On Year Eight, Simply Not Done at the Farm

All the snow that's left...

We are breathing here at Willow Brook Farm, the salt-water farm that has been in the Welsh family for generations, and which has been the home of Simply Not Done’s winter writing retreat now since 2005.  Breathing because everything is growing, changing, expanding, contracting.  Founding members Jan and Kasey Grieco have not joined us this year.  Becky’s husband John, who recently retired from his position as a hospital administrator in western Maine, is now living at the farm full time (though he’s remarkably discreet about his dealing with us, leaving us to our discussions, and cooking up a storm).  Tomorrow we shall spend the afternoon with another dear writing friend from Stonecoast, Beth Wilkins.  Winter is withdrawing early:  last night John pointed out that Dover Road has been posted already–he had to explain the secret of posting to Brenda, a city dweller, who has little experience in what heavy loads will do to frost-heaving roads.  In eight years we have been here for snowstorms, for deep freezes–and now for the awakening of skunks from hibernation.  Happy Presidents’ Day weekend!

What we do

This is important time.  As far as I’m concerned, Willow Brook Farm has become a remove.  I can’t use the term ‘vacation,’ because that’s not what it is.  It’s working time.  We are writers when we are here.  We are not teachers, we are not artists’ representatives.  We are writers.  Our talk is about writing:  content, craft.  We bring each other work, and read, and critique.  We bring each other ideas, and burrow into the deep couches in the living room to write.  We bring each other books, to discuss in terms of construction.  We talk about venues for publication.  We plan adventures which become fodder for more writing.  We bring food, and music, and laughter, and more than anything else, we bring to each other the understanding that only working struggling writers can provide.  We none of us are rich and famous, but we are striving.

So.  It’s Saturday morning.  The sky is a play of blinding white clouds against the brilliant blue sky. The flock of turkeys which live here have not yet made their presence known, and since the

What we also do

snow has nearly all gone, there are not even any tracks criss-crossing the yard.  (Wait until about 3:30, Becky says, and the flock will be along.)  Up back in the orchard, small neat piles of pruned-away branches have appeared at the bare feet of the gnarled trees.  John has a brick chicken slow-marinating in the kitchen, and the smell is fruity and comforting, like something from a distant memory.  Becky’s friend Roberta is coming to give us mani-pedis (talk about indulgence!).  I have been ordering a manuscript, and looking up possibilities for magazines to submit to. Becky has been investigating Allison Joseph’s CRWROPPS list, which is a daily email list providing information about creative writing opportunities.

The most wonderful thing about this time is that whatever we opt to do is fine.  It’s respect and love and acceptance and relaxation and, for me, the opportunity to be reminded of just how grateful I am for the good things I got out of the Stonecoast MFA program:  my peeps.  My best and dearest writing friends.  The women who accompanied me to my solo appearance at the Cornelia Street Café, and plied me with enough white wine to get me through, and who shared a room at the Harvard Club of New York, and who kidnapped Harvard Club stationary with me.  The women who told me to write The Book of the Mandolin Player–one of them in fact gave me the title.  The women to whom my second book, The Beauty of It, is dedicated.  The women who encouraged me to go to the Solstice conference, and to the Frost Place.

Tonight:  more eating and laughing.  Tomorrow:  more writing and talking. Throughout all this time:  more planning ahead.  That trip across West Texas to research black cowboys in the American west–which will involve us driving a vintage Cadillac convertible (I picture a red one, though I know Brenda pictures one in cream)?  It’s been in the planning stages for years, as Brenda works through her ideas for her story.  How about the trip to London next summer for the re-release party of Stephen Benatar’s The Man on the Bridge?  (Stephen says the actual party will be somewhat small, but our personal party could go on for days, since that’s my favorite of his books and Capuchin Classics will be publishing a new edition this year.)  Not to mention, of course, that summer is music festival season in England, and I’m sure we could find someplace to see Oysterband in our travels, since Brenda was the woman who sent me on my first adventure in their direction, and I need to return the favor.

For now, we breathe.  And that is more than enough.

What Tracker does

On the Second January’s Poems

I can’t begin to tell you how much I hate winter.  It worries me terribly.  Everything is so much harder, and darker, and more expensive.  Twice this month I’ve taken a header, once in the driveway, once in the parking lot at the Indian Island School on the way to a basketball game.  Winter hurts.  It’s also more difficult to get around–when my friend Lisa and I wanted to go to a poetry reading in Waterville, it was worth our lives to get there and back.  I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this was about this longest of all seasons–the number of poems out there about winter and snow and ice is enormous.  I kept digging them out for the kids, because that was where my head has been all month.  In the snow and the ice. There was one brilliant spot in all of January, though:  on the Friday snow day at the end of the month, a poet acquaintance of mine asked, on FaceBook, of all places, “Who needs a poem?”  I responded by saying that everyone needs a poem, most of us just don’t know it.  So he forwarded a piece of his and allowed that I could share it with my students.  They found that highly interesting.

