Here Comes The Sun

Little darling, it's been a long, long cold lonely winter.
Little darling, it feels like years since it's been here.
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
And I say...it's all right.
-The Beatles

This is the happiest song I know. The melody is happy, the words are happy. It makes me happy to listen to it and I cannot help but sing along with it when I hear it. It seems like an odd song to post on the last day of November. This is the time of year when the days are so short that I drive to work in the dark in the morning and drive home in the dark in the afternoon -- we live that far north. You would think this is a song for the spring time. But it came on the radio as I was driving to work this morning and I couldn't help smile...and sing along. Me. Me who is not a morning person.

I used to get really tired of our long winters. Almost everyone here does. Winter can start any time in October or November and usually goes all the way into March. Snow is usually on the ground into the beginning of April unless we have an unusually warm spring. So people who are young and/or active do things like ice skate, or ski, or snowshoe, or whatever else gets them outdoors. You have to or you'd go crazy being cooped up that long. People still walk their dogs, run errands, and all sorts of other things. Until it gets to be 20 below. Until the wind chill drops to dangerous levels. But it's the short days where daylight is at a minimum that gets to be hard to take. And so we take our sunshine when we can get it. What people don't realize if they don't live in a cold climate is that the cloudy days are the warm days. The clouds form a layer of insulation that keeps the heat in. When it clears up, that's when the heat escapes to the upper atmosphere and temperatures drop.

What turned winter around for me was the Solstice. Calendars and weathermen had always noted the first day of winter, but I hadn't really looked at it in terms of being the Solstice. The turning point. The time of year when we celebrate the triumph of lightness over darkness. When we reach that turning point and we know that even though it is dark, and it is cold, and there are still weeks and weeks of winter left....every single day from there on out is a day of more light. And that is a wonderful, happy thing! It makes winter no big deal any more.

Which means that attitude -- perception -- is everything. It's hard to remind yourself of that when life feels crummy. When you're angry at someone. When you're looking at darkness at all the time.

You have to remind yourself there are pockets of light and find a way to look at it differently.

Feed Jake

Now Broadway’s like a sewer. Bums and hookers everywhere.
Winos passed out on the sidewalk. Doesn’t anybody care?
Some say he’s worthless, just let him be.
I for one would have to disagree.
And so would their mamas.
-Pirates of the Mississippi

Today we drove to my oldest daughter's for Thanksgiving. A gorgeous, two and a half hour drive, most of which was along the river. Our Baby Girl came with us, and later in the day we were joined by my brother and his family, and my sister and her partner. It was a cozy day, with good food, and truly a lot to be thankful for. We all have jobs, we have good homes, things for the most part are running on an even keel for everyone. Life is good. And yet we know it isn't that way for everyone. And so what do we do about it?

My uncle used to ask his kids, every night at the dinner table, "What did you do today, to make the world a better place?" I never knew that until he died and every one of his kids talked about it at his funeral. But it made me realize how much my siblings and I were ingrained with a mentality about the importance of helping others, of becoming involved. And how have we done that?

So many people in my family have gone into helping professions, particularly teaching. In fact, in my uncle's family, he and my aunt were both teachers, as were three of their four children. My father was active in his church in so many ways and my mother was involved in community ed. I volunteered my time to La Leche League for 10 years and later to the Girl Scouts. My sister is part of the Big Sisters program. My brother has coached his kids sports teams. My youngest sister has been involved in various social activism groups. All of us have also donated financially to organizations that matter to us...The American Cancer Society, CARE, America's Child, Toys for Tots, The American Lung Association, La Leche League, Salvation Army, Vietnam Vets, and so many more.

Now I am watching my daughter become involved in organizations that help others and I'm glad to see that. It's important to give back what you can. To make the world a better place. Someone at work saw all the NFL memorabilia I had on the back of my office door and asked if I was a season ticket holder. I told her no. She wanted to know why not, especially since she knows I talk about football all the time with her son. I told her that as much as I love football, if I had that kind of money to spend on a regular basis, I would rather put it towards a charitable need. She didn't quite know what to say. But I believe that once you have a comfortable existence, the rest is just being selfish. And you should be trying to make the world a better place. You should care. If there were more people who cared, we'd have less people on the streets.

Feed Jake is an odd song, but it's sweet. You don't hear it very often on the radio any more.

Now if you get an ear pierced, some will call you gay.
But if you drive a pick-up, they'll say, "No you must be straight."
What we are, and what we ain't, what we can and what we can't.
Does it really matter?

Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake, feed Jake.
He's been a good dog, my best friend, right through it all.
If I die before I wake, feed Jake.

Blue Kentucky Girl

Don't wait to bring great riches home to me
I need no diamond rings or fancy pearls
Just bring yourself, you're all I'll ever need
That's good enough for this blue Kentucky girl

-Emmy Lou Harris

My grandmother was born in Kentucky. So was my mother... unexpectedly. My grandmother was seven months pregnant and although she was now living in the Midwest, she had gone home to visit her parents in Kentucky. While she was there she went into premature labor. My mother was only about 3 1/2 pounds when she was born and not expected to live. This was in 1924, a time when babies were still born at home, and even if they weren't, ICUs and life-saving medical care for premature infants didn't exist. Her grandmother, my great-grandmother, administered the Last Rights herself because she didn't think the family priest would get there in time to do it. But against all odds, my mom fought, and she made it.

Growing up, I remember there had always been discussion about why the family had moved from Kentucky. No one seemed to really know why. It always seemed to be a hush-hush topic and people joked that it was almost as if the family up and moved in the middle of the night, leaving things behind. I came across a book about prohibition and local gangsters once, and some of the names mentioned in the book were names I remember my mother talking about as acquaintances of her father's. My grandfather had a license to sell alcohol to pharmacies during Prohibition and I asked my mother if she thought he might have been "on the take". Oh no, she said. Her father was an honorable man. I showed her the book and some of the people mentioned in it. She didn't know quite what to think.

A few years later though, she approached me with an idea. She'd pay for a trip for the two of us to go to Kentucky if I'd help her look up her family's roots there. Never did I expect what we'd find... We started with the house she was born in, and met the current owner who was renovating it at the time. We got a great tour. Next stop was the public library to do a search of the newspaper archives. I set mom off looking up wedding announcements and obituaries while I did a more general search and that's where I got one of the biggest discoveries -- and shocks -- of all my genealogy research ever. Her grandfather, along with the chief of police and five others had been caught breaking into a warehouse on New Year's Day, stealing several kegs of whiskey, and transporting them across state lines for sale -- all the more serious because this was during Prohibition. (Her grandfather had been a successful saloon keeper before Prohibition.)

A series of articles chronicled the trial and then that one of the men had connections in Washington that commuted the two year sentence in Federal Prison to a three month sentence in the county jail. That "connection" was never identified, but I strongly suspect it was my grandfather. My grandparents were married just as all this was happening. And my grandfather worked as a page in the US Senate and had connections. And as for the move to the Midwest, I suspect that once my great-grandfather got out of jail, either the family felt their reputation was ruined, or else they simply needed to start over with a new job. Now that their daughter and son-in-law had moved to the Midwest, that's where they eventually headed too.

Don't wait to bring great riches home to me
I need no diamond rings or fancy pearls

There is a legacy we have in some of the family jewelry. My mother wore two diamond rings. Her wedding ring was the diamond that was given to her by my father, his mother's diamond ring. And when my mother died, that diamond was passed down to her son, my brother, with the intention that eventually it will go to his son's bride some day. The other diamond she had was her mother's diamond ring. That was passed on to my sister. There was a heart-shaped pin set with pearls that I wore on my wedding day. It was her grandmother's and was worn by most of the women in my mother's family on their wedding day. It wasn't mine to keep, but I wore it. But in our family, the most important legacy are the garnets.

When my father was in college, and traveling with the theater department in Brazil, he had the opportunity to buy some garnets. He bought one large one, and several smaller ones. The smaller ones, he had set in a gold cross for her and gave that to her as a wedding gift. The large one, he had banded in gold and put on a simple gold chain for my mother. She rarely took that one off. When I got married, I asked if I could wear her larger solitaire garnet. It symbolized who my mother was, and I treasured the opportunity to be able to wear it on my wedding day. I graduated from college four weeks before my wedding. My graduation gift from my parents was my own garnet necklace, just like my mother's. It means the world to me. Each of my sisters was given one when they graduated, and my brother was given a garnet ring. When my mother passed away, my youngest sister was given her garnet cross and I was given my mother's garnet solitaire. Now I had two. Because my youngest daughter had spent so much time with my mother as she was dying, I felt it was appropriate that the garnet go to her. It was passed on to my Baby Girl when she turned sixteen. When each of my two oldest daughters graduated from college, they were given a garnet necklace as well. This family tradition carries on and is a little bit better legacy than the one we discovered in the papers...