La guarda ribera

“Ríu Ríu Chíu” is a Spanish carol in the villancico style popular from the 15^th to the 18^th centuries. This one was first published in 1556, in Venice, and it makes the rounds at Christmas concerts here in the Bay Area. It’s about the Immaculate Conception and the Nativity.

I’ve got it on a number of CDs (because I have about…a lot of Christmas CDs). It’s lively, with an intricate harmonic pattern, and even if you don’t understand ancient Catalan, it’s lovely to listen to. Here are the lyrics, with translation courtesy of Wikipedia:

El lobo rabioso la quiso morder

Mas Dios Poderosa la supo defender

Quíso la hacer que no pudiese pecar

Ní aun original esta virgin no tuviera

The raging wolf sought to bite her, but God Almighty knew to defend her; He chose to make her so that she could not sin; no original sin was found in that virgin

Éste que es nacido es el Gran Moncara

Cristo Patriarca de carne vestido

Ha nos redimido con se hacer chiquito

Aúnque era infinito finite se hiciera

This one that is born is the Great King, Christ the Patriarch, clothed in flesh. He redeemed us when He made himself small, though He was Infinite He would make himself finite.

Yo vi mil Garzones que andavan cantando

Por aquí volando hacienda mil sones

Diciendo a gascones Gloria sea en el Cielo

Y paz en el suelo pues Jesús nasciera.

I saw a thousand boys (angels) go singing, here making a thousand voices while flying, telling the shepherds of glory in the heavens, and peace to the world since Jesus has been born.

The chorus is the sound of a kingfisher scaring away the wolf from Mary (sparing her from Original Sin):

Ríu, ríu, chíu, la guarda ribera

Dio guardó el lobo de nuestra cordera.

The very first time I ever heard “Ríu Ríu Chíu”, it was performed on TV by a group that would not have appeared anywhere near the top of your list of interpreters of Renaissance classics. Nonetheless, they do a bang-up job.

Winds were blowing, cows were lowing

It’s the first Friday in Advent; in case you’re getting a little wound up I’ve got something to help you step away and remind you to breathe.

I don’t even know how I acquired George Winston’s December CD, but I’m glad I did, because there’s a purity in the simplicity of his interpretations of seasonal music that often can—like us—become overwrought.

Take “Jesus, Jesus, Rest Your Head”. The Appalachian folk carol was first brought to the world’s notice by John Jacob Niles about a hundred years ago, and I’m sure you can find pages and pages of choral renderings on YouTube. But I like this version best.

  

Telling news of great joy

Okay, from music dealing with present-day holiday overload, let’s move back a few centuries for some seasonal sounds. The British Isles, in the days when “streaming” meant processing through a church and singing.

First off,  the “Coventry Carol”, dating from the 16^th Century as part of a mystery play. Mystery plays, children, were a type of amateur theatre that gave the general public an understanding of the mysteries of faith. These days we have all-religion-all-the-time cable TV channels and, of course, the Internet, to accomplish that.

At any rate, “Coventry Carol” is from a Nativity play, and I love the the lullaby elements (plus that surprise in the Picardy third). I always think that quality is best conveyed by a women’s choir, but it’s not that easy to find one on the Webs, so here’s one from Celtic Christmas.

Second up, down to another area of England for the “Sussex Carol”. This one first started appearing around the late 17^th Century. I think the perfect way to render this is with a Church of England men-and-boys choir, so here we have the King’s College, Cambridge, performing it as part of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.

I’m not from the Anglican tradition; I first discovered this service when driving from Virginia up to New Jersey as it was broadcast on Christmas Eve from King’s College. It was magical to listen to the purity of the music, the r-r-r-round vowels of the lectors, even the flutter of the pages being turned between lessons and carols. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to participate in one of these services.

But in the meantime, let’s hop over to Ireland for the “Wexford Carol” (“Carúl Loch Garman” in Irish). This is the oldest of today’s triad, originating in what’s now County Wexford in the 12^th Century.

I must have a dozen versions of this from all my Celtic CDs, but I rather like this one from Libera. It’s slightly overproduced, but there’s an ethereal quality at the beginning that sets a good tone for me.

The long bitter nights

A lot of people find the period between Thanksgiving and New Year’s difficult, myself included. So when I first heard Alison Krauss’s “Get Me Through December” it stopped me in my tracks. Have a listen for yourself and see what you think.

Rejoice

We are officially in Advent, the period before Christmas that does not involve shopping, eating, standing in lines or moaning about how you’re not ready for the holidays. Advent is the time for getting ready, for preparing for the arrival of the baby in Bethlehem.