Here are the offerings for this second January:

January 3rd, Tuesday:  Greg Delanty, “A New Law”

January 4th, Wednesday:  Marcus Jackson, “Winter Thanks”

January 5th, Thursday: Erin Shannon Hollowell, “Practice”

January 6th, Friday: Lucille Clifton, “I am Running into a New Year”

Lucille Clifton

January 9th, Monday:  Jane Kenyon, “This Morning“

January 10th, Tuesday: Mary Oliver, “The Snowshoe Hare”

January 11th, Wednesday: Billy Collins, “Snow Day”

January 12th, Thursday: Edna St. Vincent Millay, “The Snow Storm”

January 13th, Friday: Wes McNair, “Old Cadillacs”

January 17th:  Tuesday: David Adams, “A Definition of Happiness”

January 18th-20th:  midterm exams

January 23rd, Monday: still midterms, thanks to last Friday’s snow day

Anne Porter

January 24th, Tuesday: Ralph Burns, “Fishing in Winter”

January 25th, Wednesday: Robert Burns, “Winter: A Dirge” (for his birthday!)

January 26th, Thursday: Anne Porter, “Winter Twilight”

January 27th, Friday: Hunh.  Another snow day.  How’d that happen?

January 30th, Monday: Stephen Anstey, Untitled (“Everyone needs a poem”)

January 31st, Tuesday: David Budbill, “Winter is the Best Time” (Let’s try to keep the spirits up, shall we?)

So there it is.  Another January down.  I just wish winter weren’t so long and hard and cold.  Next up?  February.  I think I’ll do love poems again this year.  Any suggestions?

On the Reading at the Common Street Gallery

Rachel Contreni Flynn

Because of the all-day ice storm, neither my poet friend Lisa nor I had school Friday.  However, that did not stop the Common Street Gallery in Waterville from having their “Uncommon Words” poetry reading, featuring Rachel Contreni Flynn, Patrick Donnelly, and the wonderful and brilliant Dawn Potter.  Which meant that I had to gird my loins, as it were, and brave the elements to get to Waterville and Lisa and the reading.  I only saw one accident on the way–on Rt 139 in Unity Plantation: several cars off the road, no one hurt–but I did spend the last 10 miles or so behind a Jeep going 10 miles an hour.  Small price to pay, of course, for the adventure, and for the wonderful words in a small but attractive space with a great window overlooking a side street bounded by ice-glassed trees.

I didn’t know the work of the first two poets.  Rachel Contreni Flynn is the author of three books: Tongue (Red Hen Press, 2010), Haywire (Bright Hills Press, 2008) and Ice, Mouth, Song (Tupelo Press, 2003).  She read from each of the three, and followed with newer work from her years as an attorney.  Especially moving were the poems she read about “the girl” who finds herself abandoned in different ways by both her

Patrick Donnelly

parents.  Patrick Donnelly, who is the new director of the Frost Place Advanced Seminar, followed.  His readings included both his own work and that of several Japanese poets in translation, and was wry and witty–the pieces he chose played off each other over the twin distances of time and culture.  He is the author of The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003, since 2009 a part of Copper Canyon Press), and the forthcoming Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2012).

Dawn Potter came on last, and sadly read the least of all three poets.  She gave us a totally apropos rendition of “Valentine’s Day,” a poem in which the plow guy shows up smoking a joint; her plow guy, she told us, had not shown up by the time she left Harmony–and I could sympathize, for mine had not appeared either, so I had had to start the evening by gunning out of my driveway over the ridge of icy snow the state plow had left at the end.  She read, too, from Tracing Paradise:  Two Years in Harmony with John Milton (University of Massachusetts Press, 2009) about the difficulties of chores such as tending a wood fire.  Her third selection was a heartbreaking piece about a family ravaged by domestic violence; many of us in the audience knew of that particular

Dawn Potter

situation, as its horrifying resolution–the father taking the lives of his estranged wife and two children before killing himself–had been all over the news last spring and summer.  (How courageous of her to read it, and with a composure I could not help but be in awe of; I know how close she was to this family, and how deeply she was affected by their deaths.)  She finished with the bittersweet crowd-pleaser “First Game,” which always makes me want to cry with its celebration of gritty parental–and communal–love for a team of basketball players who, however bad, are ours.

The trek was well worth it; I’ve been introduced to new voices, and I got to listen, once again, to a poet I so greatly admire.  I couldn’t help, ironically, to be terribly envious as I listened to Dawn read from Tracing Paradise–the beauty and fluidity and absolute intelligence of her language is something I’d give my eyeteeth for.  I’m so glad I gunned it out of my driveway and skirted all those cars off the road to get to Uncommon Words; and I almost didn’t mind the horrible drive back home, either.

