"Come back and see me, if I'm still here."

A month or two ago I joined Ancestry.com, where my uncle Stephen said I would find all the work he'd done over the years. It's fun, like a particularly nerdy sort of video game. I've mostly been fleshing out the Norwegian side of the family. But I have a calendar event for today! Peg died, in 2000. I wasn't told until after the fact, so I didn't get to go to the funeral.

Peg, our next door neighbor, was a huge presence the first half of my life—essentially the grandmother who was always on scene. She and her husband Jack lived in that house for...a long, long time. I see them listed there in the 1940 census. The story I know is that they lived there with a Greek guy named Michael, who left them the house and a dragonfly-green Mercedes sedan; that's a relationship probably lost to history, except for the deed transfer.

Peg was born in 1906, in Cambridge, to Scottish Canadians—I had no idea about that part, but they were from the places that really preserved Scottish folk traditions, in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island. She was Very Very Catholic™, which I imagine she was raised with, given the family naming scheme:

Yes, Lochlin's mother was Margaret, Lochlin married a Margaret, and they raised Peg, another Margaret. It's not clear to me that there are Saints David or Sarah, but maybe they skated past a less assiduous priest or two. Peg was staunchly anti-abortion, which in all our time together was probably the only disagreement of substance, so we did what grown-ups do, and talked about everything else. She was always on the ball, a sharp Bostonian tongue that ran at lightspeed, and a conversational engagement that was basically improv comedy.

(Ancestry.com claims she and her husband Jack had a child who is alive enough to remain anonymous; that's sort of mind-blowing, if true, but I Occam's Razor says it's a computer hiccup.)

One Christmas Eve I went to visit her in the nursing home, I think after Jack died, and she got crabby at me: "Go away. I told everyone not to visit me."

Being an honest relationship, I mocked her with a sentence of grouchy animal noises: "Rahrahrahrr. Rarrararar. Raarerrrrarhar!".

She didn't miss a beat: "And I understood every word!".

She had a lot to offer a super-smart wiseass kid. I'm sorry she never got to meet Honor or J, and also sorry she never got to meet Honor's grandmother. I'm not sure what they had in common besides being spectacularly feisty elderly women, but what else do you need? It would have been fun to see.

Every time I saw her at the nursing home, I would head back to college, and she would give me a couple of the most brand-new $100 bills I've ever seen, with the same message:

"Don't spend it on beer and women. Come back and see me, if I'm still here."

Not to worry, Peg. I spent it on gin and bagels. 

that could have gone better.

There's a phenomenal fiddle+guitar duo out of Boston, called Rakish, and when I saw they have a new album out, I thought I'd see where they're touring. They don't usually come to the West Coast, obviously, but lo and behold, they were at the Bellingham (WA) Celtic Festival, doing a show, and leading a "session," which is an Irish/Scottish thing where musicians gather, usually in a pub, and a leader starts playing a tune, everyone else joins in, they play it for a few minutes, then signals the transition to the next song.

"How can this possibly work?", you ask. For some reason nobody wants to say this out loud, but the way it works, I shit you not, is that the participants know hundreds and thousands of tunes. Musicians do the same for the American offshoots of Irish/Scottish, what are now things like Old-Time and bluegrass. I saw it happen when I was at Fiddle Tunes in 2019. It's really daunting, if you don't know the tunes or you're not able to make it up as you go along. Or, like me, it takes you the entire eight repetitions of the tune just to start remembering the melody.

Rakish were absolutely stunning in concert, everything I could have hoped. And everything else about the week was the worst travel I've had since being in Mexico with The Bad Relationship™ twenty years ago.

It's a long story, but mostly, the Airbnb I rented turned out to have had cats living in it for several weeks. It was a huge place, beautiful woodwork all over, with a million little places cats would just love: for example, the roll-out shelves where I put my clothes. I found out the cat thing after the first night.

(There is a pattern in my family tree of fathers who don't want cats in the house justifying it to the kids by falsely claiming to be allergic to cats. I however, am actually allergic to cats. Not anaphylactic-shock allergic, but it's easy to overwhelm anything an antihistamine can do for me.)

The hosts were super nice about it, and they worked with Airbnb to refund my remaining nights. It's definitely their fault—cats were mentioned briefly in the last line of the listing, and the house is so big it couldn't be de-catted in just the few hours used for cleaning. I moved myself to a hotel.

Unpacking my clothes at the hotel, my ears started to itch again, and I realized I was going to have to wash all my clothes. Bellingham turns out to have the best laundromat I've ever seen, but even so, it sucked up most of a day.

The hotel couldn't extend my stay to my last day, and it was just an ordinary hotel, so rather than fuck around with it, I reserved a different Airbnb for the last few days. I carefully asked the host about cats first. Success!

I went to a workshop about playing in sessions, which I was really hopeful about, because I want to play music with other humans. But it turned out to be a very very very chatty Irish-American, who just went on and on, talking about balancing the various interpersonal and musical dynamics of a group. That is (a) how I make a living, and (b) something I've been doing for 30 years, in theater and music before I was in tech.

On the bright side, there's a lawyer from L.A. who I'd originally talked to when I first wanted to buy a Mats Nordwall cittern, eons ago, and he's generally been down an expert version of my musical path, so it was surprising to discover he was staying on the floor above me. For his part, he and his girlfriend had no idea there was another unit in the basement there, so they had a different surprise.

And finally, one of my least restful vacations ever came to an end, and I got to go home, exhausted and dissatisfied. That didn't last long, since I got laid off a couple weeks after, and had a whole series of other things to think about.