For me, a good part of that preparation involves light and music, so this year I thought I’d share some of the latter with you. We’ll take it easy—one piece of Christmas-related music per day.

And let’s start with the ultimate Advent carol, “Veni, veni, Emmanuel”. It dates from way back, you know—before monks started cutting CDs.

I used to sing in a choir in San Diego whose director always had the men sing the first verse in unison (like monks chanting) and let the women come in on the chorus. It was glorious.

However, I can’t find any version that does that, so I’ll give you the King’s Singers. It’s pretty good.

Parallel universe

I’ve spoken before about the habit of tech companies turning English into Jaberwocky in job postings. It’s partly because they think that the cool kids with the skills they’re looking for are basically magpies, attracted by anything (and only a thing) that’s shiny and different. And it’s partly because the people who write this stuff (or copy it from competitors) are completely ignorant of the language.

By way of example, here’s a recent posting for a product manager position from Foursquare. They’re the wonderful folks who built apps that allow your friends to flood your social media with notifications every time they turn a corner or enter some place of business. That being the case, you know they want to attract top talent, so here are their requirements for the PM role:

It’s the parallelize that eats my lunch. It’s actually a computing term, to do with a program that runs functions simultaneously. It’s something machines do. Humans, on the other hand, multitask. (As it happens, recent research indicates that when we do multitask, we do none of them very well. But employers don’t care about that; they just want someone who looks like they’re basically intelligent octopi with no tentacle unoccupied.)

What’s interesting to me is the detail that follows the offending word. Eventually they get to the do-everything-at-once part. But under the rubric of “parallelize” the first prompt is “must be a self-motivated team player able to work in a small, fast-paced environment without much oversight.” That’s nothing to do with running parallel activities; what they want is someone who sees what needs to be done and does it without regard to whether it’s in his/her job description and without asking for validation for making the decision. But they don’t seem to know how to make that sound hip.

As for the requirement that the candidate write succinctly, I’m not sure Foursquare would recognize that if it leapt up and bit them on the nose.

Gratitude Monday: A lighter load

If you’ve ever moved house, you know that there’s nothing like facing packing up all your possessions to make you realize how much stuff you have. Usually, it’s an appalling realization, and the longer you’ve been in place, the worse the feeling on account of you’ve had more time to accumulate.

I’ve moved four times since 2008, and I’ve culled a lot of things every time. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t still have a lot of stuff to get rid of, even though I’ve gone through a couple of rounds of decluttering in this past year.

However, since the beginning of October I’ve been applying much stricter criteria for what I really, really want to keep with me, which means that yesterday a couple of guys from a company called Remoov (no, I do not make this stuff up) took away a queen sized bed, Ikea furniture and a whole lot of bin bags of clothes, kitchenware, books and miscellanea from my third-floor-no-elevator flat.

I have to say that I feel lighter for watching that stuff go. I’m going to be camping out for a bit on an air mattress until my final move, but it’s such a relief to find a way to unburden myself—because that’s what it feels like. A burden of possessions has been lifted from me, and I’m very grateful for that.

Merci

I’m in that moving stage where the movee needs to use up comestibles. As it happens, one of the items that needs to go is a bottle of Moët et Chandon Brut Impérial, my favorite Champagne. Thanksgiving seemed the exactly right occasion to start it on its journey.

So I did.

Living under a death sentence

It’s Thanksgiving Day in America, so you know the drill. This is the Super Bowl of gratitude, the occasion on which we’re meant to take a little time—a single day out of 365—to pause and reflect on the things in our lives that essentially bring us joy.

That’s what gratitude is, right? The realization that something or someone brings us joy. It might be a momentary flicker or an all-encompassing wave of delight, but saying, “I give thanks for this” is really the conscious acknowledgement of that happiness. One day out of the year for this is just the teensiest bit paltry, in my opinion, but still—let’s make the most of it.

For the past few years I’ve made a concerted effort to practice gratitude daily. This isn’t always easy; there have been days when I only grudgingly and after much flailing about come up with three things to name out loud as being worthy of thanks. This very month, following the attacks in Paris and for the first time in years, there were two days I couldn’t find the heart to do even that.

I’ve been thinking a lot about all those lives in shards after that Friday night. No warning and no reason. Lives ended, bodies maimed, families and friends bereft and bewildered. One minute a play on the football pitch, a rock song or a bite of dinner; the next explosions, automatic fire, screams, blood, death. No one knew when they headed out that night that this was in store. They weren’t prepared to die, and they didn’t know to prepare their loved ones for their deaths.

