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| Groundhog Day/Midwinters Day. |
We make valentines every year, carrying on a tradition that came with this house. My aunts Esther and Eleanor used to make valentines. Their father, my great-grandfather Theodorus Howe (1856-1923), was born on Valentines Day and they always made cards in his honor. When my children were small and we lived out west, we used to receive valentines from the Aunts every year. So when we moved here, we took up the tradition. It has become quite a sophisticated project involving fancy papers, stickers, pens, and paper doilies. Everyone joins in over several evenings, sometimes a week’s worth, to make sure there are valentines for everyone on the list.
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| Making Valentines cards and watching Groundhog Day. |
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| My great-grandfather Theodorus Howe and his bride, Anna May Stevens. |
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| Some of the finished Valentines. |
Last week I had to chuckle when I heard people talking about “warm weather” coming later in the week. Warm weather, you understand, is a relative thing in Potter County in February. It arrived on Thursday and stayed through Friday. What that meant for us was that the temperature rose to a balmy 35°. The snow actually started to soften a bit. But our February heat wave was short-lived. By Friday evening the wind was blowing and we were back in the twenties, by Saturday we were in the teens, last night we dropped to three below zero, but now it’s back in the twenties again. It looks like things won’t get much warmer all week. Last year at this time we were excitedly anticipating a trip to Florida. We’d hoped to escape there again this year, but now it looks like it won’t happen until April, if at all.
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| Our February heat wave. |
My musical binge last week was opera. I came to appreciate opera late in my classical music explorations. When I was younger, like many people, I thought I did not like it without ever having listened to it much. My early exposure to it came entirely from TV, most notably Looney Tunes cartoons with Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. I remember a Kellogg’s Rice Krispies commercial where a man laments the fact that they’ve run out of cereal by singing the “Vesti la giubba” aria from Leoncavallo’s opera Pagliacci. (“My tears will not stop, until I hear snap, crackle, pop!”) I also remember the Joker (Cesar Romero) singing that same aria on an episode of Batman. And then there was that episode of Gilligan’s Island where the castaways put on an operatic version of Hamlet with Shakespeare set to arias from Bizet’s Carmen and Offenbach’s Tales from Hoffman. I can still sing Gilligan’s aria “To be or not to be” set to the Habañera from Carmen and the chorus “Neither a borrower or a lender be” set to the Toreador Song from Carmen. Aside from that, I thought opera was just a lot of fat people wearing horned helmets bellowing out music in languages I did not understand. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I discovered that I actually did like opera (admittedly not all of them – some of them still sound a lot like bellowing to me). And, as with many of my classical music discoveries, it came from listening to the radio – KUSC, the classical music station broadcast from the University of Southern California. On Friday nights Jim Svjeda hosted The Opera Box and I became a fan and devoted listener. I find that I prefer Italian opera over French (except for Bizet) or German (except for some Mozart). I don’t care for Wagner (too long, no great melodies, and those horned helmets). Among the Italians, my favorite composer is lyrical, romantic Puccini. I love La Bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, Gianni Schicchi, and Turandot. I love the arias most, when the action stops and they sing a melodic solo, rather than the recitative parts where they engage in singing dialog. There are some amazingly beautiful opera arias. Some are sad, some are jubilant, there are love songs and laments. That’s what I listened to all week.
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| Looney Tunes opera. |
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| The Joker singing Pagliacci. |
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| Gilligan's Island and Hamlet. |
Once a few years ago, when I was substituting for the music teacher at the high school, in a moment of hope, I tried to expand some young minds by introducing the students to opera. They’d just finished a project where they had played and then reported on their favorite songs. I had to sit through some pretty terrible presentations of pretty horrible music. When they were done they asked me to play some of my favorite music. I obliged by playing for them the aria O mio babbino caro (from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi). Before I began it, I explained the plot of the opera and what the singer was saying. When I started the music you would have thought I was dragging my fingernails across a blackboard. They complained and moaned. Some of them put their hands over their ears. They could not, would not listen. They couldn’t hear any beauty in it. It made me sad. I might have been like that once. I’m glad I’m not anymore.
Lately the other members of my family here have been playing music together in the evenings. We have long loved Celtic music and a few weeks ago Miriam decided to teach herself how to play the penny whistle. She’s been making good progress with simple reels and jigs. Then Hannah, who plays the violin, decided to join in. Next Stacey came in with her auto harp. Lacking a suitable instrument, I was content to sit and listen to them. Then last week, they gave me an early birthday present so I could also join the band. They got me a bodhran, an Irish drum. I watched a few YouTube tutorials and began practicing and now I’m a member of the band too. We are not all that good. We need lots of practice. But we enjoy sitting together on these winter evenings and attempting to make a bit of music.
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| Making music. |
On Friday I was in school for one of the high school English teachers. Her classes were mostly literature classes, which was great for me. And even better, the three books her different classes were reading were Treasure Island, Dracula, and The Canterbury Tales. I love Treasure Island, in fact I love all of Robert Louis Stevenson’s books. And Dracula is one of the scariest books I’ve ever read. I read it for the first time when I was a teenager and I made the mistake of staying up very late one night reading. My bedroom was down in the basement of that house. My brother Steve was sound asleep across the room in his bed. The whole house was asleep and quiet. As I was reading, huddled under my blanket with just my small reading lamp for light, I got to a particularly creepy part of the book where Dracula is coming across the city and the dogs are howling. Just then Sandy, our dog, jumped up on the bed. My old bed had a bent frame and the slats that held the mattress up would sometimes give out if I moved around too much. Sandy startled me and I let out a shriek and jumped up and the slats slipped and my bed collapsed. I was terrified for a second and then had to laugh at myself as I reassembled my bed and turned in for the night. Steve never even woke up. And I finished reading the book only during the daylight hours.
I have a special love for The Canterbury Tales. When I was in college, I took a class on Chaucer. For a whole semester we spent each class reading The Canterbury Tales aloud – in the original Old English. The professor was an amazing teacher. He knew the tales intimately and loved them and I learned to love them too. In class last Friday, I tried to show off for the students, who are reading a modern English translation, by reciting part of the Prologue in Old English (the only part I can still remember):
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour . . .
They weren’t very impressed. Oh well.
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| The Prologue page from the Ellesmere Manuscript of The Canterbury Tales. |
This morning as we got ready for church, I noticed that my Aunt Joyce amaryllis is at the peak of its bloom. Seeing it made me so happy on such a cold and snowy morning. On our way to and from church today we saw three bald eagles in various places, two on the way there and one on the way home. Now we are home and lunch preparations are underway – biscuits and gravy and scrambled eggs. Perfect food for a cold and snowy Sabbath afternoon. Miriam and Hannah are in the kitchen making the food and watching Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat on a laptop and singing along. That makes me smile. This next weekend we are all getting together for a big February celebration – Rachel’s birthday (today), my birthday (the 11th), Valentines Day, and the anniversary of our trip to Italy – all in one big party. It will be a fun weekend with lots of family and great Italian food. I’ll tell you all about it next week.
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| My Aunt Joyce amaryllis this morning. |
Dan
