Martin Luther King’s birthday and a federal holiday. To be blunt, we need to stop killing each other and hating each other. And an awful lot of hate is based on fear: fear of others, fear of losing money or status or standing.
The photograph is from September 2022, from my road trip with my friend Maline Robinson. She is second from the right in the photograph. We visited her in-laws in Beloit, Wisconsin on a road trip, going to visit her old friends and family. Her husband George Harrell had died of lung cancer in 2015. Maline died in February 2023.
I am the short one, in the skirt.
Let peace and love spread over the world, justice and an end to discrimination.
I grew up with lots of music. My father played guitar and lute and Segovia is engraved in my memory. He and my mother sang in large choruses: the Brahms Requiem, the Mozart Requiem and Bach. We had lots of classical records. I was born in the early 60s when my parents were in college, so they had tons of records. The Band, Bob Dylan, the Loving Spoonful, Joanie Mitchell, Oscar Brand and Jean Richie. I didn’t buy my first record until I was in my early teens and I bought ABBA. My father said, “This is POP!” I said, “I am a 14 year old girl. OF COURSE it’s pop and it’s really good.” He was mildly horrified.
We sang folk songs. My parents were editing them by the time I was three, because I was memorizing the words. They put the naughty folk song records away. They avoided sentimental songs. We learned “dead girl songs”, as my sister called them (Banks of the Ohio, Long Black Veil, Clementine, When I was a Bachelor, there are a lot of educational dead girl songs). We learned lots of comic songs. We also learned work and protest songs and absorbed our parents’ hatred of discrimination.
I set up a recording session for my father and sister and I after my mother died. I have a recording of us singing Long Black Veil and other songs. Here is The Band singing it.
Let’s have a band with women too, and for me that is Sweet Honey in the Rock. Acapella, with a sign language translator, and now they have been singing for ?forty years? They have amazing children’s songs and they are willing to sing about grief and protest. They have sustained me through the loss of my mother, sister and father.
And from one of the children’s albums.
The photograph is of my father at his 70th birthday in 2008. Malcolm K. Ottaway, with Andie Makie and Coke Francis. Andie is playing harmonica, my father on guitar. Malene Robinson took these photographs. The next is me and my sister at that party.
And one more of my sister, Christine Robbins Ottaway.
For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: bands. Wait, you said keep this light. Oh, well. Fail on that.
In the Vatican Museum, I note that the paintings are attributed to men. I start really looking for a woman artist. Of course, some of the male artists may have stolen the work or be “passing”. I love this small sculpture, by a woman artist. I think I saw two works clearly by women. Dear Vatican: get a clue.
Around age 13, my son listened continuously to three bands or musicians. We had two years where I swear, he wouldn’t play anything else.
And this is where I feel proud as a mom.
Jimi Hendrix. Bob Marley and the Wailers.
And the third is Sweet Honey in the Rock. African American women a capella. And so he knows about Harry Moore and Joanne Little.
Prayers for all the people discriminated against, terrorized, or in the the path of disaster. And for all the motherless children, we who have had our mothers die. Dave Van Ronk: motherless child.
This is the first song I think of with today’s Ragtag Daily Prompt: onomatopoeia. This song sounds like kids playing and speeds up like kids do and all the laughter, about being outside. Wonderful! I love the Sweet Honey in the Rock kids’ records as well as adult records and my kids did too.
Here is an adult song followed by the kids’ song and circling back to the difficult adult part.
Let’s see, I am thinking of famous people, not just that I’ve seen (from a distance) but that I know or knew:
Frankie Manning, one of Whitey’s Lindyhoppers who danced lindyhop at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. He came to teach at the Savoy Swings Again dance weekends in West Virginia in the 1980s. He came to Port Townsend, too, for the dance camps here. I got to dance with him years ago and took classes and watched demonstrations. Hooray for him!
Bernice Reagon Johnson PhD, both for being an historian at the Smithsonian and for being the leader of Sweet Honey in the Rock for 40 years, and it’s still going! Ok, I don’t know her, but she is from my Washington, DC stomping grounds and I love that group.
Darryl Davis, for being an African American man who made appointments with KKK Grand Dragons to talk to them to try to understand. And some have quit! And he’s a fabulous Baltimore blues man and he and his band played at our wedding in 1989. He ran the Centrum Blues Fest for years too.
Let’s see. I have a sprained left shin. I fell on Monday, walking around a piece of property trying to find out if it had two streams. It doesn’t. It has one, three feet deep and over 18 inches wide. Who cares? Well, if it’s over 18 inches wide, it’s a salmon stream and to build a house you have to be 150 feet away. Which means you can’t because it cuts diagonally right through the property. Darn. I did not fall in the stream. I fell into a nice hole by a tree and rolled my left ankle a little. My ankles are pretty strong from dancing. It seemed fine.
So the next day I hike the beach twice, with my daughter and then B, maybe 6 miles. I am tired of hiking boots and try the toe shoes instead. “You have toe SOCKS?” said my minimalist daughter. “Of course,” I said, “Otherwise they are uncomfortable.”
Ankle is fine.
Next day I end up moving furniture. Ankle is a little sore.
Next day I hike a couple miles of beach in the morning and then a friend from Portland and I do the spit. We get to within a mile of the lighthouse, which means we hike 5-6 miles out on sand. It is gorgeous. I am limping on both feet by the time we get back, but left shin is worse. It’s really dumb to hike 14 miles in shoes that you have only worn once in the last year. I elevate my ankle once in the car.
