Falalala Lalalala

 

A couple of weekends ago, Joe and I, along with our friend Janice, attended a Christmas concert performed by the Marietta Pops Orchestra, held at Marietta First Baptist Church.  

 

 Joe and I had moved to Marietta, a former small town and current suburb of Atlanta, from real Atlanta over a year ago, but, because of the pandemic, we couldn't get a good feel for all that Marietta has to offer.  Plus, we were a little snobby.  The bad thing about living in Atlanta is, duh, the traffic, but the good thing is access to fine dining and the arts.   

So, when we arrived, in the rain, at Marietta First Baptist Church that evening, our expectations weren’t particularly high.  We figured the church would be just as beautiful inside as it is outside, and it was.  But the Marietta Pops Orchestra? Really? How could they hold a candle to the Atlanta Symphony? 

  

But, Oh Holy Night!, they were amazing.  I don’t know enough musical jargon to adequately describe what we experienced but those folks could play.  There were regular violins and those big violin-looking things that sit on the floor.   And horns!  French ones and trombone ones and those little piccolo ones.   There was even a guy with a triangle. I'm telling you, that Baptist front altar area was full of people who knew what they were doing, and we felt lucky to be there. 

 

However,  this post isn’t really about how great the Marietta Pops Orchestra is.  It’s about how much Joe loves Christmas music and what a bad singer he is.  

Although Joe and I had known each other for over twenty years when we met up again, there were still many things we didn’t know about each other.  We started dating in the Spring, so we had quite a bit of time to reconnect as Spring turned to Summer and Summer turned to Fall, and thoughts of Winter and Christmas began dancing in our heads.

  

But I quickly found out that, for Joe, the Christmas season comes musically sometime in early November when he cranks up his car Spotify app with the likes of Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer and Bob Dylan’s Christmas album.  Let me be clear.  Early November, not after Thanksgiving November.  

That first early November, before I knew what hit me, The Carol of the Bells was playing on Joe’s car radio when he arrived to pick me up.  Not only that.  He was singing along. I think.  

 

I’m not sure what Joe does can be described as singing.  I would call him a one-note wonder, but doing so would be way, way too generous.  That’s because Joe’s one note isn’t a note at all.  It’s some mysterious guttural sound that one might make if one were perhaps digging a deep ditch in inhospitable soil. 

 

Poor Rudolph, poor Santa, poor Frosty, poor sweet Baby Jesus, the man has no pity. He’s an equal opportunity carol abuser. There is one notable exception, however.  Joe’s a master “rum-a-pum-pum"-er when enjoying The Little Drummer Boy.  He even gives it a flourish, a rolling of the “r” in “rum”. 

But, back to that recent Saturday, you can imagine how thrilled Joe was when, right there on our performance program, he observed that a section of the presentation would be a sing-along.

 

All I could hope for, on that bleak early Winter’s Night, was for God to rest my merry gentleman so we could all have a silent night. 

 

Which we did, as the Marietta Pops Orchestra completed its superb performance to a standing ovation, and we drove home, quietly enjoying the Christmas lights around the Square. 

Henry and the Runaway Christmas Tree

Henry was our early marriage dog. As with many newlywed couples, anxious to nurture something but knowing it was too soon for that thing to be a baby, Gary and I adopted Henry. Gary was doing his pharmacy residency at McCook’s Pharmacy in South Macon, an area known as the Rutland Community. Being a good old boy, Gary fit right in at McCook’s, a place where patrons brought in cooked-to-perfection turnip greens and warm-from-the-garden tomatoes to share with the people who worked there. At some point, someone mentioned that a lady had some pure-bred beagle puppies she was going to sell for next to nothing, so we went and picked one out .

I have lots of stories about Henry, about our moves with him to South Carolina and back, about the fence we bought to keep him in, about all the flowers he pulled up in that fenced-in yard, about the many times I had to bail him out of the pound when he dug under that fence. But the story I’m going to tell now is one that’s appropriate for the season and one that exemplifies what typically seems to happen to my best laid and made holiday plans.  And that story is the one about Henry and the runaway Christmas tree.

Henry was a sweet dog, but stupid. When the human babies started arriving, he accepted those annoying hiccups in his life plan pretty well as little ones grabbed his hairy nose and black dog lips and tried to ride on his speckled back. However, I do believe that all this mayhem did serve to make poor Henry a little nervous. If he’d been a person, he might have developed a nervous tic or perhaps a smoking habit. In addition, the more crowded the house became, the less attention Henry received from the people who had promised to cherish him just a few years earlier. Whereas, before the kids came along, he could depend on a bowl of clean water and fresh gruel each morning and evening, that expectation eroded as changing diapers and spooning baby food took energy and focus away from caring for the dog.

