There's a lady who lives just up the road from us in a town called Palm Coast, and she's a very talented painter of dogs. Here are two of her pictures that were in the newspaper the other day. I like these especially because the dogs in them remind me of yours truly.
If you're looking for a "story" song about two guys who are trapped in the belly of a whale, and one of them wants to kill the other one to avenge a wrong the second guy did to the first one's mother long ago, and the first one has been looking for the second one for at least fifteen years plus twenty months, well then, "The Mariner's Revenge Song," written by Colin Meloy and performed by his band, The Decemberists, is your best bet.
Truth be told, I had some trouble following the lyrics at first, because there are a lot of them. (Sometimes when people are talking to me, all I'm apt to hear is blah, blah, blah, Buddy, especially if I'm tired, which I was when I first watched this video on YouTube.) For your convenience, here's a link to the song's words if you need to see them. And here's a useful Wikipedia article about it.
While I ended up liking the story, after doing my research, what I enjoy most about the video are the sounds of the instruments and the singers' rather strange voices, and especially the drummer's driving beat, which reminds me of eating French fries. What I mean by that is once you get started, you don't want it to stop.
Check it out. (For the wide-format version, go here.)
COL Fred P. Taylor, that's who! He's also the most awesome adoptive brother-in-law a pup could ask for. And I want to be the first true "dogface" to congratulate him on his retirement from the U.S. Army's Judge Advocate General Corps. Here's a recent family picture of Fred with Mike, Annabelle, and Bonnie:
In honor of Fred's retirement and to celebrate his 27-year career, Luisa Santiago put together this great slideshow. (For the bigger-format version at YouTube, go here.)
Thank you for your service, Fred. You and your whole family are way cool!
Meet Gracie, a new feral kitty who's come to live at our house.
She's not really "feral," but a "drop-off" that some crap-for-brains human left in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Still, the doc at the Pet Vet Cruiser (AKA "the bus"), where Jeannie and her merry band of cat catchers had her spayed about three months ago, clipped off the tip of her right ear to mark her as a "free-roaming" female, feral or not. (Males get their left ears tipped.) So J says her full name should be Gracie van Gogh. (I'll admit I had to Google that one!)
Gracie's free-roaming days were supposed to be over in March, but they had to return her to her camp near Wal-Mart instead of sending her to a cat shelter. This is because the doc said that Gracie had recently had kittens! So back she went, and sure enough there were two, and they were glad to see her. J and Company continued to feed Gracie--and her kittens--at Wal-Mart until the babies were old enough to make their own trips to the bus. The kittens are now living together at the shelter, and Gracie is here with us.
During the weeks Gracie remained at Wal-Mart, it became obvious that she loves human contact. She can't seem to get enough petting, which is a sure sign she was a discarded pet and not a true feral. So M and J bonded with her and decided that she needed more of a home than a shelter could provide.
The reason for the title of this post (which Mike says is perfect, but which I also had to Google!) is that last Thursday, Gracie's first night with us, she was locked up by herself in the bathroom and just about drove us bonkers with her crying. The next night she had the run of the house with me, Arlo, and Rocky--everyone except crabby old Willis--and there were a few noisy disagreements in the wee small hours. Basically she put the fear into all of us--even Willis, when he finally got the chance to give her some attitude. Jeannie thinks there's something about Gracie's having been a mother that lets her take charge, even though she's the smallest critter in the house. Her little voice seems to get the word out: If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy!
Since that second night, things have settled down pretty well. Everybody's been able to sleep calmly through the nights. And much of the days, too!
Here are a few more pics of Gracie van Gogh, the new sheriff in town. This first one's called "One more step, Willis, and I will knock your block off.":
Oops! How'd that one get there? Mike says it ought to be titled "The Culhanes of Cornfield County." That boy sure likes to keep me Googling!
Today is May 27th, one of those twice-a-year "best-of-times, worst-of-times" days when we celebrate a loved one's birth and also remember the passing of another. Actually we remember the passing of both of these two particular loved ones, not just on this date, but on the other one as well.
Mike's dad, my Grandpa George, would have turned 91 today. But he died last year on March 7th, which would have been Grandma Grace's 88th birthday, except as some of you know, she died two years ago today. So on each of these days we are happy to mark the birth of one of them, but at the same time saddened to be reminded of the deaths of both of them. In death, it seems you just can't separate these two. (Even though in life, according to M, they'd been divorced for many years! Go figure!)
This first post today is Grandpa's "Happy birthday!" shout-out. Grandma's "I still miss you like the dickens!" post will follow.
