La, la, la, la, lullaby9/9/04
La, la, la, la, lightbulb
La, la, la, linoleum,
La, lalala, I love you.
Until school starts, Fridays are my day to watch grandson #3, Miguel, while mom and dad work. This has been great fun for both of us. I find him an utter joy to be around and look forward to Baby Day all week.
One of our favorite things is music, so in anticipation of Miguel's visits I've been boning up on lyrics so I can sing all sorts of things his mom would never think of exposing him to. She sings sweet, appropriate, kindergartenish ditties that educate him about the location of his various body parts, the mechanisms of city transportation, and farm animal sounds. I see it as my task to introduce him to such essentials as the green eyed dragon with thirteen tails (who'll feed--with greed--on little boys and puppy dogs and biiiiiiggg fat snails), la seule dent dans la mรขchoire a Jean, and other favorites. I've been forbidden to sing the gleeful tune my mother taught me celebrating daddy's return from work: "...for this is the day he gets his pay, we'll jolly him and we'll TAKE IT AWAY!" Hmmph. Censorship may slow me down, but it also inspires me to work that much harder to find music suitable to my grandson's proper upbringing.
We listened to a lot of ethnic folk music when I was growing up. I fancied that it gave me a wormhole connection to the parallel worlds of other people's lives in other times and places. With no idea what any of it meant, I reveled in rich and joyful descriptions of feast tables excessively laden with
I don't know much about my Irish ancestors' lives, but I feel myself pulled to another time and place that makes me feel as if I might have just a glint of insight when I hear the mournful, a capella lyrics:
Mom's work schedule will be changing and once I start classes she'll be taking Miguel to another day care where he'll likely learn the Alphabet Song or some other such frivolity. But for now, Fridays find Miguel and me singing Tortillitas de Maiz and dancing our (um, at this point I guess that would be MY) feet off to Breton fiddle music.
One of our favorite things is music, so in anticipation of Miguel's visits I've been boning up on lyrics so I can sing all sorts of things his mom would never think of exposing him to. She sings sweet, appropriate, kindergartenish ditties that educate him about the location of his various body parts, the mechanisms of city transportation, and farm animal sounds. I see it as my task to introduce him to such essentials as the green eyed dragon with thirteen tails (who'll feed--with greed--on little boys and puppy dogs and biiiiiiggg fat snails), la seule dent dans la mรขchoire a Jean, and other favorites. I've been forbidden to sing the gleeful tune my mother taught me celebrating daddy's return from work: "...for this is the day he gets his pay, we'll jolly him and we'll TAKE IT AWAY!" Hmmph. Censorship may slow me down, but it also inspires me to work that much harder to find music suitable to my grandson's proper upbringing.
We listened to a lot of ethnic folk music when I was growing up. I fancied that it gave me a wormhole connection to the parallel worlds of other people's lives in other times and places. With no idea what any of it meant, I reveled in rich and joyful descriptions of feast tables excessively laden with
...birch rine, tar twine, cherry wine and turpentineIt really didn't seem such a stretch to layer the foreign flavor of those images over characters within the same approximate time frame (though geographically distant), as described by my grandmother, kicking up their heels on the hardpan floor at a wedding party or other festive gathering in an ancient, picturesque French village.
jowls and cavalances, ginger beer and tea;
pigs' feet, cat meat, dumplings boiled in a sheet
dandelion and crackey's teeth at the Kelligrew's soiree.
I don't know much about my Irish ancestors' lives, but I feel myself pulled to another time and place that makes me feel as if I might have just a glint of insight when I hear the mournful, a capella lyrics:
Now Ireland is with plenty blessedAnd I heard defiance to oppressive control in
but the people they are sore oppress'd
all by those cursed tyrants we are forced for to obey.
Some haughty landlords for to please
our houses and our lands they will sieze
to put fifty farms into one and take us all away!
Regardless of the widows' cries,
the mother's tears, and the orphans' sighs
in thousands we are driven from home which grieves our hearts full sore!
We are fraught with famine and disease;
We emigrated across the seas
from that sore oppressed island that they call the Shamrock Shore.
Hooray for our own native isle Newfoundland!I've always adored listening to Odetta and recently had the opportunity to hear her live, singing some of my old favorites. Of course, anything she sings is a favorite of mine. But as a child my heart felt its first pangs of social injustice when she sang:
Not a stranger shall hold one inch of her strand!
Her face turns to Britain, her back to the gulf;
come here at your peril, Canadian wolf!
When you wake, you shall have all the pretty little horses.or
Way down yonder in the meadow
Lies my poor little baby
Bees and butterflies are a-peckin on his eyes
Poor little thing is cryin' Mammy
On the fourteenth day of Oc-TO-ber-O (**HEY!! THAT'S MY BIRTHDAY!!**)Naturally, as a child I adored anything that made reference to me. My mother used to sing a tune, making up lyrics as she went along that described whatever I was wearing and had done that day. Another particularly favorite song described a Newfoundlander who shared both my name and favorite color, if not my gender:
I hitched my team in orderrr-o
To drive the hiiiiiilllls of Saludio
To me rol, to me rol, to my rideo...
Now, 'twas twenty-five or thirty years since Jack first saw the light;I didn't understand at the time, but have since realized that Jack was a metaphorical teacher of life lessons. Like Jonah, he went into the belly of the whale. Heroically, he overcame darkness and isolation:
he came into this world of woe one dark and stormy night.
He was born on board his father's ship as she was lyin' to,
'bout twenty-five or thirty miles southeast of Bacalieu...
Oh, Jack was every inch a sailor,
five and twenty years a whaler;
Jack was every inch a sailor,
he was born upon the bright blue sea.
When Jack grew up to be a man, he went to the Labrador.I wonder how I ever let all this slip away. At any rate, I'm grateful to my grandson for inspiring me to dredge it back up.
He fished in Indian Harbor, where his father fished before.
On his returnin' in the fog, he met with a heavy gale
and Jack was swept into the sea and swallered by a whale!
The whale went straight for Baffin's Bay 'bout ninety knots an hour
and every time he'd blow a spray, he'd send it in a shower.
Ho, now! says Jack unto himself, I must see what he's about;
so he grabbed that whale all by the tail and turned him inside out!
Mom's work schedule will be changing and once I start classes she'll be taking Miguel to another day care where he'll likely learn the Alphabet Song or some other such frivolity. But for now, Fridays find Miguel and me singing Tortillitas de Maiz and dancing our (um, at this point I guess that would be MY) feet off to Breton fiddle music.