I, on the other hand, count myself as fortunate. I had the grace, the blessing of knowing that my days with my BFF were numbered. She died last month, five years after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, a bastard of a death sentence. Pretty much from the beginning, Leilah did a magnificent job of facing the future, and she prepared us for that every step of the way.

And this was a tremendous gift to me. After initially totally screwing the pooch for a couple of months, I did my best to be brave, supportive, encouraging, silly, honest and loving, whatever state of mind I found her in. Knowing her time was precious, we made super use of it by communicating openly and, in the end, fearlessly.

Example: last summer I asked her, “Listen—all those years when I made fruitcakes and gave them to you at Christmas: did you really like them, or were there a lot of very tipsy birds around your house? It’s okay, you can tell me the truth; I’m never going to go to the trouble of making them again.”

No, she really liked them. A slice of fruitcake and a cup of tea were just what she needed on some days.

This year, when she finally stopped the chemotherapy, we doubled down. She’d planned to hook a small rug for me in a Celtic knot pattern, but she realized she wouldn’t get to do it. So she sent me one in an Amish pattern that she’d made a couple of years ago. I told her I’d put it next to my bed so it would be the last thing my feet touch at night and the first thing they touch in the morning.  And so it is.

On my recommendation, she watched Fantastic Mr. Fox—Bill Murray as Mr. Badger was what did it. She loved it, high praise as a career children’s librarian who wasn’t all that wild about animated films.

I started jotting down memories—pie (she basically introduced me to real pie), getting so involved in our conversation while out on a hike that we ended up halfway to Baja before we realized we were lost, smuggling her cat Angela across the Oregon-California border, our respective weird cousins (mine are contenders, but hers sweep all categories), flying to Borrego Springs in their Cessna…for brunch—and scribbled them across several cards. Just reminders of shared experiences, conversations, laughs, close calls. I came nowhere near covering the depths, but I gave what we researchers might call a representative sample, and she was tickled to have card after card arrive, all those cues to fire up her own memories.

She did her own version—for my birthday last summer she sent me a carton with many small gifts, which included a pair of earrings I’d given her about 40 years ago, her mother’s pilot’s log book and two sterling serving pieces that simply beg to be used at a dinner party. It was Christmas in August.

My last conversation with Leilah was right after my job interview in DC in October; I called her the instant I walked into my hotel room and got those interview shoes off. She was so pleased to hear the enthusiasm and confidence in my voice; that came through the slight driftiness of the morphine. It was a good conversation, and it ended (as our calls have done for more than five years) with us saying, “I love you.”

A week and a half later she was dead. No more phone calls, movie recommendations, surprise packages at the door. But the legacy of a deep friendship that enriched my life and made me a better friend to others. And we were able to say how much we mattered to each other because we knew we didn’t have much time. Nothing went unsaid, nothing got put off “until next time.”

And because of that, I know that Leilah knew how much she meant to me, and I sure as hell know that she loved me. We expressed that in every conversation, every debate, every cup of tea or glass of wine. There was no room for doubt, and that is a huge comfort to me as I face my first holidays without her to share them with.

Here’s the thing, people: we’re all under a death sentence. We just don’t know when it’s going to be executed. The world we live in is not as stable or safe as we would wish—and we need to work on that. Part of that work, in my opinion, is never passing up an opportunity to express our affection in words and actions—to those close to us and those we meet on the way.

Treat everyone as though this might be the last time you see or talk with them. Be honest—be kindly honest, especially about how much you appreciate them. When you act like a jerk (come on—we all do), apologize as soon as you can bring yourself to do so. When they do something to piss you off, consider cutting them some slack; or, if you must call them on it, frame it in terms of the anomaly you know it to be. Leave a note, make a call, send an email, give a hug, pat a back, listen to a tale, share a cookie, say a prayer—whatever it is that strengthens the connections that bring joy to your life, do it.

Do not wait until you see a Paris-class catastrophe or get a phone call saying so-and-so was in a car crash to think, “But I didn’t get to say…” You still may not get to the Celtic knot hooked rug or the grand photo album with annotations and pithy remarks. But, in the end—soon or late—that won’t matter if you’ve created that tapestry of friendship one stitch at a time, making every moment count.

Trust me on this: you’ll be grateful you did.

Atmospherics

Yesterday morning we had clouds, which eventually brought a bit of much-needed rain. They also made possible a beautiful sunrise, starting with just the palest tinting of pink on the closest edges—so delicate, I couldn’t capture it on camera, just in my eyes and heart.

Then, as I approached the Apple HQ-in-process, it got fired up some:

And finally, when it died down in the East, the West gave me this:

This kind of sky show only happens when there are clouds, and they’re a rarity here. But it was a perfect time for me to be pulled out of my routine and watch the spectacular around me.