December, 2023

Dear Family and Friends,
One of the benefits of writing this annual letter and creating the card is the opportunity to look backward and count my blessings.

I keep busy with my usual stuff: a lot of fiddle tunes, gardening (summertime) splitting and stacking firewood (wintertime), housekeeping (could be worse, could be better), crocheting hats to give away (know anyone who wants hats?), exploring new and old recipes (Cranberry Chutney! Soup! Careful use of Jalapeños!)

If you don't want to read all the details about what I have been up to, skip to the bottom. There you will find a brief round-up of the rest of the family. You can still see the 2021 and 2022 cards.

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SAYING FAREWELL

It has been a tough year.

In March we had to say good-bye to our wonderful Daffy Doodle. She was 14½, an advanced age for a big dog.

It became clear during last winter that she leaving us. We tried everything! But time goes in only one direction, as we continue to learn.

Read my farewell to Daffy here.

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The New Bear
I toyed with the idea of having a chain-saw carving made in memory of Daffy. I couldn't quite imagine what that would look like, or how sad it might make me every day, so I ultimately decided to purchase a bear. We already had two bears. That doesn't seem like the right number of bears.

I was able to track down Barre Pinske, the carver who made the "Ray Bear" we inherited from our dear friend Ray Hitchcock, and went to his workshop to see his work, meet his very nice dog, Buster, and ultimately select a bear. That was late in March; he delivered the Bear about 2 months later, when our road had finally dried out enough for him to navigate his big truck up the hill safely, and between rainstorms, of which there many this year. Click here to see the bear (center) arriving.

There are some amazing chain-saw carvers in Vermont. Barre organizes an annual chain saw carving event to celebrate and share the craft. Check out the Big Buzz Chain Saw Festival.

You'll see our new Bear in the Xmas card, surrounded by flowers.

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About the 2023 McQuillen Project
Bob McQuillen (1923-2014) was a good friend and a prolific composer of fiddle tunes. To celebrate his centenary year, I cooked up a project to try to document the playing of ALL 1,554 of his published tunes during the year. Insane, I know, but I did it anyway and you can find all the info at McQuillen Tunes Dot Com.

I immersed myself in Bob's tunes, from his first (Scotty O'Neil, 1973), right up through his Book 15, published in 2012. Some of Bob's tunes have become so ubiquitous in the traditional music world that people no longer know they are contemporary tunes composed by a specific person, for example Amelia, The Dancing Bear, Sarah's Jig, The Chickadee's Polka, Pete's March. 

For Bob, it wasn't just about the tunes. He dedicated each tune to someone or something personal, an homage of sorts. Once a tune was inked in, named and dedicated, Bob didn't worry about whether it was a good tune or not. That was for others to determine.

I expected that at least half of the tunes would be clunkers. As it turned out, most of the tunes are playable, danceable reels, jigs, marches and waltzes. Very few are downright bad, and far more than the tunes mentioned above are great. So many, in fact, that I had to create a spreadsheet to keep track of the Best Tunes, The Best of the Best, The Very Best of the Best of the Best. And that is just one person's opinion.

This project turned out to be much more than just playing through a bunch of tunes. It involved a collaborative process with my good friend Deborah Maynard to put together. It involved over 600 different people in over 100 different places playing Bob's tunes and submitting them to the project. It involved reaching out to people all over the place, hearing story after story about Bob and his kindness, his generosity, his enormous joie de vivre. It involved working with a software developer who I still haven't met to produce an iPad app with all 1,554 tunes (available on the iTunes store).

It also involved a group of local musicians playing his tunes together on Wednesdays, starting on January 1. As soon as it was warm enough in the Spring, we moved from Jill's living room to my screened-in porch for the Wednesday Porch Tunes. Not every single tune played on these Wednesdays was a Bob tune but most of them were. More often than not, after the tune was played, someone would say, "that's a good one!"

You can still skip to the bottom.

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Playing Fiddle Tunes
From time to time throughout my almost-50-year fiddling career I have dipped a toe into Klezmer — the traditional music of the Eastern European Jews (my people). Each time until now, it's fizzled. I get frustrated with the prevailing style, a frantic wild gallop with a huge band all screeching away as loud as they can; I get frustrated with the insistence that it had to be played in a specific way, with specific ornaments, or it was 'wrong'. Geographically Klezmer music was played over a vast area by musicians from many different countries, all with individual vernacular, so there had to have been many ways to play the same tune.

This music did not come to us in an unbroken living line. Instead, it has been unearthed by dedicated musicians and scholars. Some amazing research and archeology is being performed to resurrect the tunes and keep alive the memory of the people who played it and composed it and cared enough about it to document it. 

The Klezmer Institute
There is a fascinating collaborative project developed in the last few years to transcribe and digitize a trove of hand-written scores that lay hidden and neglected — but safe — in the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, brought to light by people from Copenhagen and Abu Dhabi and New York and California who came together in Tokyo in 2017. The aim of this project is to bring this music back to life; make it universally available to anyone interested; to have these tunes played and enjoyed as they once were. Over a thousand tunes have been transcribed and annotated, and are making their way out into the world. I will find some that speak to me and learn them.

The manuscript shown here is one of the better examples - it's actually legible, without coffee stains, folds, tears, missing pieces, 100+-year-old tape. About halfway down the page is one of my favorite tunes lately: "Bolgar in F". Here it is, played by Susi and Szilvia. Magnificent.

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Nobody lasts forever!
Andy and I both turned 71 this year, and you have to figure that the systems we've taken for granted all this time are going to start showing some wear and tear. We've been careful; we haven't gotten covid; we eat good stuff and are active and engaged, but time — as I say above — goes in only one direction.

I figured that after Daffy died my heart was just broken, but it turns out that I had some other virus, probably RSV, in late March and not unlike covid, there can be lasting effects. Considerable pep has evaporated and has yet to regenerate, my joints hurt more than they did. I had all sorts of boring and embarrassing tests which revealed: nothing.

But that's not all! Andy had to have major surgery at the end of September and I am here to tell you that the job of caregiving is truly all-encompassing and totally exhausting. He has recovered very well, to the point where I have pretty much stopped trying to boss him around, as it proves utterly ineffective. Altogether, I think we can both say, it could be worse.

Another Big Dig
After 3 years of planning, our electric company, Green Mountain Power, replaced the power lines to our house, re-routing them so that the lines don't go over the pond (seriously). It involved burying the lines from the last pole to our barn, which had Andy digging a 300 ft trench and then spending a few weeks laying conduit.

He wants you to know he dug it with a garden trowel on his hands and knees, and laid the conduit with his teeth. If that were true, he would not be able to walk upright. Of course, that was before the surgery.

I leave it to you to decide how he actually did it.

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