Somewhere Quiet

Grandma Trouble

Ten years ago today, my great-grandma Julia died. I'm not doing a big memoir-y blog post, I just wanted to write down a few things that I loved about her, and what kind of a woman she was.

I was only 12 when she died, and we lived three hours away from each other, so I didn't see her all that frequently. But every Christmas Eve I spent for 12 years was at her house, with her dog Muffin (and later Sandy) and her mechanical recliner that my mom said she used due to her wonky hip, but probably did because she enjoyed watching her grandchildren and great-grandchildren play on it.  Grandma Julia loved Christmas. Nothing made her happier than having her whole family around her, singing carols, greeting Santa. She had sweaters and these wonderful tacky costume jewelry pins that she adored. This last Christmas Eve my aunt Nancy gave us all one of her pins, and it's one of the most precious things I own. 

Grandma T couldn't cook for anything but made some mean buttered toast. She was a devout Catholic who sprinkled holy water on her six children as they slept but more than anything she was a happy woman who loved Jesus and her family.

She was known to everyone as Grandma Trouble because of her bad habit of sneaking candy on the sly to all her various grandchildren. She got her driver's license in her 60s and never knew how to swim. (Thankfully she was a large lady and would simply float along.) In her last months she was in the hospital she was such a favorite with her nurses that many of them attended her funeral when she died. Before she died she was diagnosed with cancer and given some months to live, but her death was peaceful just a few weeks later, surrounded by her children. Her funeral was sad but joyful, and her memory is cherished by everyone who was lucky enough to know her.

Josh Ritter, Valentine's Day, 2011

Scott Hutchinson of Frightened Rabbit was the opening act, playing solo on an acoustic guitar. He provided the "bitter motherfucker" part of the show, he told us. In reality he was funny, engaging, and sexily Scottish, stopping songs when we laughed at a lyric to poke fun at the young, pretentious songwriter he was once. And while his songs are generally more of the "trampled, squished up heart" variety he also dedicated the cover song he performed to his long-term girlfriend and serenaded the audience with "Old Old Fashioned", one of my favorite songs which is both romantic and a foot-stomper.

Not only are both Frightened Rabbit and Josh Ritter probably the only artists that I buy entire CDs of instead of individual songs, they have a great juxtaposition in the content of their music. Mr. Hutchinson's songs tend towards the emotive and autobiographical, so a lot of his work is about heartbreak and sadness, and they're very good songs. Josh Ritter tends towards weaving a story about American folk legends, or symmetry in nature, basically anything curious and interesting that he sees in the world. And they're very good songs. And I loved hearing them both, at once, by their artists.

So after Scott was done warming us up and teaching us Scottish slang for having sex ("having a wee winch"), it was time for the man himself. He started off on stage solo, and for the life of me I cannot remember which song he opened with. I know it was excellent and everyone was immediately so excited and captivated to hear him sing. After that the Royal City Band joined him on stage and we were off.

The songs were a good mix of old and new material, some of which I was less familiar with, like "Harrisburg" and "Lillian, Egypt". Some songs gained a new quality when performed live, especially "Rumors". Hearing Josh swagger about how his "orchestra is gigantic" is that much more fun when you're getting blasted by saxes, trumpets, and drums. "Right Moves" and "Real Long Distance Call" were similarly rowdy and exciting. Probably my favorite song of the night was "The Curse" which on its own is a lovely song about a mummy and his archaeologist love. But live, it was practically a transcendental experience. Mr. Ritter had complete sway over the crowd, weaving this delicate, lovely story in front of us. "Southern Pacifica" was another song that seeped through the audience. ( I should also mention the Royal City Band, who were incredible and got many accolades from both the audience and the singers.)

Josh took the stage solo for a few more songs, including "Girl In The War" and "You Don't Make It Easy Babe", both of which were soft, like singing around a campfire. For a few verses of "Girl" he was away from the microphone, singing with us. The same thing had happened earlier in the show with "Empty Hearts", where the balcony got a verse of the chorus and then all of us got one, and he just listened. I really liked that. It made me feel, as an audience member, that I was involved with the show and that he was really sharing his music. That might be sappy, but it was a good feeling.

For those who were wondering (Jen) he did indeed play "Lantern" and we all got glowstick bracelets at the door for that very song. That was obviously a very special song and one of the last he played before the encore. Another highlight of the night was "Kathleen". Being Valentine's Day and all, there was a nice buildup of "everybody wipe your palms and prepare to get awkward" before he bust out the disco ball and romantic bari sax to lead us in D.C.'s largest slowdance, making the whole thing a much more enjoyable version of a middle school dance. And "Kathleen" was played exactly how it should be, big and swelling and nostalgic.