(Lisa, of course, lives in Waterville–so getting home wasn’t so exciting for her.)

Postscript:

When I drove north from Waterville on I-95 (I thought that might be easier than going back on 139) in sleet that, once I passed the Pittsfield exit, mutated into heavy sticky unplowedsnow, I was forcibly reminded of another time when I went to a reading in horrible weather.  Several years ago, the late Jack Wiler read at the Harlow Gallery in

Jack Wiler

Hallowell in a blizzard.  The storm was so bad that the hosts of the reading, Ted and Ruth Bookey, didn’t even show up.  The audience consisted of me, David Moreau, and Baron Wormser.  Afterward, we retired to Baron’s, where Jack was staying, for a nightcap, and he kept insisting that David and I should stay–but somewhat idiotically, we both opted to take ourselves home.  That might have been the worst drive I’ve ever done:  it took years to complete, and took years off my life.  Even now, whenever I see David at readings, he refers to it as the night we almost spent together.  But he’s a poet.  He has a weird sense of humor.

On Fixing Stuff

All right, I admit it.  That little black car pulled over by the state policeman down on Route 7 near the softball field last night?  That was me, coming home from the Nokomis boys’ basketball games (JV won, by the way).  Why?  Because I had a headlight out.  When the trooper asked me if I knew it, I admitted it.  It’s been out for a while now.  I’ve been meaning to fix it, but…it’s been cold.  It’s been snowing.  I hate fixing stuff outside in the winter.

It's the one on the right...

I’ve never done a headlight on this car.  I’ve had cars where it was a simple procedure:  pop the bulb out of the bracket on the back of the light, put a new one in, and voila!  I’ve had cars where you had to replace the entire unit–what a drag.  I had no idea what this one would be like, so while the policeman was back in his cruiser running all my ID to make sure I was not some hardened criminal on the lam, I held my owner’s manual up in the beams of his (working) headlights and read about how to do it.  In years past, I would ask my grandfather to show me how to fix stuff, and he invariably knew; but he’s been dead for quite some time now, so I’ve learned to look up directions in books, or online.  This did not seem too difficult.

Except, I found this afternoon, when I popped the hood and began work on it in the parking lot at the auto parts store in Newport, that there were two steps missing from the directions in the manual.  Fortunately, this is a car where you can simply replace bulbs (halogen!  Don’t touch the glass!); but between the bulb and the power source, there’s a bracket, a rubber cowling, and a secondary plug unit.  The book said nothing about the last two.  Nor did it say anything about the contortions one has to go through to get a hand in around the windshield washer filling tube and well and up to the back of the headlight assembly.  Fortunately, I am a stubborn person who, after the initial frustration because this is just not right, tries something which seems a practical solution.  If that doesn’t work, I stop and think for a bit, and then try something else.  This was me this afternoon, and eventually, I got the plug out.  I had to have the counter guy at the parts store show me how to get the secondary plug off the old bulb without breaking the thing.  I got the cowling off.  I got the bracket moved.  I put the new bulb on the secondary, hung upside down over the front end of the car in the snow so I could manipulate the bracket around the new light.  Cowling back on, plug back in.  Ta-da!  Light.  Not so difficult at all, despite the poor directions, despite the snow, despite the cut on my hand from trying to fit it into a less-than-comfortable space.  Even though it was still daylight, I drove home with the headlights on, hoping I’d run into my trooper friend again, so he could see how well I’d done.  No go there, though.

Down there. Try getting a bleeder line on that baby.

But we all know the saying about pride going before a fall…I got home to a cold house, because sometime while I was away, either working on the car, or previous to that, making triangle toast at the breakfast at the snowmobile club, the furnace quit.  Yes, that furnace, the one in the cellar of doom, with its dirt floor, low beams, and eons worth of dead spiders.  So that’s how I spent the rest of my afternoon:  checking the reset, bleeding the fuel line to make sure there were no air bubbles.  I have my own little took kit for the furnace, and it stays down there next to the furnace itself–in this house, you learn lessons like that.  I only suffered a tiny bit of frustration there–this furnace can be temperamental, with a 30-second reset, and a bleeder valve in a really awkward place; it likes to have its line bled and then to be left alone for a few minutes to consider before it will allow me to reset.  However, after all these years, it and I have come to an understanding.  I pamper it to the best of my ability, with regular fuel deliveries–one this week, as a matter of fact, from my neighbors the McKees who own 1st Choice Oil (they pamper it, too, and I reward them with regular payments).  End of story:  furnace up and running, house warming up.

This is what mine would look like if it could.

Now it’s time to vacuum.  Of course, my vacuum cleaner is a 23-year-old Electrolux that was much abused by my ex-husband (another story for another time), so more often than not, I have to fix that, too.  Good thing I’m stubborn.

