Gaudete, gaudete!

One thing that Tim brought into our lives was the musician George Winston, who he saw in Maine at some point, and in particular Winston's solo piano albums.

(His other interest is slack-key Hawaiian songs, which don't speak to me at all, but made for an interesting show when I saw him play at the Troy City Music Hall. I was with the talented concert pianist I was dating at the time, and his technique has some obvious quirks that drove her nuts, which I of course exploited to needle her. ANYWAY.)

The album December probably has original compositions on it, I dunno, but my favorite track has always been the souped-up (instrumental) arrangement of "The Holly and the Ivy." I don't actually know the song from anywhere else, but in looking for a good video of it (check out this one!) I came upon the old Latin carol "Gaudete." As you'd expect, the King's Singers do a tight traditional madrigal thing.

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BUT. You can also hear it done by Steeleye Span, one of the stalwarts of the English folk revival! Their approach is much more of a "humans without conservatory training" vibe, just having at it with their daytime accents.

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It doesn't exactly feel secular, what with the "Christus est natus / Ex Maria virgine" refrain, but despite the Latin—which is not rocket science, as Latin goes—their performance is definitely vernacular. The dude in front is wearing a white t-shirt and seems to have mixed feelings about this song interrupting his glass of wine (which he continues holding). It's entirely likely they can make themselves sound like a regular choir, but that territory has been amply covered for centuries. Regardless, clearly Maddy Pryor has found an application of her voice that she's content with.

Steeleye Span is also my favorite version of "The Boar's Head Carol":

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We used to go to the huge Boar's Head Festival at the Neo-Gothic church where I went to nursery school, and it was amazing. If you grabbed some artists and said "Build me a medieval Christmas festival inside a church" you would get that sort of profusion of acrobats, jugglers, minstrels, people on stilts, acrobats on stilts, pageant, and music. Steeleye Span's "rehearse a lot and then get a couple drinks in before the show" approach really honors the material.

"The Boar's Head Carol" also connects with the text of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, of a similar vintage. It wasn't until an adulthood blessed with Wikipedia that I looked them up and learned that mixed-language texts are called "macaronic." Knowing this has had no apparent impact on my life, except that I know it, and learning is my most fundamental joy.

now with 18 strings!

I bought a guitar! Well, two. Taylor Guitars is having a holiday sale with a steep discount on their very well-done small guitars, the GS Minis, and I kind of wanted one anyway, so I allowed myself to be seduced. The GS Mini is a delightful "sounds good, fun to play, throw in the car, won't be heartbroken if it's stolen" instrument. The bigger guitar, an 814ce, is thoroughly delightful, and wildly different from my old one. I've never had more than one acoustic guitar at once, and now I have three, which is a real treat. I'll try to make some recordings, though I tried today and wasn't satisfied. (I mostly resent the intrusion of electricity into my hobbies, and I'm a perfectionist about my music, so recording is annoying and I don't get better at it.)

My guitar since 2003 has been a very faithful and anonymous 1970s Japanese copy of the classic Martin D-28, a shape Martin invented in 1916 and named after a battleship. Like many pre-amplification instruments, it's designed to stand up to loudmouths like violins or horns, and even in the modern age of microphones, the Dreadnought sound is what you hear in just about every bluegrass, country, and old-time tune, and a whole lot of folk and rock. Gibson, a venerable company with a very different vibe and level of design and quality control, also makes Dreadnoughts, which don't sound like Martin's.

I have a lot of affection for my pseudo-Martin, and we've spent a long time together, but the more I play the Taylor, the closer I get to moving the pseudo-Martin to its next home. That may mean just gifting it on to some kid with no money, because being that it's not actually a Martin, it's worth a fraction as much as  a Martin, no matter how good it is. It's what used guitar ads call a "player's instrument," which I guess is opposed to "collectible": if you only care about making music, sink a little money into this thing which will not appreciate over time, but will help you make music.

And, hey, if the not-Martin and my earlier Yamaha electric both leave the house, there's space for a 12-string, and a short-scale bass...

elk. moose. large...deer. thing.

J ran D&D for us Sunday, and it was awesome. Instead of playing my dynamic duo of Sneaky McStabStab (J created and named him for me eons ago) and the cat-humanoid Fluffy the Disdainful, I am playing my chipper, optimistic, trusting little Gnome Druid, Edda. Druids can cast spells and whatever, but much of their utility on an adventure is an ability to "Wild Shape" into an animal. You keep all your intelligence and abilities, but you stack on the abilities of the animal. The animal takes damage instead of you, so you can be doubling your hit points in a combat.

It's worth going through the Monster Manual to find just the right animal for a situation, and when it came time to fight the Big Bad—some sort of demigod-ish evil tree sorcerer thing—I looked at the map and decided I needed to get there fast, and just be what gaming calls a "tank." Charge in, do a bunch of damage, absorb a bunch of damage.

