That Glorious Song Of Old

Over there in my ramshackle blogroll thingie, you’ll find Daughter of the Golden West. There aren’t enough blogs like that on the Intertunnel. Or people like that on the planet, now that you mention it. It’s pleasant, and it’s location specific. If I need a dash of Southern California, I go over there and get a fix. One of the greatest services a blogger can perform is to simply depict what’s outside their windows. I used to live a few hours north of there, and I miss it sometimes.

The Daughter and her daughter have a business. They sell vintage Christmas ornaments and assorted other Yule swag at 32 Degrees North. They sent my sons Advent calendars. Marvelous.

When I was young, such things were rampant. We had little caroling books –and used them– and made garlands from strips of construction paper and wreaths from computer punch cards. We hung up those big, garish Christmas lights with red, orange, blue, and white bulbs, on the tree outside the door. We wrapped our front door like a present. We had fake snow in the corners of the windows. We favored all sorts of things we don’t see much of now. In many ways I feel as though my life has been thrown back in time. Because we didn’t have very much, we had to take a bit of time and care with everything. Little trifles become more memorable that way. It’s certainly like that for me again.

My little son has a very orderly mind and likes calendars and lists and thing of that nature, and he’s quite taken with his Advent calendar. We’re quite taken with him, of course, and grateful to people who are kind to him and his brother.

32 Degrees North

O ye beneath life’s crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow;
Look now, for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing;
Oh rest beside the weary road
And hear the angels sing.

When I’m Good And Ready

If I got to go get a roscoe I’ll get me a roscoe and then what? But I don’t need no roscoe for you. This place is nothing but a dunghill, but I’m the cock on top of it, brother. You don’t wanna come down here into my chicks. Ask anybody. You got a razor? I like it when they got a razor or some knuckles. Nothing but a minute’s work and then the Man don’t care what I done to you. But you don’t look like you could do nothing anyway.

You see that car out front? That’s me, brother. I go where I please and I do what I want and there’s no bud dee can tell me different. You cats always be measuring yourself to other peoples but I’m the only yardstick here and you better know it. You don’t know what you don’t know and that’s bad for your health if you get a notion. Why don’t you slide on down the rail and let me be. There’s high test and wimmins enough for everybody after I’m through and gone.

When I’m good and ready.

Orange Line

I wished I had you in Carrickfergus,
Only for nights in Ballygrand,
I would swim over the deepest ocean,
The deepest ocean to be by your side.

But the sea is wide and I can’t swim over
And neither have I wings to fly.
I wish I could find me a handy boatman
To ferry me over to my love and die.

My childhood days bring back sad reflections
Of happy days so long ago.
My boyhood friends and my own relations.
Have all passed on like the melting snow.

So I’ll spend my days in endless roving,
Soft is the grass and my bed is free.
Oh to be home now in Carrickfergus,
On the long road down to the salty sea.

And in Kilkenny it is reported
On marble stone there as black as ink,
With gold and silver I did support her
But I’ll sing no more now till I get a drink.

I’m drunk today and I’m rarely sober,
A handsome rover from town to town.
Oh but I am sick now and my days are numbered
Come all ye young men and lay me down.

I wish you’d put the battered kettle on
The bag could take one steeping more
I’d walk for miles across a rocky down
To hear the whistle we’re all waiting for

The gulf yawns wide and I can’t leap over
Until my time is drawing nigh
You’re laid to rest in the nonesuch clover
When you were here you slipped on by

Those Christmas days and our destinations
Trolley rides through the dirty snow
My childhood’s gone, like passing stations
Eyes full of tears, some from the cold

The Vice-President In Charge Of Trefoil

Still some wicked cool benches left over at Sippican Cottage Furniture’s Ready To Ship page. They’re all very nice, but none as nice as this one.

My little son is eight. He “helps” me in my workshop. He’s fond of earning a quarter by vacuuming the floor, for instance. He gets an equal amount of dust on himself and into the vacuum, but either way it’s not on the floor anymore.

An eight-year-old is prone to flights of fancy. He’s as likely to ask you if we could vacation on Jupiter as anything more mundane. The world is full of possibilities for him. There’s very little world in the rear-view mirror to discourage him in any way.

In a lull in the dust fighting, he looked at me in a way I’m  accustomed to seeing just before some sort of trouble. It’s usually followed by a request for us to make a ray gun with a paper towel tube and the hot glue gun. It wouldn’t be so bad except that he expects it to actually emit some sort of rays when we’re finished, or it’s a failure. He hears not now too often, as I work most all the time at one thing or another.

“Why don’t you put a shamrock or a heart on your benches, dad, like you do with your steppers? It would look nicer, and then you could sell them for more because they’re better and you could pay me for inventing it. Then I’d have lots of money and could buy a Bionicle.”

I began to disabuse him of this notion as a wild flight of childish fancy and impractical and daddy’s too busy to…

Then I stopped and realized it was a bona fide good idea, and made one. If you buy it, the kid gets 10 bucks, and I probably won’t get my floor vacuumed again for the forty weeks worth of quarters that represents.

Sippican Cottage’s Ready to Ship.

If Silence Was Golden, You Couldn’t Raise A Dime



Everyone loves Mose Allison. Tom Lehrer. George Carlin. Mark Twain. They belong to a select few that can spend a goodly portion of their time being irascible, but somehow manage to make being the rock in the world’s shoe feel like a massage to the pedestrians.

“If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say
something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will
all have been worth the while.” –Tom Lehrer

I Am Not A Good Father. This Is A Good Father

I am a father. I take that rather seriously. News media refer to the persons simply responsible for impregnating women as “fathers.” I don’t.

The word father does not allow for any hyphenations or qualifiers to me. You either are, or you aren’t a father. Pass/fail. If I am proud of anything in this life, it’s that I’m told by people I respect that I pass as a father. It’s enough praise, but it’s not enough accomplishment to suit me. I keep trying.

I’ll break my own rule now, and use an adjective to describe a father. The man in the video, little Ivor’s father, Jorge Cardile, is a good father.

He is not a good father because he succeeded in his effort. If it had failed miserably, and had no effect whatsoever, it wouldn’t have affected my opinion of him one whit — quite the opposite — for a prayer is not the pull of a lever expecting a gumball.

Jorge Cardile

Month: November 2011

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