View from North Beach
The NEXT day B and I are on a jaunt. My ankle now makes it known that it is NOT HAPPY with me. We stop at the store for fud, as my son calls it, and I get an ace wrap and wrap it. Later we pay $1.00 at a Fast Food Joint for a cup of ice water and I ice it. At his park unit he mows and I limp along the river until I am in the sun. Later we hike Rialto Beach. I wore my hiking boots. My ankle is not appeased.
Now we are at yesterday. I have tickets to the Sweet Honey in the Rock on line concert. At noon. Junteenth. Ooops, no, at 3 pm. Ooops, no, on the west coast at 5 pm. Then I can’t make the stupid ticket work. I am really really frustrated. Well. I send them emails, try to get a new password, I have the ticket number. I keep getting a 503 server OVERWHELMED. Dang. I give up after an hour.
But I am invited to a Sinatra Solstice Juneteenth Bash, formal dress up. In my town that means wearing anything you can think of. I put on a gray dress, sleeveless but it has little gray flowers with silver gray pearls in the middle, all over the front. I have above the elbow white gloves. My ankle has a snug wrap and I put on dark gray hose and silver shoes with a 1.5 inch heel. I won’t dance, too hard on the ankle. I have acquired a set of gray pearlish beads which is so long that if I do not wrap it around twice it reaches to my knees. Mysteriously enough, it has a clasp. Why does it have a clasp? So some giant can put it around their neck? I complete the outfit with lipstick and my oxygen tank. The tanks are lighter than the concentrator, though bulkier. They are slightly bigger around than a tall oxygen tank but are light. I change the tank before I go. A full one lasts about 3-4 hours.
It is an outdoor party, there is tons of yummy food and there is wine and mead but no beer. I brought one beer along with my contribution, so I nurse my one beer… and dance. My ankle does not like this, but the music is so fun. Our host sings sets intermittently and then there is a DJ. The above the elbow white gloves are very fun to wear dancing and I have to try not to whack people when I spin with the awkward oxygen tank.
One gentleman thanks me for dancing. He says I am having so much fun that he’s having fun just watching. Cool. I LOVE to dance. One woman says something about wanting to pick one of the gray flowers off my dress, and I say dramatically, “No, I shall not be deflowered!” A line that one cannot use often… People have wonderful costumes and feathers and gloves and hats. It is fun just seeing what people are wearing. People were asked to come only if vaccinated and I am mostly distanced. I mostly dance alone, but have a couple of dances with guys. It’s a bit tricky to spin without whacking them with the tank. Tank girl, heh, heh.
At last I get home. I got to the party at 6 and it is not dark when I get home. Maybe 8 or 8:30? I lie down on the bed with an ice pack, propping my pissed off shin up on a pillow, just for a few minutes. Crash and wake up three or four hours later with the light still on. I turn out the lights, move the ice pack and go back to sleep.
Long white gloves and an oxygen tank. I am so grateful for the oxygen. I feel better than I have in the last seven years….
….and today I might just rest the ankle.
Here is one of my favorite Sweet Honey in the Rock songs:
Sweet Honey in the Rock “breaths”
Happy Father’s Day. My father died in 2013, emphysema from unfiltered Camel cigarettes. Damn cigarettes. I miss him.
I am thinking of the songs that comfort me in grief.
And thinking about the stages of grief. Five, right? Denial, Bargaining, Anger, Grief and Acceptance. My sister said, “They left out Revenge and Acting Out. ” She died of cancer in 2012 at age 49. Six days after her birthday and the day after mine.
Anger songs for grief. But denial is first, right? Not necessarily. These are not stages you move through in a certain order. This is more like a spiral, where you go from one to the next and back to the start, from day to day or even hour to hour.
I’ve already written about My Name is Samuel Hall. That is an angry song, unrepentant, that my sister wanted the last time that I visited her. I knew that she was furious about dying and leaving her husband and daughter. And me and her friends.
My mother sang:
“Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I think I’ll go eat worms. Big fat slimy ones, little tiny wiggly ones, see them wiggle and squirm. Bite their heads off, suck their guts out, throw the skins away. I don’t see how anyone can live on three meals of worms a day… without dessert….”
She also taught us this:
“I don’t want to play in your back yard
I don’t like you any more
You’ll be sorry when you see me
Sliding down my cellar door”
My parents had songs for every mood I can imagine. There were moods they would not speak about but they sang them.
My favorite angry groups are The Devil Makes Three, Hank Williams III, The Offspring, and Sweet Honey in the Rock.
Sweet Honey in the Rock? Yes. They sing about death a lot. This song is not about death: it’s about a “bad” woman, wanted dead or alive. But listen to the song: they are singing about a real event and a woman who fought back against a rape. On the thirty year album of Sweet Honey in the Rock, the group says that their first “hit” was this song, played by news stations. “It was a hint that we were not going to be top 40.” The song is Joanne Little.
So here are three songs by the others:
The Offspring: Why don’t you get a job?
The Devil Makes Three: All Hail
Hank Williams III: My Drinking Problem
And how do families show anger? They fight. They fight with each other. They fight about how someone should die, what should be done about mom, whether dad can live alone any more, about the right way to grieve. They fight about small things or big things and they even sue each other. Before you wade into the fray, step back. Remember, families grieving are always a little bit insane, very stressed and it’s all grief.
Hank Williams III: Country heroes
Blessings on the people I know in hospice right now and on their families and loved ones. Third one today. Sending love.
Discover and re-discover Mexico’s cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - Flüchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflüchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
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