14 Nov 99 - Concert weekend
We've had a special needs chickadee at the bird feeder. One bird has no tail and has an injured leg -- at least, it holds one leg away from the perch and just hangs on with the other one. Mostly we can't tell individual birds of any one species apart, but this one is distinctive. We wonder if it had a narrow escape from a cat, or what happened.
Speaking of narrow escapes, the mice around here have been happily eating the peanut butter off my traps in the garage withoug tripping them. Phooey. I'm glad not to have squashed mice to deal with, but if the bait is being stolen the mice are still around.
Arlene has been unhappy with her binoculars for a while, and we went out to Drumlin Farm to look for new ones. It's the headquarters of the Mass. Audubon Society, and has a big gift shop with all kinds of nature-related items, a big selection of books on natural history, bird feeders, and optical equipment. We figured the salespeople there would know what kind of binoculars would work for birdwatching. We came home with a pair of Swift Ultralight 8x32's for Arlene and a compact Nikon 7x21 for me. Mine should fit comfortably in my bike "trunk" next spring, and they're light enough that I won't hesitate to take them on trips.
We walked around Drumlin Farm a little after putting the new glasses in the car. There were a lot of whitethroats around, as well as titmice, chickadees, cardinals, and bluejays and crows. The one unusual bird was a Carolina wren.
Yesterday evening we went with Sue and Richard to New Song Coffeehouse in Bedford to hear Lou & Peter Berryman. Bedford is northwest of Lexington. It's proud of having the first Colonial flag. The coffeehouse is in a church just past the center of town, across the street from a row of beautiful old colonial homes. Half a mile closer to Boston is as ordinary a mall as you could hope to ignore, but the far side of the main crossroads in Bedford center is perhaps the closest old New England village there is to Boston. With a white church on the town green and colonial homes going back 250 years, it looks as though it was built just to fit tourists' expectations. From 1976 to 1979 I used to work in Carlisle, the next town beyond Bedford, and went through Bedford on my way to work. Sad to relate, the traffic through Bedford going home in the evening was totally modern.
The Berrymans mostly sang songs we had heard before, which didn't make them any less funny. It's all a question of being in tune with them, though. A song about the similarity between defrosting your refrigerator and nuclear disarmament still has me in stitches, but Lou and Peter pointed out that the song is lost on a whole generation that has never had a refrigerator you have to defrost (and that hasn't had the cold war to worry about). The two new songs I remember were, first, one about how old Peter feels since turning 50. He tells about going out to fill the gas tank & buy a twinkie and realizing he was older than anybody, older than anybody, older than anybody at the checkout. He went down to his former favorite bar, wasn't too happy about picking his way past the winos on the street, glad he wasn't drinking so much any more, and realized he was older than anybody, older than anybody, older than anybody in the gutter. He went to his favorite cemetery because usually it cheers him up to remember at least he's alive, but read the dates on the stones and found he was older than anybody, older than anybody, older than anybody in the boneyard. The song ends by saying that though he's probably not older than that twinkie, he feels older than anybody on the planet. Second, about the grace his Uncle Dave said last Thanksgiving, giving thanks for the clothes they were wearing, though they were made by 7-year-old seamstresses in China, and the beautiful mahogany table, from a rain forest that was no longer there, and so on. That song concluded that next year they had two choices: live without food, in the nude, in a cave, or get someone to say grace other than Dave.
This afternoon we went to hear Andy Statman (unless it's Stadtman) and his quartet at Temple Emanuel. He's a Brooklyn klezmer clarinetist and mandolin player, of course not both at the same time. He had a pianist, string bassist, and drummer with him, but he was the melody instrumentalist. He's amazing, playing magnificent variations on tunes I mostly recognized in a jazz style -- long, long numbers, going through the same material over and over with extreme variations and with different instruments taking breaks. I think there were only five pieces in the first set, which took over an hour. The second set had more, shorter pieces. I'll have to look for a CD or two of his.
I put together a whole web page about the reduction block print of the Lake Sevan church. Since I had been talking about doing the print, maybe you'd like to see the whole story. Just watch out for the download time, because there are a lot of pictures.
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