But, in spite of his less than stellar cerebral cortex, Henry adapted.  He took to eating off the floor, taking advantage of the messes the children made, the milk-engorged Cheerios, the dust-covered cracker crumbs, a tasty bit of pre-chewed weenie.  As for water, he got it wherever he could find it, from mud puddles, toilets, the occasionally-mopped kitchen floor.

As the holidays approached one Christmas and preparations were underway, Henry was in dog heaven with actual baking going on and butter and chocolate dropping in giant glorious globs upon the floor.  And then there was the real tree, adorned with candy canes, chewy and delicious despite their cellophane wrappings, and the tree itself sitting in its very own reservoir of water.  Not stopping to reflect on the unfairness of a newly-arrived stalk of future pine straw getting preferential treatment over the family dog, Henry, pragmatic soul that he was, decided to feast upon the waters that sustained that Christmas tree.

This water poaching went on for quite a while with my knowledge until ultimately the irresistible force met the immovable object when Gary happened upon Henry in mid drink on none other than Christmas Eve, its divine self.  A chase quickly ensued as Henry's collar, striving as we all do to make a some kind of connection to another entity, linked itself to one of the strings of Christmas lights that gave the tree its shine.

All I saw as I arrived from the kitchen, covered in sugar and sweat and wondering just what this particular ruckus could have possibly been about, was Henry and the Christmas tree rounding the corner and careening down the hall in an attempt to find refuge under a bed. 

At that point, if he could have, if he'd just had the words and the cultural history and a brain large enough for rote memory skills, Henry might have had the courage and the abandon to render the following from Clement Moore:

But I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he drove out of sight,

"Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!"

And although he didn't, I do have all those things and, since I'm not hiding under a bed with a Christmas tree ruefully attached to my collar, that's exactly what I offer to you.

A Christmas Walk

In thinking about a Christmas memory, several come to mind. I remember my mother making us listen to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol via 78 rpm recordings each Christmas Eve, a story that should have been more interesting than it was. Of course, on Christmas Eve, pretty much nothing was as interesting as looking for Santa's feet landing on our hearth followed by all the presents I'd asked for and was confident I deserved.

I also remember another Christmas Eve when my brother set his bed on fire. Too nerdy to smoke and too smart to play with matches, Sandy decided to try to lull his excited self to sleep by reading under the covers while I slept in the next bed, having had to give up my room to Aunt Susie for the holidays. He took the shade off the lamp before he entered his private reading fort, one that unfortunately turned out to be combustible when the bare bulb met the cotton sheet. However, it seems that there wasn’t too much of a conflagration as I slept through the entire emergency. From then on, our holiday tradition was to open presents on Christmas Eve to keep my dumb-ass brother from burning the house down.

A Christmas Day memory I have is one that happened a bit later. It was 1964, I think, which made me 14, a difficult age for the holidays, too old to play with the toys Santa had brought me and too young to borrow the family car to escape from the heat produced by too much food and too many relatives. I had already received all the compliments I was going to get about how pretty I looked in my new Christmas sweater and I couldn’t watch TV because Uncle Walter was sitting in front of the television set nursing his highball. When the phone rang and my new friend, who’d just recently moved to Savannah, bemoaned her similar circumstances, we decided to get together and take a walk around the beautiful island that was our home. We met up by her house and agreed to walk down by the bluff, a gorgeous spot adorned with moss-hung oaks, genteel old homes, and quaint river docks. I wore my Christmas sweater and she wore her new navy pea coat, something I immediately added to my upcoming birthday wish list. My new friend’s name was Allison and I’d been looking for her for a quite a while, even though I hadn’t known it. I’d skipped a grade in junior high and had been at loose ends ever since, as the kids I’d played with my entire life were now a year behind me in school and we no longer seemed to have much in common.

Beginning with that Christmas walk, it didn’t take long at all for Allison and me to bind our friendship through our outlandish senses of humor, our budding liberal views, and our love for saddle oxfords. We went on to become college room-mates, bridesmaids in each others' weddings, and, years later, that same other was right there when each of our marriages ended. And then, just a few years ago, fate would intervene once again when we both had the opportunity to move to Atlanta around the same time.

And so, forty-six Christmases later, my new friend is now my old friend. Although I never got my pea coat and we no longer yearn for saddle oxfords, which, by the way, just might now work wonders in covering our bunions and veiny feet, we are still pretty darned silly and annoyingly liberal. Just ask anybody.

