Sippican Cottage
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More Beatles Bolognese

June 14, 2012 6 Comments

(Galeazzo Frudua on YouTube)

My sons are up to around twenty-five songs that they can play together now. After dinner each night, my wife and I go for a walk around the neighborhood while they practice together in an unused bedroom. The plaster is falling off the walls rather nicely in there.

The nine-year-old is entirely immune to praise. If you tell him,”You played that really great,” he might say,”Yes, we did,” in his best Chance the Gardener monotone, but he’s more likely to start rambling about something he’s building on Minecraft, which is apparently what he’s thinking of the entire time he’s playing the drums. My older son teaches him the songs. They have become self-contained now.  I used to give the little one a lesson at lunch every day, but it became superfluous.

They use Spotify  and YouTube to find out what they need to know. Our children do not attend the public schools. I was amused –if that’s the right word — to read that the local schools hand out laptops to all the children, but are reconsidering allowing the children to fully use them for school. They’re thinking of blocking certain sites because the kids waste too much time there. Only a few websites, one being YouTube, were mentioned as needing to be blocked.

After all, what could an intelligent and curious youngster find on YouTube that’s worth knowing?

Yeah, We Home-School Our Kids. Why? No Reason. Next Question

June 13, 2012 5 Comments

[Editor’s note: The original video was removed by the author. I’ve substituted another. The original was from a High School in Hartford, Connecticut, and the students were even less informed than these kids are]

At 2:10, the young lady actually texts her answer aloud: IDK.

I give you, one more time, a six-year-old:

Keep doing you-know-what to that Public School chicken, everybody. It’s working out swell.

O Eeys That Loke

June 12, 2012 1 Comment

O Eeys That Loke
by: Sippican Cottage

Banquo’s ghosts all shuffle in 
Take their chairs and we begin 
They whisper things incessantly 
Beyond the ken of men like me 
I want to speak but I am mute 
So they continue in cahoots 
Or I can speak but never dare 
To make a squeak while they are there 
They hold a mirror to my face 
While drawing marks to prove their case 
Regret is limned in every one 
Perish crosshatched when they’re done 
The statue’s broke, there’s no repair 
But broken now it cannot wear 
But I am worn down — there’s the rub 
Until I join their shady club 
There’s one among them I can’t stand 
I’ve felt the touch of his right hand 
If he ever looks me in the eye 
I’ll lay down on the ground and die 
It’s worse than that; he does not linger 
Or look my way or lift a finger 
I turned my back on him you see 
Can’t help but turn his back on me 
Now I wander all alone 
The seconds tick by like a loan 
I’ll sit and murmur in my turn 
While children fill my leaky urn

The Fourteenth-Best Song About A Mortuary

June 11, 2012 8 Comments



I used to buy old Skinner auction pamphlets to look for furniture to copy. They had really nicely printed stuff back in the 70s and 80s. Back then, something resembling antique furniture was still being sold at auctions. The definition of what an antique is has morphed over time. It used to mean furniture that wasn’t made in a formal factory setting. Pre-Civil War, basically.

The problem was, it didn’t really exist out in the wild anymore. All of it was in collections or museums or being extinguished inexpertly by a fireman, and auction houses had nothing much to sell. So they changed the definition, informally, mind you, to anything 100 years old or so. The flea markets just soldiered on with “anything that looks vaguely old.” It’s still common for antique stores to leave all their furniture wares outside to get ruined so it looks older than it is. The patina on your antiques is probably as forced as any I make in a bucket in my workshop. And since I actually make furniture by hand, my brand-new stuff is closer to a real antique than most of what’s in an antiques store, which is mostly just humdrum homegoods from some dead, unmourned aunt’s ranch house.

But time does winnow. It’s slapdash, of course. Hard to say if Shakespeare was all that. Maybe he was the third best playwright in the greater Avon area, but the rest of the guys forgot to go to the Stratford Kinko’s and left the originals near an outhouse the day after the all-you-can-eat blood pudding special at the Pig&Pox Inn. But the sloped sides on the funnel of time do make some things more interesting, don’t they?

“St. Dennistoun Mortuary” is a coin-operated automaton, attributed to John Dennison, c. 1900. The mahogany cabinet and glazed viewing area displays a Greek Revival mortuary building with double doors and grieving mourners out front. When a coin is inserted, doors open and the room is lighted revealing four morticians and four poor souls on embalming tables. The morticians move as if busily at work on their grisly task and mourners standing outside bob their heads as if sobbing in grief. This automaton will be offered as Lot 207 at auction on June 2, 2012 at Skinner Auctioneers & Appraisers in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Estimate $4,000-6,000



And for all I know, that’s the fourteenth-best song about a mortuary. But I doubt it.

A Hint Of Debris

June 10, 2012 6 Comments



It’s cool in the early morning. The window screens breathe in and out with the breeze. The sun finds all sorts of windows it’s not on speaking terms with three seasons a year. Its fingers point out a spot a painter missed in 1901.

The birds are arguing or in love — what’s the difference — and the butterflies start their congeries of flightpaths around the lupines and phlox. I’ve already opened the basement below the basement, and put the bicycle out on the patch of pavement behind the house that is my boy’s ration. He’ll spend the morning looping around it a thousand times, as precisely as a driver with a sponsor.

There’s a hint of debris from a neighbor’s visit on the table before the couch in my office. Last night his European charges sat barefoot on the floor before the screen and pressed their ration of buttons with my sons, while we sat two doors away in my midden and talked of this and that and not much. He is smart but not an Intellectual and that’s the only kind of person you want in your house. He told us the Massachusetts people who bought the house on the corner, who only show up once in a great while, were rude to him while he was out walking his dog. He’s been here since Eisenhower.

He said it like he was talking about strangers. Not to strangers. For a brief, shining moment you wondered if  you finally belonged somewhere.

Month: June 2012

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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