and whatever of their family or friends might be visiting them. They would arrive at noon from their farm a few miles to the east, bringing food to share; tables, chairs and an old wooden bench were hauled into the shade of a big maple, while my Dad cleared a year's accumulation of dead leaves and twigs from the outdoor fireplace. Bowls of salad, crocks of baked beans, sweating pitchers of kool-aid and iced tea were set out while the fire flared and smoked and eventually settled down to the hot coals that Dad considered right for cooking hamburgers and hot dogs. The devices used for grilling the meat were hinged racks made of closely spaced wire. The hamburgers or hot dogs were arranged on one half of the open grill, the other half folded down and if one was careful to keep the long double handles closely pressed together, the whole thing could be flipped without losing the meat into the fire. Whatever dessert of cake or pie was on offer, we children preferred the messy delight of toasted marshmallows, more often than not charred and fringed with ash from the smoldering fire. While the adults settled back to talk of cows and crops, church and town business, we younger ones sat on the grass licking sticky fingers and brushing ants from our bare legs.

Decades later, our children grown and my husband usually "on the road" trucking, friends and I found special events to attend during what had become a four day holiday weekend. The Vermont Symphany Orchestra performed in an outdoor ampitheater in Middlebury. Parking in that college town was always at a premium, so the plan was to squeeze into one vehicle, find a parking space on one of the side streets within walking distance, and stop to buy pints of Ben and Jerry's ice cream to eat while we enjoyed the concert. The performances were timed to end just at dark with Tchaicovsky's 1812 Overture complete with canon blasts.

In July of 1997, my last summer in Vermont, I made the short ferry journey, so familiar to generations of my family, "across the lake" to Fort Ticonderoga, meeting the same dear friends who had arrived there from their Weybridge farm via the Crown Point Bridge. Hundreds of people from communities on both sides of Lake Champlain thronged into the courtyard of the old fort to watch while the pride of the local police force, a German Shepherd dog, was put through his paces, while members of the Iroquis Nation marched in a "flag drill." The highlight was a performance by the Royal Pipe and Drum Corp, fresh from their duties at the handing over ceremonies in Hong Kong. Darkness fell while the old stones of walls and ramparts echoed with the skirl of bagpipes and the smart rap of snare drums. Of one accord we rose to our feet at the first strains of the final number, "Amazing Grace." Later, alone in my truck, I watched the moon rise over Lake Champlain as I inched along, part of the procession waiting for a return to the opposite shore on the ferry.

Yesterday storms blew down from the mountains bringing spatters of rain and bursts of wind all afternoon. After supper the rumble of thunder vied with the crack and boom of firecrackers. Lights blinked as lightning crackled across a dark sky. In town the rodeo was cancelled, a house was burned. Rain sheeted down the windows and leaves were torn from the cottonwoods. At nearly midnight we stood in our darkened house watching from the front door as showers of red, blue, green and gold streamed down the night horizon and a full moon rode the turbulence of billowing clouds.