Views and Interviews - Online Journal

Watching the Grass Grow

Well not really the grass - not growing either.  What I was actually doing was watching the driveway dry as the sun came out, way ahead of schedule.  And watching didn't work.  That is although there was progress almost from moment to moment, like the hands of a clock moving, the change was nevertheless too slow for my eyes to see it.  I was watching out of relief that the freezing rain had stopped, that the ice on wires and tree limbs would get no thicker.  Last night while meditating (and therefore being quiet enough to hear) every so often there would be a sharp crack and then a thud as an overloaded branch broke and fell.  Sirens rang in the distance. The lights flickered and several times went out completely, but only for a moment.  We were lucky.  This morning there is news that the power is out for half of New Hampshire, and many areas of New England and northern NY State have been hard hit. 

Odetta, and Times Past

Yesterday the news was all over the internet that the great singer Odetta had died.  I saw her first at one of the two Newport Folk Festivals that I attended - I think, in 1960.  The experience itself was unforgettable.  It was a cool night, very damp, with great banks of fog blowing in from the ocean, at times obscuring both stage and singers, but never the songs.  One of the last songs Odetta sang was about the Irish Easter rebellion of 1916, The Foggy Dew.  Slow and mornful, her heavy rich voice held us almost breathless as the mists swirled and carried the last lines: "While Britannia’s Huns with their long-range guns, Sailed into the foggy dew."

After that, I attended as many of her concerts as I could, even traveling for hours once with a friend to be able to hear her sing at a Cape Cod nightclub.  And we slept in a field that night since we had no money for anything better. 

[To hear an Irish version of Foggy Dew, click here.]