Postscript:

Every time I fix something, I miss my grandfather.

On Below-Zero Weather and Soup

This morning when I got up, it was -12 F outside–so cold that the road running past the front of the house had gone entirely grey.  So cold that the dogs, after doing their morning duty, curled up around one another on the ratty blanket they share and refused to move for man nor beast (read: for me or the cats).  So cold that it hurt to breathe outside, so I opted to stay inside.  All day.  Wearing the fuzzy socks Rosalie gave me for Christmas (my daughter knows me very well), and layers upon layers of clothes.  This is the coldest it’s been yet this winter:  the brilliant brittle cold where the blue sky and the bright sun mock most painfully.

I hate the cold.  By this I mean real cold, the kind I’ve felt all day today.  It’s the kind that works its way into the bones and sets them to scraping and rattling when I try to move, even though I know perfectly well that moving is just about the only antidote.  It’s the kind of cold that has me pouring tea down my gullet in an attempt to warm up from the inside, with very little result–and thanks to my lovely friend Trisha O and her thoughtful Christmas present, I have an enormous selection of tea here.  Believe me, I’ve tried all of it.

The heathens have been gone all day up to their father’s family, where they were ostensibly going to celebrate some birthdays by ice fishing (I’m fairly certain that didn’t go as planned, but I’m sure I’ll hear about it when they reappear later).  So, I’ve been drinking my tea, huddling in the comfy chair my lovely friend Becky donated to the cause of furnishing my living room, burrowing under a blanket while reading the fourth George R. R. Martin book my lovely friend Ian lent me.  Every once in a while I have set the book aside, marking my place with the card Ian gave me when he delivered the book–the card announcing his wedding to his fiancée Kate, come summer–and stumbling into the kitchen to give the soup a stir.

My stockpot, for the last 20 years

Because this is the kind of day, and this is the kind of weather, that demands soup.

In all truth, this soup of which I speak has been in the works for several days now, which as any soup aficionado can tell you, is the way it’s supposed to be.  This is a beef and vegetable soup, with a deep rich broth that can only come from simmering beef bones.  And not just any beef bones, mind you:  bones saved from the prime rib roast the heathens and I had to celebrate New Year’s.  They’ve been simmering down for days.  After I strained them out of the broth and skimmed off the fat, I threw a large, slice-up onion into the pot and boiled the living daylights out of the whole shebang until only half of it remained.  Then I threw in some stew beef, cut small, and cooked that for most of this weekend.  This morning I sliced up four carrots and added them, too.  Just a couple of hours ago I threw in a bunch of orzo.  There’s some pepper in there, too, and a bay leaf (my mother, as I recall, threw a bay leaf into everything involving beef, and I do the same out of force of habit more than anything else).  The pot’s on the back burner, the heat set to ‘simmer,’ and when I last checked, it was looking–and smelling–pretty darned good, especially on this fearsome cold late afternoon.

I’ll be eating soon.  I scared up the fixings for some cornbread, and that’s in the oven.  Granted, it’s not the recipe of my lovely friend Brenda, nor is it the cornbread with a kick that her friend, the musician Jonathan Byrd, mixes up in a skillet from Cackalack…but it’s a treat, hot with melting butter, and a big ol’ bowl of that soup I’ve been waiting for throughout this whole long cold day.

Postscript:

Stay warm, all.  I wish you good soup, good books, and lovely friends, like the ones I have in Trisha, Becky, Ian (and Kate), and Brenda.  They all make this cold bearable for me.

On Ian’s Favorite Books: A Song of Ice and Fire

I took a class up at the university last spring and summer, with Ian, one of my co-workers.  He’s a history teacher whose major interest is the American Civil War–”since you ask”–though the class was on writing.  We did have the opportunity, though, to discuss our favorite books as part of the program, and Ian raved about the George R. R. Martin series, A Song of Ice and Fire.  He was a Martin zealot, crazy for the books.  As it happened, I had recently read an article about Martin and the series in The New Yorker, published just at the time the series was first being televised on HBO; the article itself was enticing enough, with descriptions of Martin, his fans, his anti-fans, and the world of Westeros he’d created.  But I resisted.  I’m not a fantasy reader.

This winter, Ian got on my case again.  I had to read the books.  All right, I wasn’t a fantasy reader, but what he liked about the series, he claimed, was less the fantastical elements (there are dragons in it, after all) and more what he called the Medieval  flavor of the stories.  In The New Yorker article, Laura Miller pointed out that readers couldn’t really get too attached to characters, because it was likely that they’d be killed in incredibly horrific ways, good guys and bad guys alike.  That, Ian insisted, is what makes it like real life.  (Either a cynic or a realist, that Ian, but I can’t really decide.)

