Happy Thanksgiving Day!

The table is set .....

         ... The pies are baked ...

       .. and now the people are here...

     .... and Gertie too ...

Hope YOU had a lovely Thanksgiving! 

A "Getting Rid of Stuff" Case Study

There are lots of categories of "things" I'm disposing of, and one is LP records, or vinyl. My turntable died some time ago, and my amplifier has a short in it, so I haven't played LP records for quite a while. And there will be no room for them in the new small house. I had two big boxes of LPs. Classical, Pipe organ, folk, jazz, etc. There are two stores locally that "buy" used LPs. The  first box I got rid of a while back - it was taken off my hands by the store owner for $12. Ok. That was the less "popular" box. Sort of an odd mix of stuff. By the time I got around to dealing with the second box, I had gotten into the process of cataloguing my library, and decided to do the same with the LPs. I photographed each record and listed it.  Maybe a 100 records in all. I took the list into the other store owner, and asked him to look it over and see if anything interested him. He did, and highlighted about 30 records. I pulled them out and brought them in to him, and he said he would check their condition, and I could come back later, which I did. He had selected maybe ten records, and said he would give me $25 for them. That was twice as much as I got for the first box, so I took it. The rest of the box went to our local thrift store, Experienced Goods, run by Hospice. A good cause.

But I noticed that the guy who bought the records seemed particularly interested in a one spoken record, a collection of the speeches by Malcolm X, titled Message to the Grass Roots:

That made me curious, and I did something I should have done earlier: I went online to see if anybody was offering this record for sale. I did indeed find one copy, one in mint condition - unsealed in fact (which mine is not). It was being offered for $105!!  That made me curious about the other three spoken records I had just gotten rid of. One of ee cummings reading his poetry, one the speeches of Adlai Stevenson, and one of speeches of John Kennedy. The latter two were modest - under $15. But cummings - wow! That very record (again in mint condition) was being offered for $145!!  Who knew?  I sure didn't.
 

I didn't want to take the time to research the value of all those records, and if  had,  I'm not sure I would have started with those. Knowing what I know now, I might have added them to items I have given to Savanna who offered to put some things up on eBay. I did give her one record that I consider to be very rare, and maybe valuable:

 

This record was given to me by Richard Dyer-Bennet's wife. I had actually met Dyer-Bennet, and probably his wife as well, decades ago when I stopped to help pull someone out of a snowbank in Dummerston one stormy night, and it turned out to be him! He was a friend of David Flaherty, brother of Robert Flaherty, famed "father of the documentary film" (Nanook of the North, etc.) who lived near me. A few years ago I wrote Mrs. Dyer-Bennet asking for some information about her husband (who was no longer living), and she sent me this record. It is a 2-record set of Dyer-Bennet singing his English translation of Schubert's Die Schone Mullerin. It was never released commercially. It was created by "Dyer-Bennet records" - a home product. It does not exist in the on-line universe. So I thought maybe a Dyer-Bennet collector might be interested. We'll see. But what a fascinating world! Too bad I'm not that interested in it. I have a feeling that people who would buy an ee cummings record for  $145 may be more interested in an investment than they are in poetry. And paying $105 for a record of Malcolm X might not guarantee that they are supporters of "Black Lives Matter" !

Mood swings

Given all the things we are going through right now, my emotions are all over the place. Chronic uncertainty about where we are going to live once we leave here (if we ever do!), and frustration with particular options, e. g., Putney Commons, can lead to discouragement and even moments of despair. But in the midst of that, I can have a period of delight, e. g., Wednesday, which was Ellen's birthday, she was away for the day, and I had the chance to create a birthday card for her based on our favorite puzzle, Spelling Bee, an idea that had come to me in the night. I had great fun doing that.

    Oops, this is upside down ... O well... You get the idea. Solving the puzzle provided the text of the card. 

We are coming into a really full time around Thanksgiving!

Meanwhile I'm disposing of library books and LP records. I got $25 for a stack of LPs yesterday at a local used LP store. And I've photographed and catalogued 225 books in the process of sorting them and disposing of them: E.g. -

         This is probably a keeper. 

Several boxes of one thing or another have gone out the door this week. Yay!

