Twenty-four years ago, my sister gave me this:
Some detail:
I was stunned when I first received it, and I’ve been grateful for it ever since. What a joy it is to have on my livingroom wall.
Today’s Advent hymn was written by Eleanor Farjeon (perhaps best known for “Morning Has Broken”) and first included in the Oxford Book of Carols in 1928 set to the French tune “Besançon”.
“People Look East” has
all the Advent elements: we’re urged to prepare our homes; the seemingly barren
winter earth is about to bear fruit; stars keep watch; angels proclaim the Lord’s
arrival. Here’s the Ely Cathedral choir singing it.
So at least there’s
that.
But still—the season is
here, whether we feel like celebrating it or not, and whether we can gather
with friends and family or not. So let’s settle in for it, preparing the way of
the Lord—some anticipatory joy, as well as all the cleaning out and reflecting.
I’m starting it off
with “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing”, which was written in 1758 by a
22-year-old English Baptist pastor named Robert Robertson. The Brits use a different
melody, but here in the US, it’s set to the folk piece “Nettleton”.
Because this has indeed
been such a weird year, instead of some lovely choral versions, I’m giving you
this cover by Sufjan Stevens. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure I really like
his delivery, with that breathy voice, but the photos are gorgeous and maybe as a function of Advent prep in this particular year,
this is a time when we really ought to sit down and concentrate on hearing the
words. Which are:
Come,
thou Fount of every blessing,
tune my heart to sing thy grace;
streams of mercy, never ceasing,
call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount I'm fixed upon it
mount of God's redeeming love.
Here
I find my greatest treasure;
hither by thy help I've come;
and I hope, by thy good pleasure,
safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
wandering from the fold of God;
he, to rescue me from danger,
bought me with his precious blood.
Oh,
to grace how great a debtor
daily I'm constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to thee:
prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
here's my heart, O take and seal it;
seal it for thy courts above.
Back when I lived in the UK, my sister sent me a mix tape of country music. It introduced me to the likes of Martina McBride, Patty Loveless, Kathy Mattea and Patty Griffin. The outlier was Hal Ketchum, who died this past week aged 67 from dementia-related causes.
This is the song I got
more than 20 years ago, and it still breaks my heart.
This is the first Thanksgiving in several years that I won’t be sharing with friends. I was invited over, but since I’ve had workmen in my house over the past couple of weeks, I declined because I just don’t want the thought of being a potential infection vector on my plate alongside the turkey and mashed potatoes.
But let me say that I’m deeply grateful for the invitation. My feeling is that I can put on a Thanksgiving meal at any time of the year, and maybe I should do that. Just declare 29 April Thanksgiving and invite a bunch of people over to overdo on both eating and conversation. Or 16 June. Or whenever.
In the meantime, I’m grateful that I am in good health, have secure shelter and plenty of sustenance. My dishwasher is working, as is my new furnace. I can afford to toss out birdseed several times a day, even if those little landshark squirrels come along and vacuum it up. I’ve got books from the library on kitchen design to pore over, and a bottle of Roederer chilling.
And Cadet Bonespurs will
be out of the Oval Office in less than two months.
I was on my walk a while ago, and took a picture of this fountain in the grounds of the corporate HQ behind me:
Then I took a different shot:
But I didn’t realize what was in the frame until I walked a bit further:
This is as close as I could get to him:
It reminded me of the time I was on Chincoteague Island, and saw a fawn lying very still among some reeds across a stream. A troop of Boy Scouts rollicked loudly past me, too busy with loudness and rollicking to notice the fawn.
I wonder how many herons and fawns we miss when we do this?
So, on Friday the entire company was told we needed to create new passwords, but immediately, and yesterday was a complete…uh, you don’t want to know.
Let me just say that the Okta account management application apparently let me create a new passphrase that is too long for my Windows Active Directory login, but didn’t tell me. So, as of time of this writing, I’m logged into my laptop with yesterday morning’s password, but into the VPN with yesterday afternoon’s password, and I’m afraid to turn the machine off for the night, because I don’t know how I’ll get back in.
Also, I put my phone number in Help Desk’s queue for a call back around noon EST, which was more than six hours ago.
Good thing this is a short work week.
UPDATE:
I called IT before 0700 this morning, got straight through to an engineer and
within five minutes he fixed it. I am savèd.
My dishwasher stopped draining last week—well, it drained, but not completely. I did everything YouTube told me to do: cleaned the glass trap and the filter, scunged out with baking soda and white vinegar, unhooked and cleaned the drain from the garbage disposer. Nada.
The next YouTube step involved pulling the machine away from the wall and messing around underneath it, so I reckoned it was time to call in the pros.
Only it turns out that, in this the year of COVID, everyone’s appliances are breaking down, and appliance repairmen are booked up weeks in advance. Thursday morning, I got an appointment for 1 December from one company, but I called the last name on my list and struck lucky: they’d had a consolation, and the guy could be at my place between 1100 and 1400.
Well, let me say, that in two days of not having a dishwasher, I had quite the stack of dirty dishes piling up on my stovetop, so I was just elated.
He did come out, vindicated that everything I’d done was the right thing, but it just wasn’t the problem, so he pulled out the machine from the wall and started messing around underneath. Pump was working, but clearly not all the water was getting through the other end. So he pulled off the drain hose as the culprit. He tried without luck to clear the hose, but ended up replacing it instead.
Let me just say that I found the whole experience worth the $180 it cost me. I got the most interesting history about how he came to repair appliances (being able to fix lawnmowers in high school got him a job doing same at Sears in Bailey’s Crossroads; that morphed into fixing appliances—which you can do year round, unlike lawnmowers—and here we are, nearly 30 years later), and also a couple of recommendations for small restaurants around town.
And—my dishwasher is back in service, which is a massive relief. I understand this is decidedly a first world problem, but I’m grateful all the same. (Yes, I've cancelled the appointment for 1 December; I am not a jerk.)
Also—Cadet Bonespurs is
failing at every attempt to subvert the election. That’s a big, big load of
gratitude.
One of my favorite pop albums is Trio, with Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt. Their harmonizing is just fantastic and it lends depth to each track.
Trio was
one of ten tapes I had with me to augment FM radio when I drove across country
twice back in the 80s. Let me just say that ten cassettes is not enough to get
you through either Texas or Montana.
That to the contrary notwithstanding, here’s one of my favourite songs from this album. I believe it’s applicable to our current situation, and I offer it in honor of the three powerhouse women. And, especially today, Dolly.
News broke this week that millions of people around the world should thank Dolly Parton for funding early research on one of the apparently COVID-19 vaccines to the tune of $1M. The money went to researchers at Vanderbilt University, on whose work Moderna has developed its vaccine, which the company says is about 95% effective at protecting against the virus.
Let me
first say that this is one of the many things I despise about big pharma—the fact
that so much of their “research” is basically just topping off masses of work
done by academic scientists and then marketing the living daylights out of it.
When they tell you that their therapeutic for [diabetes, asthma, Multiple
Sclerosis, whatever] costs the patients $3,000 per month because they’ve spent
all this money on research, that’s largely a crock of moose milk. They pick up exploratory
work that was frequently funded by public and private grants and soak everyone
for those ads that fill up the magazines and air waves, instructing you to “ask
your doctor if [whatever] is right for you.”
That
aside, Dolly Parton is a goddam humanitarian treasure, and I love the dickens
out of her.