One of Mike's favorite songs is called "Leader of the Band." It was written a long time ago by Dan Fogelberg. During Grandpa's last year with us, as it became clear that his time was running out, Mike found himself listening to this song more and more, for a couple of reasons. First, it reminded him of his own love of music, which he knows he got from both of his parents. But he was also drawn to the song because it echoes one of Grandpa's finest musical achievements: He was the leader of a band. In fact, during his early years, he'd been the leader of two of them!
When he was a teenager in Tampa, just before World War II, Grandpa was the drum major of the H. B. Plant High School Band. Then for almost three years after his wartime service, he was the first drum major of the U. S. Army Ground Forces (AGF) Band (now called the U. S. Army Field Band). He also played clarinet in the concert versions of both of those bands. (M says that Grandma played clarinet in the high school band as well. In fact, that's how she and Grandpa met!)
Here's a picture of Grandma and Grandpa playing their clarinets along with two of their high school bandmates. Grandma is second from the left, and Grandpa is standing beside her, second from the right:
And here's one of Grandpa in his Plant High School Band uniform, with his drum major baton:
And here he is in June of 1946, playing clarinet in an AGF Band concert on the lawn of the White House, for President Harry S. Truman. Grandpa is in the second row of clarinets, the second seat from the end:
This is one of Mike's favorite pictures, his dad leading the AGF Band in Philadelphia's 1946 Fourth of July Parade:
Mike was proud of his dad's musical accomplishments and said so in his eulogy at Grandpa's burial service last year. Here's an interesting tidbit that he was able to share with Grandpa just a month or so before that. It was true then and it's still true as of this morning: If you do a Google image search (M says he had to stop at this point and explain to Grandpa what Google is, and what a Google image search is, because he wasn't exactly an "online" kind of guy) and you type in the search words "drum major poster" (with or without the quotation marks), the very first picture you'll see is this one:
It's an advertisement for a 1947 concert by the AGF Band. And the drum major in the poster is taken from a photograph of Grandpa. I think that's pretty awesome: Grandpa didn't know Google from granola, and yet he's a #1 hit on it!
We thought it would be fitting today to show a clip of Dan Fogelberg singing "Leader of the Band," to thank Grandpa for his own music, as well as the love of music that he and Grandma gave to Mike. The video we liked best was made from a live concert performance, and M says that the sound is a bit "muddy" in spots. If you have trouble understanding any of the words, here they are for quick reference (click to enlarge):
Happy birthday, Grandpa!
II. I still miss my most loyal reader!
Grandma Grace has been gone for two years, but I still remember her,
thanks to her sweet comments on this blog and to a YouTube slideshow
made from a bunch of her family pictures. I first posted it four months after she
died and have decided to show it again today. I don't think she'd mind,
since she loved to watch reruns of old TV shows.
Some of you knew my Grandma. But for those who didn't, here's the 4-1-1 just as I described her in that earlier post:
Grandma was such a great human--kind and generous, cheerful and helpful,
and talented in so many ways. She could sing and dance, knit and water
ski--though M says she hadn't done the latter in quite a few years. She
played piano and ukulele, and when she was in high school she also
played the clarinet. And she knew how to improvise in more ways than one: Mike once saw her catch a bass on a fishing lure that she made out of the rubber strap from a bathing cap and a chewed-up piece of chewing gum. At various times in her life she flew airplanes all
over the country and sailed a big sailboat called Night Train. M
says she was a great cook, too (especially chicken pot pie!), and that
she could underwrite insurance policies. (I have no idea what that last
thing means, but it sounds pretty hard.) She could even touch-type.
More than anything, Grandma loved her family. She loved her parents, her
sister, her kids and grandkids and great-grandkids, all four of her
husbands, and her many other relatives, including cousins, aunts, uncles, in-laws, and
outlaws.
The
music we chose for her slideshow is a song called "When You and I Were Young, Maggie," by George
Washington Johnson and James Butterfield. It was one of Grandma's
favorites. The pictures date from October of 1924, when she was a baby, to
September of 2010, when she was . . . not. Most are from her own
big collection of albums, but some are from Mike and Jeannie and other kinfolk. I hope you enjoy it. In fact I hope you've enjoyed this whole humongous post. If you did, feel free to share it with your own friends and loved ones.
Please note: I've been having trouble now and then getting the
video to load to its full length, which is 4 minutes and 37 seconds. If
it comes up short for you, try reloading the page or go to the original here at YouTube. In either case, if your computer will support it, you may want to use the "Full screen" mode, which
makes it easier to read the captions that are on some of the pictures.
We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words. Anna Sewell, author of Black Beauty
A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself. Josh Billings, US humorist