One Journey concert

Another lovely concert, this one on a smaller scale: a house concert in Katie & Savanna's living room. K&S have been members for years of a women's group called One Journey. It performs the music of Helen Fortier. At present, a four-member group. The music is very accessible, positive, encouraging in the face of social and political evils, and spiritually uplifting. A very nice concert.

          One Journey (S&K at left)

A wonderful concert

The By the People, for the People concert earlier this evening was a great success, I think. It was almost a full house; I 'm guessing 400 people, and they were enthusiastic. Those of us up on the stage felt good about it. The program was very diverse, drawing on a wide variety of musical traditions, which is typical of the Guilford church's music ministry. It was a very lively evening, which is remarkable in a way because several of the songs we sang had death as a theme, e.g., All is Well, and Your Lone Journey. But the audience loved it.

Earlier, between our afternoon rehearsal and the call time for the concert, six of us used the break to go the the home of Judith Kinley, a member of our church who is dying. Her family were all there and  she wanted to have sort of a "preview" of her own memorial service when she could be there to share it with them. We sang hymns she had chosen and one piece from the concert. It was a crazy thing to do, but we're glad we did, even though it meant going. "straight out" from 2:00 until 10p.m. An 8-hour marathon! 

And, of course, I didn't have my iPhone, so, no pix. Maybe tomorrow I can download something. But I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing ended up on YouTube.

Japanese tea ceremony

Last Monday, our Osher series on Japanese aesthetics had for its climax an "immersion" (so to speak)  in the tea ceremony. I knew little about it, and it is fascinating, with a very long history. We learned a lot about tea also. Did you know that all varieties of tea descend from camelia siensis? That there are basically three methods of producing tea leaves: withering, firing and bruising? That we don't really know where tea originated? China? India? Nepal? The Chinese believe the "Yellow Emperor" (4500 years ago) was the first tea drinker. Another legend has it that the Bodidharma (a 5th century Buddhist monk ) tried to stay awake during meditation and when he failed, he tore off his eyelids in desperation and threw them to the ground, whereupon the first tea plants emerged, thus providing the stimulant that would help monks stay awake during meditation.

The earliest Japanese tea "ceremonies" (8th C.) were weeks-long parties at which tea was drunk in excess. But some key figures introduced austerity, e.g., Murata Juko, Takeno Joo and especially Sen no Rikyu, who successively developed the chanoyu, the Japanese "way of tea," especially what is called the wabi-cha tradition. Tea moves into little tea huts, fewer, simpler implements ( bamboo), fewer people ("four mats" ). It becomes a highly prescripted, codified ceremony.

Seth Harter brought hot water, tea and cereamic cups for all. He appealed to the minimalist saying of Rikyu:  "Light the fire, boil the water, drink the tea." But there is also the motto of Rikyu: Wa, Kei, Sei, Jaku:  "Harmony, respect, purity, and tranquility," which expresses more of the depth of meaning of the chanoyu tradition. 

            All things are ready !

             Serving the tea

We were interested to learn that at Mt. Holyoke College, there is a tea hut and garden. We could go there and have the full experience.  

A quick visit to Lowell Lake

Sunday, we went to Londonderry, VT, to a meeting of the Windham -Union Association of UCC churches. We went with two members of our church , Patty Meyer, who is both our organist and church secretary, and Brian Remer, who is a cool guy who grew up near where I lived in Iowa. The meeting was a combination of worship, business (e.g ., electing officers), and a program on how churches can take advantage of social media ( most of that talk went over the head of this quasi-Ludite. I was glad the " young folks" were there - i. e., in their 50s).

On our way home, we drove past the entrance to Lowell Lake State Park, one of the best kept secrets in Vermont. I asked if they had heard of it. They hadn't. Would they like to take a few minutes to see it? "Sure!" So we did. I think they were enthralled. It is a mostly unspoiled lake, virtually no development. The park is also undeveloped. It encompasses an old camp with a score of cabins and a lodge where I have stayed many times. It is now suffering from decades of neglect. It is sad to see, but the lake is beautiful. 

       Brian contemplating the lake 

      Similarly, Patty and Ellen

               The old log lodge