He brought me the first book, A Game of Thrones, on the Thursday before Christmas break.  In case I read fast, he brought me the second book the very next day–never mind that each of them was around 800 pages long.  I started reading immediately.  And got sucked into the story immediately.  In the first chapters, there was a really cool little kid, Bran.  I made a mistake:  I liked this character.  Never mind that he climbed on towers and high walls in the castle of Winterfell, and that his mother, Catelyn Stark, warned his father not to let him climb, and to keep him safe–by page 75, he hadn’t fallen but had been pushed off a high tower by one of the bad guys.  Ack!  The first cool character!  And a seven-year-old kid!  I knew it was going to happen–I’d even found myself thinking as I was reading:  don’t get attached…this might be one that dies horribly…or maybe this one…or all of them–and I fell into the trap anyway.

But Bran didn’t die.  I still knew better, though:  The New Yorker wasn’t going to be lying to me about this terrible trend in the Martin books, and Ian wasn’t going to be, nor were any of the other Martin readers I spoke to as I made my way through the first 800 pages.  I still, however, came to be attached to Bran’s father, Eddard Stark, known as Ned.  Man, what a guy.  Good, strong, upright, always measuring his conscience to make sure he was doing what was well and truly right; loyal to his faraway wife, even when tempted by the lusty  Queen Cersei; a good, kind, loving, firm father to his children…and by the end of the first book, it was just that rightness that got him brutally and unexpectedly beheaded by the spoiled young king, despite that king’s own mother’s and own betrothed’s pleas for mercy.  Oh, I got suckered into that one, all right.

One of the most attractive things about this series so far is, as Ian hinted at, the characterization.  There is no single character here who is completely good, and no one who is completely bad (though I reserve judgment on Cersei and Jaime Lannister for the time being).  Eddard Stark, though as close to a good guy as we might come, has an illegitimate son, the mother of whom he never mentions.  Catelyn Stark, though a strong and loyal mother, has moments of incredible unkindness where that illegitimate son is concerned.  Tyrion Lannister, though a member of the family which opposes and for the most part destroys the House of Stark, is a physically and perhaps emotionally stunted character who shows great kindness in defense of the young and self-centered Sansa Stark.  Sandor Clegane, the Hound, who acts as young King Joffrey’s bodyguard, gives Sansa some of the best advice and strongest support of anyone who is ranged against her family.  In this series, there is no black and white, though I knew exactly where my sympathies lay.

I didn’t finish that first book before Christmas break; but I did finish it and the second before New Year’s.  By then I was well and truly trapped:  I had to know what was going to happen to these people, or at least how my absolute favorite ones would meet their bitter and bloody ends.  When Bran was betrayed and killed by his foster brother at the end of the second installment, A Clash of Kings, I was heart-broken again by his death…until I found out that maybe he wasn’t really dead.  Again, suckered in by George R. R. Martin, then wrung out to dry.  Even though I wouldn’t see Ian again until January 3rd, I dashed off a frantic email to him:  bring that third book to school when we go back!  Two straight days he forgot to do it, and I thought I would die of frustration.  I needed to know!

Ian’s finally come through, however.  I’ve got the third book, A Storm of Swords, and I’m devouring it with both greed and dread.  I need to know what’s going to be happening.  I fear what’s going to be happening.  This series has become a fixation with me, an addiction.  I need more!  I fear I’ve turned into one of those Martin-crazed people Miller described in her article.  The next thing that’s probably going to happen is my grabbing Ian and taking him on my search for Martin, to see what kind of quest he will set for us.  Then we’ll all get knighted.  He’ll be Ser Ian, and I?  I’ll be like Brienne of Tarth:  I’d like to be a Ser, but I am a woman, after all.

Rats.

Postscript:

I don’t have HBO.  I haven’t seen the series on television.  I don’t know if I want to.  Perhaps reading is enough for me.

On Ghosts of Christmases Past

For more years than I can count, we’ve been going around the corner and up the hill to the church here for the Christmas Eve service.  When Molly was small, she and I would walk up the hill in the dark, and sometimes she would sing with me.  More recently, with the heathens–who generally don’t sing in public, and frown upon me when I do–we’ve been part of the pageant.  To be specific, Rosalie has, several times, been Mary, and once was the angel of the annunciation in her long white gown and gold tinsel halo; Ben has always wanted to be one of the Wise Men, especially when our neighbor William (a very tall boy several years Ben’s senior) was the other of them (yes, they were each, apparently, a Wise Man and a half; or more likely, Ben was one of them and William the other two).  The church itself has a tiny congregation, and in our experience has never quite had enough children to fill out the Nativity, so the uncovered parts have always been played by someone’s enormous yard ornaments.  I have upon occasion filled in as a reader, and one year attempted to have some of the kids play Christmas carols with me on their band instruments (with questionable success, though we meant well).

