Dave's Whiteboard

Hyperlink, schmyperlink.  I’m reposting my “decoder ring” for Robert Burns’ most famous song.

Why decode?  People who sing Auld Lang Syne, especially those who do so only once a year, don’t always know what the song’s about. The lyrics are in Scots–a language or dialect* of Lowland Scotland (as distinct from the Gaelic [Gaidhlig] of the Highlands).

* “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
— Max Weinrich

Also, overexposure tends to deaden perception.  Especially in the U.S., we associate the song with noisemakers and incoherent New Year’s Eve singing.

I like revisiting the song.  Auld lang syne (“old long since”) means something like “the days that are past,” and especially “the times that we remember.”  In a way, Burns is celebrating the treasure of a shared experience.

(For extra credit:  “Syne” is pronounced like “sign.”  No Z sound.  There’s a demo below the lyrics.)

Here are two versions, both sung by Eddi Reader at the opening of the Scottish Parliament’s new building. First she solos with a traditional but less-well-known melody, then has the assembly join in.

Bliadhna mhath ùr (Happy new year).

You wouldn’t know it by my recent output, but I’ve learned a lot this year, much of it helped by people I’ve never met in person.  I’d name you here if I were even mostly sure I wouldn’t leave someone out.

Instead, I’m celebrating those connections and the holiday by posting this 1920 poem by Robert Frost, inexplicably little known.

Christmas Trees
(A Christmas Circular Letter)

The city had withdrawn into itself
And left at last the country to the country;
When between whirls of snow not come to lie
And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove
A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,
Yet did in country fashion in that there
He sat and waited till he drew us out
A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.
He proved to be the city come again
To look for something it had left behind
And could not do without and keep its Christmas.
He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;
My woods—the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.
I doubt if I was tempted for a moment
To sell them off their feet to go in cars
And leave the slope behind the house all bare,
Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon.
I’d hate to have them know it if I was.
Yet more I’d hate to hold my trees except
As others hold theirs or refuse for them,
Beyond the time of profitable growth,
The trial by market everything must come to.
I dallied so much with the thought of selling.
Then whether from mistaken courtesy
And fear of seeming short of speech, or whether
From hope of hearing good of what was mine,
I said, “There aren’t enough to be worth while.”
“I could soon tell how many they would cut,
You let me look them over.”

“You could look.
But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.”
Pasture they spring in, some in clumps too close
That lop each other of boughs, but not a few
Quite solitary and having equal boughs
All round and round. The latter he nodded “Yes” to,
Or paused to say beneath some lovelier one,
With a buyer’s moderation, “That would do.”
I thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so.
We climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over,
And came down on the north.
He said, “A thousand.”

“A thousand Christmas trees!—at what apiece?”

He felt some need of softening that to me:
“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”

Then I was certain I had never meant
To let him have them. Never show surprise!
But thirty dollars seemed so small beside
The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents
(For that was all they figured out apiece),
Three cents so small beside the dollar friends
I should be writing to within the hour
Would pay in cities for good trees like those,
Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools
Could hang enough on to pick off enough.
A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
Worth three cents more to give away than sell,
As may be shown by a simple calculation.
Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,
In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.

CC-licensed photo of fir trees in Nova Scotia by Christopher Jackson.

Yesterday marked one year since my dad died.  As the date approached, I thought of a term I first heard a few months ago from my friend Zoe: “a year’s mind.”

Dad, with his youngest great-granddaughter

It means a remembrance, as in the one year anniversary of someone’s death.  And as October 21 approached, I’d been thinking about my dad.  I had considered writing something here on the date, but decided against it.  Or had decided, until this morning, when I read Karyn Romeis’s poignant post in which she marked her own father’s birthday.

So I’ve decided to talk about one of the ways I remember Dad.

My mother asked me to give the eulogy at his funeral, and while I was working on that, I found an image I’d made years before.  He’d written me a letter about ten years ago, when his parents’ house was torn down, and for some reason I’d scanned the letter.  I’m glad I did, because there’s so much of him in it.

Dear Dave,

Hope the shock of getting a letter from this end won’t be too hard on you.

No one who knew Dad would be surprised by the wry humor.

I cut this out some time back and forgot where I put it until today.

“It” was a two-photo feature from my home town newspaper.  The big, cream-colored house that his father built in 1923 had been demolished.

I have a lot of nice memories about life in (the) big house but my fondest memories are of the Red Rows where I was born.

My home town was a coal-mining town on the western shore of Cape Breton Island.  The mine built dozens of little duplex houses, all painted red: the Red Rows.  Dad said one time of his family’s place in the Red Rows (a home for his parents, six or seven children, and his grandmother, that there was so little room that “before we went to sleep they must have given us something so we’d sleep and hung us up on hooks.”

I was to a dance in Windsor Saturday night.  Buddy MacMaster played and the place was jammed.  Music was excellent.  I got home about 2:15 a.m.  I went with Alex and Muggsy.  It was a nice evening as I saw a lot of friends both young and old.  It was a trip to Cape Breton.

Dad and Mom were living in Dearborn, Michigan,  a suburb of Detroit; Windsor, Ontario is just the other side of the Detroit River.  Alex and Muggsy are part of  the vast Cape Breton diaspora that for decades has out-networked Facebook.

As for Buddy MacMaster, he’d have played tunes like these and these, though the clips are from a concert in Boston, not a dance like the one in Windsor.

I read the paragraph about the dance at Dad’s funeral–and I added that if not for the date on the letter, he could have written it any time from 1951, when he moved to Detroit, till 2009.

Weather here very nice, a little frost each morning.
All the rest of the family OK.

