Category Archives: sing

by

Learn young

This child is not afraid of the saxophone because she is growing up with it. The saxophone player is her father. She’s ready to help and be up on stage as well! She’ll have a fabulous jazz foundation and her father didn’t miss a note!

This is Tuesday night at the Bishop Hotel in Port Townsend, Washington. Chris Miller and Peter Leopold Freeman.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: saxophone.

by

Music Magnifies Joy

Ben Sollee is new to me. I heard him at Over the Rhine‘s NoWhereElse Festival. In Ohio.

What a fabulous line up of musicians! Ben Sollee makes joyous music with a cello, his voice and a drummer! They made more noise and more complex rhythms than many much bigger groups! I got one of his albums and three other fabulous groups!

This is lovely:

All things shall perish from under the sky, music alone shall live never to die.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: magnify.

The photograph is of another group at the festival: Carolina Story.

by

AI Oh

Old MacDonald has a ‘puter

A-I-A-I-O

And to this ‘puter he did mutter

A-I-A-I-O

With a mutter here and mutter there, here a mutter there a mutter, mutter butter fuddy dutter

Old MacDonald has a ‘puter

A-I-A-I- O!

Old MacDonald has a cell

A-I-A-I-O

The cell listens in full well

A-I-A-I-O

With an ad here an ad there, longer stronger 12 inch donger

Old MacDonald has a cell

A-I-A-I-O

Old MacDonald had a twitter

A-I-A-I-O

But the Chief Twit’s tweets got too bitter

A-I-A-I-O

Fire here fire there dumped and trumped everywhere

Old MacDonald had a twitter

A-I-A-I-O

Old MacDonald has an algorithm

A-I-A-I-O

His rhythm system slithers mythdom

A-I-A-I-O

Confusion here discrimination there mansplain what a pain cocaine human brain

Old MacDonald has an algorhythm

A-I-A-I-O

_____________

I think we could come up with LOTS more verses. The photograph is of Boa, my cat who died in 2020 at age 17.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: mischief.

by

Songs to raise girls: lullaby

Just you wait: new stories. We visited my Aunt Pat, Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Joan, all in their 80s. I want more stories!

My Aunt Pat and Uncle Jim were married for two weeks and then took a newborn home: me. My mother was in a tuberculosis hospital for active tuberculosis and could not be around me. I would be infected and die. So I went with my father, my aunt and uncle, my paternal grandparents and my great grandfather Malcolm Kenyon Ottaway and Florence Henderson Ottaway, who were visiting from Lincoln, England for two weeks. My father, aunt and uncle were all in college at the University of Tennessee. My aunt says it was rather chaos.

My great grandfather Mal would walk up and down singing this lullaby: “With her head tucked underneath her arm.” It’s about Anne Boleyn as a ghost after being beheaded, haunting the Tower of London. So this was one of my lullabies. Some of the songs to raise me were fairly peculiar choices. This might explain some things about me. My Aunt Pat says that Great Grandfather Mal said “‘ead tucked underneath ‘er arm”.

Here are the lyrics: https://genius.com/Stanley-holloway-with-her-head-tucked-under-her-arm-lyrics.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: just.

The photograph is Aunt Pat and Aunt Joan playing four hands Christmas songs. YouTube sometimes does not approve of my music choices. After finding these four versions of “With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm”, it plays this to try to mellow me out. Just stop that, YouTube.

by

Frosted

Ok, it’s not frost, is it? It’s snow.

I went out each morning to get the frozen feeder and wrap a hot towel around it until TicTok could drink. TicTok would yell at me if I didn’t fix it as soon as it was light.

The Anna’s hummingbirds can overwinter here. It got well below freezing. They can slow their metabolism and do an overnight mini-hibernation. They are hungry as bears when they wake up!

Taken in 2019.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: frost.

by

silence

You are silent.

I try a little more but I am tired. I am tired of drama, trauma drama. I dream and dream and dream. I dream that my ex touches a live bat. The bat changes in my dream, from a tiny brown nose bat to a huge fox bat with fur and stripes. It is unconscious.

“Don’t touch it! You touched it! Now we have to take it to the Health Department!” I am eyeing the bat and thinking of throwing something over it. A container. It’s huge.

My ex laughs. “No we don’t.”

“Yes we do! Rabies! It could have rabies! If we don’t take it in, you’ll need rabies shots!” Poor bat, I think, it will be killed to test for rabies.

My ex keeps laughing. “I’m not going to be tested, I won’t have shots, and the bat is fine!”

“WHAT!” I say, “No, you could die!”

I wake up. What was that dream about? Oh. It’s about you, refusing to test for Covid after being exposed. You said you would hike with me. “Not if you won’t test,” I say, “I can’t afford to get Covid again, I can’t be around you for 15 days if you won’t test.”

And you go silent.

And I try a little more and I let go. You will have to break the silence if you plan to keep your promises. Will you or won’t you? I am supposed to trust you. But people say trust me, and then sometimes they are drunk, and lying, and you can’t trust them. “I will never hurt you,” is a lie. Try this instead: “I will try not to hurt you and I will listen if you feel hurt.” And change, maybe?

Maybe.

________________

Dreams are funny. Fox bats ARE the largest bats in the world, but they do not have stripes: https://allthatsinteresting.com/giant-golden-crowned-flying-fox.

by

march on

This is my dead steampunk pirate costume. That’s what I wore Saturday morning for the Farmer’s Market. Friends were playing music and I danced. I managed to lure one very little person out to dance. She held my fingers and watched my feet as I let her around. She was fascinated, but did not want to look at my face. Sensible small person!

I switched to a skirt and skeletal stockings for the evening. The stockings are both left legs. The socks are both right legs. You can tell by where the fibula is in the lower leg: it should not be on the same side in both legs! I danced to a great Port Angeles Band: funk and reggae. I liked Joan Baez reggae style. Loads of fun and I won the dead steampunk pirate category. Well, there weren’t categories. I gave the prize to the band.

My friend P took this photograph with my phone. Thank you, P!

I need some stamina today. I have my last pulmonary rehabilitation visit, #24, and then a dress rehearsal tonight for the concert on Saturday and Sunday. You should come!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: stamina.

by

Rebel in clinic

Right before my hospital district informed me that they no longer wanted my services, I was rebelling. The fight from my perspective, was over good patient care. They had set a quota. 18 patients a day. One every 20 minutes and one 40 minute visit. 8 am to noon and 1 pm to 5. I argued and argued and argued. I knew finishing the note in the room took me 25 minutes on the hateful electronic medical record and I had averaged 16 patients a day my whole career. I was not fast but I was super thorough and had just gotten an excellent report on a chart review and had been told that I was a great diagnostician. Which was mostly due to my nearly OCD thoroughness. I was not diplomatic with the hospital administration.

One day I was feeling wicked, just wicked. I had a brainstorm and started whistling softly. The other two doctors and PA were all in the same small office.

One took the bait. “What is that? I know that song.”

“Oh, we are singing it in chorus. For some reason it is in my head today.” So I sang this song.

I did not have the words memorized. I swear that the temperature in the room dropped and the male doctors hunched in their chairs.

“Yeah, don’t know why that one keeps playing in my head.” I said. “I hope you can all come to the concert!”

But answer came there none.

I took the photograph at Quimper Family Medicine, the clinic I opened after the hospital clinic kicked me out. The skeleton was named Mordechai in a contest. This is from 2014. Mordechai lived in our waiting room every October, with different outfits.