This year there was no pageant, which is just as well–the heathens seem to have outgrown their desire to participate.  On Christmas Eve, the service was of lessons and carols.  Quite frankly, that’s my favorite kind: because the carols are ones to which most of us around here know the words–at least, to the first couple of verses.  The minister leading the service Saturday night, Terry, said he hoped we were in fine voice, because we would be singing all the verses to all the songs.  He wasn’t kidding, either.  Much to everyone’s surprise, in the first carol, “Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful,” he leapt vigorously into that popish Latin verse the Methodists always include in their hymnal.  Yes!  I spent years and years studying Latin, and this time of year I got to sing that verse as well as “Roma Ardet” (don’t ask, really).  One of my earliest memories of my grandfather was of him singing that Latin verse to this song–but he had grown up a good Irish Catholic altar boy, after all.  Still, though the white frame Methodist church up here is a far cry the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception at the foot of Munjoy Hill in Portland in the early 1900′s, I could still hear Granddad singing with us–it’s just another way that man haunts me.

Ironically, the second song was “Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem,” which was my grandmother’s favorite.  She tried valiantly to teach me to play it on the piano when I was first learning–but that was hopeless.  It’s one of the few songs I can remember her actually playing–by the time I began on her piano, her arthritis was so painful

My grandmother, long before she was my grandmother

that she very rarely touched the instrument, save to march out of the kitchen to plunk a key or two when I’d gone dreadfully wrong in my practice.  Still, it’s the song I can’t hear without thinking of her, and the way she’d lean over my shoulder, tilting her head to better see through her bifocals, and reaching a gnarled hand around to correct me.  Then she’d sing a bit, sigh a bit, and go on back to the kitchen.

My brother, too, had a favorite Christmas carol–though why I remember this, I’m not sure.  His was “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” and wouldn’t you know it–that was the third carol on Saturday night.  Once we got that far, I felt surrounded, by the ghosts of my Christmases past.  Sadly, I don’t know if my parents had favorites; come to think of it, neither of my sisters are ghosts by any stretch of the imagination, but I don’t know whether they have favorites, either.  Mine has always been “Angels We Have Heard on High,” and that’s mainly because of those swooping glorias in the refrain.  This one was not included on Christmas Eve, and that made me rather sad:  it’s lovely to sing, and even more lovely to play on the trumpet.  One year I had the great good fortune to play that song, accompanied by the church pianist, 80-some-odd-year-old Mildred Clifford; she, of course, was at the front of the church, but I swooped all those brass glorias from the choir loft above in the rear.  I remember watching Mildred’s hands from up there, the better to mesh with her piano.  The sound echoed ever so slightly from the tin ceiling overhead.  It was

Best angel ever

magic.  Saturday night, Mildred said she’d like to do that again sometime.  I should like to, too.  Perhaps next year.

Postscript:

Saturday night I shared the hymnal with Ben.  Afterward, he asked, “Did you hear me rocking those Christmas carols?”  I had.  I’d heard him, and I’d heard many other people, both living and dead.  Funny how that happens.  I wonder if they all heard him, too.

On the Second December’s Poems

This has been a distinctly odd month, weather-wise:  warm when it should have been cold, rain when there should have been snow.  As always, we plug along to the death of the old year, the days growing shorter, the darkness stretching.  This month, though, some of the boys have been asking for poems with hunting, poems with deer.  Guy poems.  One young man decided to do a web search for a poem about three of his favorite things–and managed to come up with something…which led to a discussion of literary merit, and revision (I didn’t care for the poem, primarily because of the apparent lack of thought that went into the revision; but I shared it because of the effort TJ went to in tracking it down–and the discussion was well worth it!).

Also this month, I learned of the death of a poet I’ve known since I was 18–a man who was by turns the kindest and cruelest person I’ve ever known.  Herb Coursen was a man who could at once discuss wonderful ideas about poetry–content, construction–and at the same time become enraged if your opinions did not conform to his.  In recent years we had come to a kind of truce.  He had organized the readings for Longfellow Days at the library in Brunswick, and two times he chose to include me in his program…then proceeded to tell the audiences that he’d taught me everything I know.  After some thought, I included a poem he wrote (and published in Love Poem, a book from the mid-90′s) as a kind of tribute:  he once told me it was–as was that entire book–an outgrowth of a series of discussions we’d had via letter about the process of writing sonnets.

So there it is.  Now it’s vacation.