 

Still friends (and silly) after all these years.

Star Light, Star Bright

First star I see tonight.

I wish I may

I wish I might

Have the wish

I wish tonight.

I don’t remember my first night sky memory. Perhaps it was a warm summer evening when my parents took my brother and me out in the yard to lie on our backs, hands behind our heads, to ponder the moon. I see the moon and the moon sees me. Or maybe it was Christmas Eve, gazing up to look for the Star of Bethlehem on that silent night, holy night - or Rudolph’s nose so bright, won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?

Several things have happened lately to make me think of the night sky and all of its wonders.

First is a current REI ad on television.  Although REI is a company that sells hiking and camping equipment, items I'm not all that interested in, their latest ad is a good one.   It makes me want to step back and contemplate my life, which is a lot to ask of a television commercial, especially one touting something I don't want.  In it,  a woman is perched on a dusk-lit cliff in the great outdoors, eating a piece of bread slathered with peanut butter. By the enthusiastic noises she's making, you can tell she is thoroughly enjoying that peanut-buttered bread, as the narrator says something like, "Jane Smith has just discovered that a four-star restaurant can't begin to compete with one having four million stars."  All I can add to that is "Isn't that the truth and where can I buy a sleeping bag - or at least a big old jar of peanut butter."

And then, there’s the teaching of second grade and our current curriculum unit centered around the moon and the stars. For this unit, we usually have the students keep a moon-phase calendar for a month, an assignment that causes no small amount of angst for parents and children alike as they try to find the time each night to locate the moon not only in the midst of a cloudy evening, but also in the middle of homework, baths and bedtime stories.  So, this year, I asked the parents to simply help their child to take a moment during the busy holiday season to go outside and look up at our beautiful night sky, to think about the moon and the stars and what they mean to us, to marvel at the wonder of it all.

As soon as I asked that, I had to stop and consider just when was the last time I marveled at the gift we get for free most nights if we just stop and look up at the magnificence of our universe.  For those of us who live in Atlanta, when we gaze toward the heavens, we often can't get past our city view, with its skyscrapers lit up like Christmas trees all year round.  It takes real focus and commitment to take note of the glory of our earth and its suburbs, the neighboring galaxies.

And finally, there's this season we're in, when we humans add twinkly lights to trees, homes, bushes and the occasional dog in an effort to emulate the celestial bodies. And don't forget the story we tell all over the world about that special star that led the wise men to that certain babe.

And so, my promise to myself this holiday season is to take my own moment to go out into the brisk night air, to stop and look up in wonder at the sky and think about what a gift it all is, how the stars have guided us throughout time, how the moon moves the oceans, the miracle that is our universe.  I think I may take along a jar of peanut butter.

A Gospel Christmas

A sea of red, a vocalized tsunami, an undulating mass, and the assertion that God is, indeed, in the house. That’s what I get each year when I’m lucky enough to attend the Atlanta Symphony’s Gospel Christmas Concert.

Although the orchestra gets first billing, make no mistake about who owns the night.

The Atlanta Gospel Choir is made up of about a hundred folks who can certainly belt out a tune, but it’s more than that. The term gestalt keeps coming to my mind as I consider the sum of all those very human parts. The great majority of the members are African American, with just a few pasty faces punctuating the throng. I’ve wondered just how talented a Caucasian has to be to infiltrate a group of dynamic singers who’ve undoubtedly been experiencing the mightiness of God’s Own Personal Music in their churches since they arrived that first Sunday as little babies tucked into their mothers' necks.

The city of Atlanta has a vast and powerful Black population, and why wouldn’t it, with its history and its strong connection to Dr. King. It’s long been a place where African Americans have come because they believe they can find a good and safe place for themselves and their families, a place they can call home. And that home has often revolved around church - and church means music.

Now, keep in mind that I'm the pastiest of pasty faces and I'm certainly not in the choir.  In addition, I'm pretty sure some of my black friends will tell me I'm being simplistic here and that not all African Americans are church-going choir members.

I know that, but this is my story so I get to say it the way I see it.  And the way I see it is that the sum of those singing parts in the Atlanta Gospel Choir is certainly greater than what it would appear to be at first glance.  Those people perform not only with superb talent and abundant energy, but also with an assuredness that could come only from some kind of big old belief in something even more important and lasting than standing up, en masse, and singing along with the Atlanta Symphony. 

And being enveloped in that belief and that authority for a couple of hours each December makes me want to believe too.