Quite the Life (and all in Times New Roman 10pt!)
It was so much fun I did it twice…so far…
(if you missed the live show, watch it on Youtube and enjoy!)
(hot dang I was so much fun on Episode 39 they had me back for Episode 42!)
Well…now…most everyone knows I’m not only out on a limb most times, I’m also the first one to shake the tree and leap off the branch without even a dare.
That noted, I hope you’ll all be able to tune in, tune up, or at some point watch and listen to an upcoming author talk show I’m taking part in.
(this is so exciting…)
Make oceans form.
A favorite anecdote of mine is this:
A friend’s daughter is a concert oboist. No one else in the family ever demonstrated any penchant for music. One day he asked her what caused her to pursue music with such determination.
She said that when she was a child – she thought maybe three or four years old – the family went on a trip and met a friend of her father’s in a restaurant. She remembers that she was fidgeting because her mother kept telling her to sit still while her father and his friend talked.
This friend asked the waitress for an extra straw. He took out a pocketknife and made a few cuts in it, then put it to his lips and started playing music with it like it was a flute.
Real music. Tunes you could recognize.
He then gave her the straw and said, “Here you go. Play me some music so I can go to sleep when I get back to my hotel.”
She said she didn’t remember who the friend was but did remember that his ability to take a common soda straw and turn it into a musical instrument was magic to her. True magic and she never forgot it.
It’s also what caused her to pursue music the way she did, because she wanted to give others that kind of magic.
That friend was me. I’d been making musical instruments out of straws since I was a bored kid in a restaurant and had to ask my dad to borrow his pocketknife.
But what her story taught me is that we can never know how much the slightest act of kindness – or cruelty – will affect another’s life.
Continue reading “What if Today is The Day You Make Oceans?”
One of the Last of the Goods Ones Moves On
One of my teachers passed on Sunday. It was right after breakfast. I stood by the backdoor, looking into the woods, and felt him cross over.
“Calum’s gone.”
Back in the 1990s I studied with two Celtic Teachers, Pahdeval and Da Fischer. They’d taken me as far as they could. Several hundred miles separated them and almost to the day they both told me I had to learn Gaelic – Scots Gaelic – to continue my studies because am Beurlad (Modern English) doesn’t support the concepts I studied with them.
Easy decision. Learn Gaelic. Could they teach me?
Yes, and there was another I had to study with, Calum Crùbach. In Alba Nuadh (Nova Scotia).
That’s a fairly big place. Where, specifically?
Falbh agus fios aige (Go and he’ll know).
Susan and I enrolled in a Gaelic summer school up there, an anniversary present to ourselves. We made lots of friends. One fellow, Malcolm, always seemed to be around. His humor was dry and infectious. He’d tell you a story straightfaced then burst out laughing when you caught on to the joke. He was a bawdy gentleman; courteous, gracious, considerate, always helpful, and would openly stare at a woman’s chest as if nothing else mattered.
It was a wonderful time and, as graduation approached, I had tshirts made up for the class, something to remember each other by.
I wasn’t sure of my Gaelic and he had a thick accent although he wasn’t teaching (he was studying pìob mhòr – traditional bagpiping). I asked him to help with my translations.
Happy to. He came up with a few translations that made advanced students laugh and blush. I asked Malcolm to translate “Don’t know the words, don’t know the language, gonna wing it.”
One teacher, a Scottish School M’arm if ever there was one (she was a Presbyterian minister’s wife and it showed. A lot), read one of the translations and walked away, shaking her head. “That’s not what it says, not at all at all at all.”
Tapadh Leibh, Malcolm (Thank you, Malcolm).
That’s when he corrected me. “Calum.”
Calum came from the Outer Isles and a line of Celtic StoryTellers. He had a tale for everything. Teaching stories, thinking stories, growing stories. Lore.
He asked me to help him translate fairy tales into a colinear Gaelic-am Beurlad to keep the language alive. He did it to teach me, more than anything else. To get me use to the rhythms, the meanings. The why of the Celts and Gaels, what cultural anthropologists know as the ceremony versus the ritual.
He taught me the traditions (fios agam) behind Scotch (if you think it’s just for drinking or celebrating, you…have studied differently than I have), the myths and not-myths of the Celts and Gaels. He taught me to sing the waulks, to summon the seas and quiet the earths.
He taught me how to see through the present to the past, into the deep past, and to respect the Old Ones of the Isles for choosing to reveal themselves to me and not to others.
He told me my name.
And he’s moved on.
Stad gu math, a’ Chalium.
Le Meas,
Eois
Turning to face the strange
Sometime in the near future this blog will offer memberships. There will be different membership levels and there will be different rewards for the different levels.
What’s in it for me?
The majority of visitors won’t notice a difference. There will still be free content available to everyone, including non-members. People who choose to become members will have to login to access member-only content. The login is the same as currently required to leave a comment.
Continue reading “Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes”
My humour is officially “wicked”
Oz’s Clancy Tucker asked me a series of questions that I floundered through magnificently. Read it all at 8 September 2018 – JOSEPH CARRABIS – GUEST AUTHOR .
and thanks.