December 1, Thursday:  Robert Frost, “An Old Man’s Winter Night“

Carl Sandburg

December 2, Friday: Thomas Hardy, “The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House“

December 5, Monday: Emily Dickinson, “There’s a certain Slant of light“

December 6, Tuesday: Carl Sandburg, “Horses and Men in Rain“  (especially appropriate for the rain, and for the fact that we’d just got done a series of readings about knights)

December 7, Wednesday: Delmore Schwartz, “Poem (In the morning, when it was raining)“

December 8, Thursday: H. R. Coursen, “Love Poem (Sort of): for Anne” (for Herb, whose death I’m not sure what to do with)

December 9, Friday: Erica Jong, “Ordinary Miracles“

December 12, Monday: Wes McNair, “Glass Night”

December 13, Tuesday: Annie Deppe, “The Minister’s Wife”

December 14, Wednesday: Jane Kenyon, “Apple Dropping into Deep Early Snow“

December 15, Thursday: Kirsten Dierking, “Shoveling Snow“

December 16, Friday: Emily Dickinson, “Besides the Autumn Poets Sing“

December 19, Monday: Robert Francis, “Blue Winter“

Robert Francis

December 20, Tuesday: Mary Oliver, “On Winter’s Margin“

December 21, Wednesday:  unknown, “”A Poem of Hunting, Fishing, and a Truck” (this was a poem brought to me by TJ in my third period class, who likes–you guessed it–hunting, fishing, and trucks)

December 22, Thursday: Gary Johnson, “December“

On Frank Sinatra and the Rebekahs

Way back before the heathens were born, before I devoted all my time in winter to basketball, I used to play trumpet in an all-women’s Dixieland band.  Six Basin Street was the name of the group, named, of course, after “Basin Street Blues” and originally having something to do with the number of players.  By the time I joined, at the behest of Jan Klitch, the original trumpeter, the band personnel included–aside from us–a drummer, a saxophone player, a clarinetist, a vocalist, a trombonist, and a tuba player.  We wore red and white striped vests and cool hats and played in incredibly odd places:  parks, a celebration of the passage of women’s suffrage, grange halls, and one year, a Christmas party at the Odd Fellows Hall in Orrington.

We practiced diligently on Friday nights in a basement in Brewer, playing old standards like “Tiger Rag” (way too much fun with a slide trombone), “Tin Roof Blues,” “That’s A-Plenty,” and “Bill Bailey.”  My all-time favorite was “St. James Infirmary” with its grief-stricken trumpet wailing about a dead guy…which, somehow, seemed a strange up-beat grieving, despite its minor chords.  Not much in the repertoire for dancing (the Odd Fellows and Rebekahs did ask, once we got to playing), and even less for Christmas carols…but that didn’t stop us from accepting their invitation to the IOOF party.  However, once we’d played through our entire list for them, those very nice men and women of a certain age invited us to share their dinner; afterwards, the Rebekahs all gave us small presents–Christmas tokens, if you will.  Mine was a cassette tape of Frank Sinatra doing up Christmas in his own special way:  a logical choice coming from those ladies, it seemed to me at the time.

From that point on, ol’ Frank became part of Christmas at the house.  His is the music we listen to when we put up the tree:  I love those J-I-N-G-L-E bells!  He hangs out with us for most of December,  his voice full and deep.  Even years later, his is the first CD the heathens look for when Christmas time rolls around.  CD, you say?  Oh, yes.  The original Rebekahs cassette tape went on walkabout at the time of my divorce, but so ingrained was A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra by then that I was forced to hunt down another copy, and the CD just made better sense.  So here we are now, some seventeen or eighteen years after the Odd Fellows Christmas party, and Frank has become the Energizer Bunny, after a fashion–he keeps going and going and going.  This is truly the gift that keeps on giving.  I’ve collected quite a few Christmas CDs since then, but Frank’s is my first, and my best.  And, of course, all thanks to the Rebekahs from the Orrington IOOF.

Postscript:

Here’s what’s on the CD:

1. “Jingle Bells” (James Pierpont) – 2:00
2. “The Christmas Song” (Mel Tormé, Robert Wells) – 3:28
3. “Mistletoe and Holly” (Hank Sanicola, Frank Sinatra, Doc Stanford) – 2:18
4. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” (Kim Gannon, Walter Kent, Buck Ram) – 3:11
5. “The Christmas Waltz” (Sammy Cahn, Jule Styne) – 3:03
6. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (Hugh Martin, Ralph Blane) – 3:29
7. “The First Noel” (William B. Sandys) – 2:44
8. “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” (Felix Mendelssohn, Charles Wesley) – 2:24
9. “O Little Town of Bethlehem” (Lewis H. Redner, Phillip Brooks) – 2:06
10. “Adeste Fideles” (“O, Come All Ye Faithful”) (John Francis Wade) – 2:34
11. “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” (Edmund Sears, Richard Storrs Willis) – 2:51
12. “Silent Night” (Franz Gruber, Josef Mohr) – 2:31