Mr. Ritter is just so good at what he does. His songs are incredible, of course, but he's also a really special performer. The most striking thing is how excited he is to be playing music. He smiled virtually nonstop, jumping and dancing around the stage, joking with the audience and band, and he was effusive in his gratitude for the organizers, band, and audience. Maybe the best illustration of the evening was the reaction of my friend Megan, who hadn't heard of either musician. She looked up their songs as soon as we got home and game her thoughts as, "I think I'm in love with Josh Ritter."

The encore included a duet by Scott and Josh (yaaaay!) and ended with "To The Dogs Or Whoever" which I sadly had to leave halfway through. The Metro waits for no man, no matter how talented a songwriter.

This whole experience and trip was kind of a big thing for me. Not only was it my first concert, it was the first time I really took initiative and planned an entire trip. That's not something I'm usually comfortable with, and the fact that it went so well added anther layer of sweetness to the whole thing. Best Valentine's Day ever.

(Disclaimer: not my pictures)

 

This Year I...

• graduated college
• visited Alaska
• moved back home
• got a job
• got my driver's license
• read 34 books
• watched about a billion hours of Doctor Who
• named a puppy

All in all....not bad!

 

Puppy!

 
 

Like Me

As I've gotten older, I've started to recognize in myself a desire to meet another person who is like me. Or maybe not like me, but who has been in a situation like mine. My sister has problems, some or most of which look very familiar: drug abuse, body image issues, mental health problems. But her particular combination of...stuff is very different from anyone else I've ever met. Her psychologist informed us she had never met anyone like Lauren, which is really the thing every parent dreams of hearing about their child from a trained mental health professional. And her uniqueness makes us, her family, unique in a way. And with uniqueness comes some measure of aloneness. And my pickiness doesn't hurt that, either. Who else in my sphere of contact could meet my crazy criteria? Older biological-child sister of an adopted toddler with nebulous but disturbing psychological issues that manifest themselves in drug use, self harm, and the occasional weird psychosomatic symptoms like seizures and hallucinations?

Sometimes reading about or meeting family members of mentall ill people or drug/alchohol addicts can be helpful. But they tend to be all-biological families, and as such some of their very key fears are not mine, like the worry of genetic inheritance or the legacy of a chaotic family history. My sister and I share no genes, and my family is on the whole scarily normal. Sometimes I think my sister was given to us because otherwise we would have been too perfect. As it is I feel overwhelmingly blessed.

And some of my fears are not theirs. Did she feel pressure to live up to her adopted siblings? Do I love her enough? Some of my anger, too, isn't the kind a "typical" family feels. I know I should be grateful to their birth mother for  making the right decision, a terrible and selfless decision, but most of me is just angry that I and my parents have had to pick up the pieces of her abominable parenting. And that's both pathetic and childish, but there we are.

Anyway, all of this came from watching Intervention, a show that I love like crazy. Sometimes watching Intervention is like therapy, in the best possible way. (And cheaper!) There was this guy on, an older sibling of a drug addict, who talked very briefly about his sadness and anger. "I tried so hard to be this role model for my brother, and it didn't make one bit of difference." And even though I knew I felt this way and had articulated it to some extend in my mind, hearing it out loud from another person was kind of a revelation. Someone else was like me.

My November Guest

 This is me reading Robert Frost's poem My November Guest, with pictures I took back when it was, well, November! :) The sound quality isn't great, but it was the best my otherwise great camera could do.

The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins

To Christ our Lord

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-   dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding   Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,         5   As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding   Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!   Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here   Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion         10 Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!     No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,   Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

I went back to Lake View

 

 

 

Queen City Graves

Another activity we did in Buffalo was to go looking for some family graves. We found none of them in the very weirdly-mapped cemeteries, but there were at least some interesting headstones to compensate.    
 

Dumpling Day

I went to Buffalo this weekend to visit my grandparents and participate in Dumpling Day, which is just like it sounds. It's a day of contradictions, really. When my grandfather was little, there were too many kids and not enough money, so these cheap-and-easy dumplings were necessary. Now all the kids are grandparents themselves, and there's no real reason to make the dumplings anymore, except for the fact that it is A Tradition. In fact, no one even likes the dumplings! Every single person there had an opinion that ranged from "if you put enough gravy on it it's not so bad" to "I hate those damn dumplings". There's no recipe for the dumplings; you just throw together grated potatoes, flour, and chunks of white bread until you get some semblance of a dough, but there were prolonged disagreements about which side of the cheese grater was the "right" side and how big the chunks of bread should be.

Anyway, it was a delightful day, very our-family, and the dumplings actually were pretty good! With gravy, of course.