I don’t think I ever had a letter or a phone call without his asking about the weather.  I’ve come to see this not just as standard conversation, but his way of connecting more with someone in another place: what’s it like for you?  Here’s how things are for me… and for the people around me.

Hope you can make out the writing.  The old hand is getting pretty shaky.

I suppose it was shaky enough–but every week, Dad would write a letter to his older sister. Like this one, I’m sure they rambled from topic to topic, but they were as much a part of him as sitting in someone’s kitchen with a strong cup of tea.

* * *

And those are some of the things I’m remembering, some parts of this year’s mind.

Last April, about six months after my dad died at the age of 96, I met someone whose own father had passed away at 97.  I said something about how, when a family member’s over 90, you always have an unspoken awareness of their mortality.

She agreed, but added that for her, there was also a feeling that her father had always been there and would always be.  Not a logical feeling, but a true one.  When my grandmother died, two years after my grandfather, I remember my dad saying, “Now I’m an orphan.”  He was 59.

All my siblings, as well as my mother, live in metro Detroit.  All of us went to Nova Scotia last month. The main purpose: to have a memorial mass for those who couldn’t come to Michigan for his funeral, to celebrate Dad’s life, and to bury his ashes in his beloved Cape Breton.

I find I don’t have a lot of patience with people who talk about reaching closure as if it’s a stop on the subway.  I suppose they mean well, but I can’t help hearing an implied timetable, a hint that you should define some point and then get off the emotional train.

No, when I say “closure,” I mean a kind of rethinking.  It’s figuring out how to continue your relationship with the person who’s died – and fitting that with your other relationships.

I’m managing.  I couldn’t say when, but one day, a few months after Dad died, I had been feeling sad about his absence from some event taking place.  I stopped and asked myself what was going on. The feeling cleared itself up:  ”He would have hated to miss this.”

And then he was there: I could picture him sitting the way he did in his last few years. Often quiet because of his growing deafness and fading vision; bubbling and beaming when someone sat close enough to engage with him.

I don’t idealize him.  He wasn’t the best dad in the history of the world; he was simply the best one I had.  The memorial service down home helped me see him through the eyes of old family friends, of cousins and second cousins and their children.  Unlike other family names in that small place — the local paper once had five editors, all named Macdonald — for a long time there was only one family in town named Ferguson.

And the people who gathered at Stella Maris church on a warm Saturday in July are working on the latest chapter in their relationship with the one Hughie Ferguson they’d known all their lives.

About ten years ago, my parents got a computer. Dad was 87 and Mom was 81.  They weren’t really early adopters, except maybe among their age group.

The primary reason was my dad’s eyesight–he couldn’t drive safely at night to visit friends and play cards.  The computer allowed us to install card-game software.  The software created virtual partners for cribbage, pinochle, and euchre, as well as solitaire cards that never got sticky.

A few weeks later, my mother asked if they could get to the internet.  We got her an AOL account and bought two copies of a graphic-rich how-to book.  (That way, when she had a question, I’d use my copy and say, “Look on page 32.  I’ll walk you through the steps…”)

I printed the first email she sent, in May of 2000.  It read, in part:

I want to know what URL means.  I want to know if my address book has the e-mail addresses in it.  And how do I get it?

Those are great, goal-oriented questions.  And I had forgotten this from my dad, about a month later, until I found the copy this morning:

Hi David

Mom made me do it

This is the old fellow trying to compose a little note.

How am I doing?

Love Dad

For quite a while, they had fun with email (mostly receiving, since their typing skills weren’t the greatest). Over time, though, Mom and Dad had difficulties with the mechanics: they’d get attachments they couldn’t open, and their in-basket will fill up because they didn’t quite get the hang of filing.

Then I had an epiphany: I set up what I called the world’s smallest blog (audience: two).  Instead of writing letters or email, I started posting to the blog.  Instead of searching their in-basket, they’d click on the desktop shortcut I created.

With photos embedded in the posts, they didn’t have to open attachments.  The blog would automatically archive by month, and also by broad topic.  And my three children (who between them have more than half a dozen blogs) had author access, so they too could plop down at this digital kitchen table for a visit.

I mention this for a number of reasons.  First, Sunday was the blog’s fourth anniversary (official readership is down to just my mother).  Second, and not entirely by chance, Sunday also marked the blog’s one-thousandth post.

That’s right: for four years, my parents have had virtual guests about five posts a week.

By and large the posts on their blog are astonishingly mundane.  I write about a trip into Washington, or making chicken stew provençal, or (much less often) about a consulting project I’m working on.

Oh, and the weather.  My dad always wanted to know what our weather was like.

My kids tease me, but they know the real purpose: each post is a brief chat with my mother, often with pictures (she got a lot of pictures of last February’s snowpocalypse), letting her know what’s going on here.  They add their own comments, and a fair number of pictures of the great-grandchildren.

Another reason I mention this is that when I came up with the idea, I realized I’d broken through my own preconception of what a blog was.  Blogs are for the world at large?  Not necessarily.  They have your Big Thought of the Day?  Ehh, maybe not.  They’re all about ever-expanding readership?  It’s debatable.

What really happened is that I had a problem to solve–Mom and Dad’s challenges in working with email, and my own spotty record in sitting down to write them some email.  And by ignoring what I thought were conventions of the medium, I found a solution.

The only drawback?  My brother, who lives with my mother, urges me to post at least four times a week.  If I miss two days running, he says, my mother worries that there’s something wrong, either with her computer or with me.

I’m not sure which worries her more.

Screenshot from WordPress is mine; CC-licensed tea photo by adactio / Jeremy Keith.