I turned the page to the Giant Elk.

I have spent basically none of my life learning anything about elk—just a vague understanding of wild-ungulate problems around the world. I had the wrong image of an elk, because the Continental-Germanic word for "moose" (Alces alces, which the Continent has, unlike elk, Cervus canadensis, which it does not) is commonly a variation on "elk" (e.g. Swedish älg). I figured the Europeans who invaded North America said "that's sort of like a moose" and couldn't be fucked to learn anything like the indigenous word for them, wapiti.

But, says Wikipedia, English-speakers didn't really know what moose were:

By the 17th century, Alces alces (called "elk" in Europe) had long been extirpated from the British Isles, and the meaning of the word "elk" to English-speakers became rather vague, acquiring a meaning similar to "large deer".

It occurred to me to look up the French terms, them being the other major invader of North America. They call an elk wapiti. Their word for moose is apparently élan, which also means "momentum, impetus, burst," demonstrating that they were indeed familiar with moose.

Just this once I will cut the colonizers some slack, because if you have a word for "unspecified large deer" available, this is a Very Large Fucking Deer. I had been envisioning the relatively benign and rounded moose antlers, but no, elk antlers will straight-up impale you in a half dozen places.

In D&D, a Giant Elk can move 60' in a combat round, compared to my character's Gnomish 25'. It takes up a 15' square on the map. The horns get there 10' before the rest of it. With a running start, it does extra damage, and can knock the target down on the ground, where they can be conveniently stomped on.

Evil Sorcerer Guy's torso fell off the evil tree onto the ground. Honor's owl-humanoid was able to glide over to my antlers, then get the extra damage attacking from above. Evil Sorcerer Guy exploded, but the Giant Elk form took the damage.

Because Edda can be a Giant Elk for 6 hours at a stretch and only needs an hour to recharge, the fastest and funniest way to get back to town was to have her Giant Elk just...carry everybody. Quickly.

I would be remiss if I did not also suggest reading the verified classic, Dogs In Elk.

"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.

it was a bad week.

It happens a lot that while I meander through all the paths of my life—walk the dog, mess around in my workshop, hang out with the household, teach engineers how to communicate with each other—I'll think of something I don't know about Tim, and that maybe someday I could ask him. But he's gone, so that won't happen.

I wish Tim had found his way through. I wish we had my brother I rarely saw or talked to. I wish his kids had their dad around for their graduations and marriages and kids or whatever. I wish his students had their amazing teacher.

I think about Tim and the rest of my extended family of origin all the time, though I think they don't believe it. I've never really Done Family The Right Way for them, whatever that means in the moment.

All I know is that my heart is full of grief upon grief. A lifetime of loss and isolation, laid like a building, stone on stone. We can mourn things we never had; feel the lack, the voids that intuition tells us should be populated.

My extended family on both sides is remarkable. We have:

• Vast evidence for a biological component to intelligence. It's so bizarrely obvious, and it doesn't matter where any of us grew up, or what our childhoods were like (though mostly bad), or if we went to or finished college. There's even a handful at least as smart as me.

• The magisterial suffering of intergenerational trauma. It's tricky to speculate about where it started, when almost everyone is unable to remember their experiences (which isn't a good sign).

Tim was a casualty, and it sucks. It never stops sucking. I don't even know if I'll get used to it at some point.

cumulonimbus—uh, I mean, it's a horse!

Not to jinx it, but we are having a blessedly mild and smoke-free summer—for once, everyone in the Northern Hemisphere is having a heat wave except us. Not to worry, though, since we still have a megadrought and increasingly unstable or unseasonable weather. It rained one night last week, enough to leave modestly damp pavement behind. My broken-climate strategy was to live "someplace uphill, with rain," but that looks less tenable as everyone's weather becomes, as was promised, less predictable, and consequently more hostile to human life.

I can't overstate how weird that is, by the way. Growing up in Massachusetts, I would see Bert on Sesame Street, saying "It's a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky!", but there were always clouds somewhere in view. I'd never seen a cloudless sky before moving to California, and I've always hated it, but at least it used to be consistent.

One of the better books I'm in the middle of, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, is a pretty stunning and terrifying look at the history of soil and erosion. It turns out productive soil is a thin skin over bare rock, and a lack of basic stewardship, very much tied to enslavement and the manifest destiny of bashing our way across the continent, has left formerly productive land still poor, hundreds of years later. As with aquifers, we can consume in decades what took millions of years to develop. The math is universally extremely bad. But here we are.

I quite like my adorable little drafting surface...except it really needs a table to put it on, and while we technically have a table, we at the Snugglehaus are going through a period of clutter—also, it's our only table. I bought what is basically a 17" W x 11" H clipboard, and I can make drawings on it that are satisfying enough for practical use. For now.