Compact disc reissue bonus tracks

1. “White Christmas” (1954 single version) (Irving Berlin) – 2:37
2. “The Christmas Waltz” (1954 single version) (Sammy Cahn, Jule Styne) – 3:01

Post Postscript:

…and here’s Frank for you:

On Edinburgh and Sausage Rolls

I was walking around Edinburgh on my birthday a couple of years ago with my friends Dan and Danielle Davis (a father/daughter comedy team if ever there was one).  We had been up on Calton Hill as the sun went down, wandering about the monuments and pseudo-ruins, watching a rehearsal for the Beltane procession that would take place a week after we left (we and an enormous bunch of people were there on a school trip), trying to read inscriptions in the dying light.  As night drew on, we were unwilling to return to the Cairn Hotel on Windsor Street (a distinctly odd sort of place–where I come from, cairns are raised on hiking trails to mark where people died–smelling of lilies, though Gordon the bartender was a very nice man).  Instead we walked down to Princes Street, where Sir Walter Scott hangs out in perpetuity, to look across the gardens and up to the castle, looming darkly over the city.  Then we wandered about, looking at things as people from away will do, turning up side streets, coming upon statues of men on horses, making ever larger circles with Calton Hill and the castle as our checkpoints.  We had no idea where we were, but knew if we kept circling about, we’d always come back to something we recognized eventually.  Just as long, Dan said, as we got back to the hotel bar before it closed.

I love going on these trips, not only because I get to see things I’d never get to otherwise, but because of, ironically, the sometimes weird, sometimes poky places we tend to stay.  The hotels more often than not are rated two or fewer stars, and they’re cheap for large groups, which is why tour companies like EF Tours and Explorica do business with them.  On this particular trip to Scotland, we had stayed in one place which obviously catered to business travelers:  off the highway, far away from anything resembling a town.  But we also stayed in a totally awesome place in the Highlands where stairs went up and down, hallways zigged and zagged, and the rooms were so small that two people could comfortably stay in them if one of them stood on a bed so the other could get around to the door (Dan showed me how he put the desk chair up on top of the wardrobe so he could get to the en suite bathroom in his room; so my roommate and I did the same).  At the Cairn, the main hotel was on one side of Windsor Street, its Annex on the other.  My room was, of course, in the Annex, which meant that I needed to have someone with a special key let me into the building; this part of the hotel was in desperate need of refurbishing, though the water was really hot in the shower.  As there were no phones in the rooms on this side of the street for wake-up calls, Gordon the bartender did double duty, pounding on our doors before he went off desk duty in the morning.

Unfortunately, the food at some of these hotels could be hit-or-miss, and sadly, on this particular night, it had missed rather badly.  Supposedly a fish and chips dinner, it was only made bearable by the fact that

Dan, that silly man

the hotel gave me two tiny bottles of wine to go with it, on account of its being my birthday.  For Dan and Danielle, the flat, tasteless, so-obviously frozen fish filet was unbearable.  So as we wandered about in the Edinburgh darkness, it was no surprise that Dan was drawn to a chippy:  brilliantly lit, the doorway packed, the edges a bit grimy.  When he came back out, he had a couple of sausage rolls wrapped in greasy paper, dripping with some sort of sauce which was unidentifiable in the dark street.  Though a silly man, he was incredibly generous, letting me try some of the roll.  It was awesome.  Needless to say, I’ve been trying to replicate it ever since here at home:  sometimes I’ve thought I’ve come close, but it’s never quite the same.

I’ve hung on to that night in Edinburgh for a while now, and the sausage rolls are among the reasons why.  Calton Hill and the castle in the dark are others.  After a couple of hours walking, Dan and Danielle and I returned to the Cairn and ordered up drinks from Gordon.  The hotel still smelled like a funeral parlor.  Afterwards, I still had to have someone with a key take me across the street so I could get up to the fourth floor and my room.  But those things don’t matter.  They just make up the fabric of a good story, an adventure.

So.  The sausage rolls.  Even my son likes these, though he’s not a fan of sausage in general.  He likes them with HP Sauce, because he also indulges in food fantasies like mine.

Ingredients:

1 lb. uncased sausage, divided into 6 portions

6 full sheets puff pastry

HP Brown Sauce, or World Harbors Honey Mustard Sauce, or another sauce to taste

Melted butter

Process:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Shape each portion of sausage into a roll.  Brush one piece of pastry lightly with sauce.  Place sausage on one edge, and then roll up in pastry, tucking ends under.  Brush pastry roll with melted butter.  Do this for each sausage roll.

Place rolls on baking pan.  (I like to  line the pan with baking parchment).

Bake for 20 minutes, or until pastry is puffy and slightly browned.

Serve with additional sauce.

Extremely easy.  Extremely yummy.

Postscript:

Dan and Danielle:  want to go back?

Postscript 2:

I also got a castle for my birthday that year.