Open the Door - Surprise!

   (Photos to follow)

 I never know what I will find upon return from a day of work.  Willow and Nash had my Mother's company for the past seven days, so all were content. 

                The presidents of 100 top colleges are starting a campaign to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18, the Associated Press reported Aug 19.  They say it will reduce binge drinking, which is a major issue on college campuses.  Binge drinking is more exciting to students when it is illegal, they say.

. . . and put up a parking lot.

Curiously, I thought of these Joni Mitchell lyrics not when driving by the latest big box store in what used to be a cornfield, but during a concert of Irish fiddle music. The performer was Denis Liddy, a renown fiddler and teacher from County Clare who, with pianist and accordion player Elvie Miller, recently did a concert in the Nelson Town Hall. It’s customary for Irish fiddlers to either forget or not know the names of the tunes they are playing (and understand\able, since there are so many), but they usually go to great lengths to say who they learned the tunes from, where (what town and county) they were from, and possibly the circumstances (i.e. pub locale) of the transfer of knowledge. Denis did a nice job with this, and in the course of the evenings narrations he also told us that during the 1950s, the traditional Irish music nearly died out there. It was a difficult time, economically (as has often been the case in Irish history), and so many musicians had emigrated to America, that there were simply neither the resources or the energy to keep it going. Meanwhile, over here, some Irish fiddlers had been recorded, and those records were selling! After a while some of these recordings drifted back over the ocean, and the Irish pride was awakened: “Well, if it’s good enough to record, and these fiddlers can make a go of it, then there must be something to it.”

A similar thing could have happened here with New England fiddle music, most commonly used for contra dancing. Both the music and the dance have waxed and waned over the last couple centuries, and while it may not have been in total danger of dying out, the popularity that eventually developed outside New England caused a focus back to the source, and musicians who were still here felt both a sense of pride, and perhaps responsibility to keep things going.

In spite of the fact that New England fiddle music is alive and well, it still has a relatively small audience. It includes Irish music (though it tends to be rendered somewhat differently to accommodate the dancing), as well as French Canadian, Scottish, and Cape Breton music, and there is a lot of history and musicology for each genre, as well as the mixed genres that are emerging, with jazz, rock, and African influences.

But my point here is neither scholarly, nor confined to music.
“Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”, can take on a somewhat different meaning. Sometimes we loose the things that are important to us, but when they become important to other people who are seeing them from a different perspective, our interest can be renewed. If we do things just because they are a tradition, it can eventually be a dry experience. But if we rediscover why something became a tradition in the first place, then it becomes, simply, fun and satisfying.

So I’m not the world’s most consistent blogger, but it’s not like I had the time while I was student teaching.  I had wanted to write a kind of commentary on my student teaching, but I couldn’t find the time between student teaching and working a couple of jobs.  By the way, if anyone ever tells you teachers only work during the school hours, they haven’t the slightest clue what they’re talking about.  Needless to say, my internship was hard work and I’m glad it’s over.

My first experience with the Atlas Pyrovision Productions pyromusical displays began unknowingly in the mid-nineties.

Twice a week every summer I would make a two minute pilgrimage up a flight of stairs to the rooftop of the apartment building I lived in. It was there I would wrap my legs around a railing and sit with a few neighbors, sip a few beers and share a radio to listen to and watch whatever country was lighting up the city skyline with their presentation during Montreal’s International Fireworks Competition.

I never knew until I moved to New Hampshire that every now and then one of the competitors representing the United States was from the Granite State.

DEFINITION: Work ethic is a set of values based on the moral virtues of hard work and diligence. It is also a belief in moral benefit of work and its ability to enhance character.

I am by no means an athlete, never have been, never will be.  I'll hike up a "moderate" trail, splash around with the kids in the local lake or river, take the dog for a walk around the block, but that is the extent of my exercising.  Aside from football, I don't watch much either.  I watch a tennis match or hockey game if there's nothing else on, but I'm more likely to just pop a movie in the DVD or tromp around my gardens with trowel or camera in hand.  The Olympic games are a bit different though.  They have the ability to make me a fan of just about any sport conceivable.  But for a long time I had stopped paying attention.