Monthly Archives April 2021

A Hymn to Memory, Mom, and Andy Williams, Whom I Still Remember

One of my clearest early musical memories is of using my paper route and yard work money to buy Andy Williams’s “The Shadow of Your Smile” album as a birthday present for my mother when I was probably 15. She and my dad had purchased one of those low-slung wood-framed console stereos that were becoming fashionable at the time, signaling a kind of tentative probe into the promise of American middle class life.

When one lifted up the hinged cover door to behold the turntable and tastefully designed silver control knobs below, there was a slot to the left that was prepared to accept maybe the initial 10 or 15 albums that would launch the owner’s collection. Andy Williams was among the early occupants of that slot.

But time and memory are tricksters extraordinaire, as any good physicist will tell you about the former and neuroscientist about the latter.

And there was that song he sang, not the cover so...

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The Stephen Foster Problem

What to do with Stephen Foster? Among the greatest of American songwriters, reportedly the first to actually make a living at it (for a while), regarded by many scholars as the “father of American music.” Many of his 200+ songs written in the mid-19th century are embedded into the very fabric of American culture via countless cover versions by renowned musicians, abetted by millions of schoolchildren taking easily to his infectious, easily digestible tunes (“Beautiful Dreamer,” “Oh Susanna”, “Camptown Races,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Swanee River,” “I Dream of Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair,” “The Hard Times Come Again No More”).

Author of these lines, written for his wife Jane:

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee;
Sounds of the rude world, heard in the day,
Lull’d by the moonlight have all pass’d away!
… Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!

But there was this about...

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A Virtual Sermon on “The Dynamics of Faith, Belief and Hope”

In a year of previously unexplored firsts, the deadening and depressive effects of the pandemic have been countered to at least some degree by human adaptability as our minds stretch for new modes of communication and relationship.

Among those adaptations has been the virtual church service, increasingly refined to stand in for the currently silenced and empty sanctuaries that await the return of live, in-the-flesh worship.

It was my privilege two days ago to make my first such presentation as a guest preacher at one of my longtime spiritual homes: the Unitarian Universalist Community of Lake County, tucked into an old country church it shares with a Methodist congregation in the hamlet of Kelseyville, some 70 miles north of my former home in Santa Rosa.

I’d been making the trek to share thoughts with the good people there for the better part of a decade, and figured to continue doing so after my move east...

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(Welcoming) Mary Oliver’s “Spring”

As this space reflected on upon her death just over two years ago, Mary Oliver was at once among our most celebrated and accessible poets. Oliver was (and remains) the darling of a certain kind of spiritually inclined nature lover who revels in the unfettered ecstasy of being in the great outdoors, often alone, breathing deeply of chill morning air, much more inclined to be gazing slack-jawed under a cathedral of trees than sitting in church pews. (And if it were the latter, it would have to be Unitarian Universalists or lefty Christians rather than Garrison Keillor-style Lutherans, and it would be the late service, after the morning’s tramp though the woods…)

Despite the imprimatur of a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and a National Book Award eight years later, Oliver had her critics. Her basic theme—“Oh, how I love this world, read this and get out there and love it, too!”—was expressed in rhapsodic-but-straig...

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