Keep the Coffee Coming

Child of Mine: Carole King

2009-11-21T11:56:00.002-05:00

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O-O-O-H Child: The Five Stairsteps and Cubie

2009-11-21T11:46:00.002-05:00

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I Don't Want to Play in Your Yard: Peggy Lee

2009-11-21T11:38:00.002-05:00

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Dream of a Child: Burton Cummings

2009-11-21T11:35:00.002-05:00

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2009-11-21T11:16:00.002-05:00

"If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older."

2009-11-21T10:56:00.002-05:00

Today is a do things around the house day. Laundry is already churning in the washer. The kitchen floor is swept, the bed made and this room dusted. I'm a whirlwind of activity.

When I was little, I made memories. The school corridor, wider than a river, went on for miles. Nuns were all six foot and muscular, even the old ones. The Five and Ten was magical. Everything you wanted or needed was on one of its shelves. The railroad tracks just kept going and going as far as any of us could imagine, even to China. The woods were filled with adventures. Blueberries grew everywhere. The turkey needed two people to lift it out of the oven. The Christmas tree touched the ceiling and filled the living room.

Life is gigantic when you're little. It's is a surprise wrapped in paper and lots of ribbon. The sun is brighter, the snow deeper and the rain heavier. New still happens. Believing is easy. Santa is real and so are the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny. I know the memories I share may have been tempered by time, but I swear most of them are true, except maybe the one about the nuns. A couple of them might have been five ten.

Scarborough Fair/Canticle: Simon and Garfunkel

2009-11-20T12:22:00.002-05:00

This was from the first album I ever heard of theirs, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. My ears exulted in the sound.

Later I backtracked and found Wednesday Morning 3 A.M. but it is this album I think of as first.

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Little Bit of Rain: Karen Dalton

2009-11-20T12:08:00.002-05:00

This is a Fred Neill song from her first record, It's So Hard to Tell You Who's Going to Love You the Best. It was released in 1969. He once said, "She sure can sing the shit out of the blues."

Karen Dalton

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2009-11-20T11:54:00.002-05:00

"Autumn is marching on: even the scarecrows are wearing dead leaves."

2009-11-20T11:29:00.003-05:00

It is a dark day with light then heavy then down pouring rain. I was surprised how warm it was when I went to get the papers. My neighbor saw me by the driveway and came over. We chatted by the front fence for a long while. We chatted about fish on Fridays, why it is called soccer not football, how Portuguese and English share prefixes, pine trees and their needles and yellow houses. He and his family are going to Brazil for Christmas. It's been ten years, he said, since last they were there. They'll be gone a month.

It is difficult to believe how close it is to Thanksgiving. The year is whooshing by me, and I get spun around by the breeze of passing days. I know the years are shorter now, each is a smaller fraction of my life. It used to take forever for Thanksgiving and Christmas to arrive. Now they come with such speed I am hardly ready.

I saw my first decorated house the other night. Its front was outlined in colored lights. Too soon was my first thought then I realized how beautifully those lights shined and glowed despite the blackness of a unlit street. I decided they had really come none too soon. The dark now arrives too quickly and stays far longer than the light.

The Seven Wonders: Maddy Prior and June Tabor

2009-11-19T13:47:00.002-05:00

You have to back to 1976 and an album called Silly Sisters for this song.

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Little Boxes (Petite Boites): Kate and Anna McGarrigle

2009-11-19T13:43:00.002-05:00

This is from an album called If I Had a Song: The Songs of Pete Seeger, Vol. 2. Though the song was written by Malvina Reynolds, most people associate it with Pete Seeger.

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2009-11-19T13:32:00.002-05:00

"It often happens that a man is more humanely related to a cat or dog than to any human being."

2009-11-19T13:12:00.002-05:00

This has been a week of medical appointments, all follow-ups or scheduled maintenance. I begrudge the time. I know the appointments are necessary to make sure all my parts continue to function, but I hate appointments, the scheduling of time. My day should be leisurely, a chair on the beach with an umbrella drink in my hand sort of day.

It is sweat shirt weather: warm, sunny and lovely. Yesterday the two cats, Fern and Maddie, were eleven and today Gracie is four. Lots of special treats for the three of them.

I am a pet person from a family of pet people. All of my memories seems to include one pet or another. We had two Woolworth's painted turtles which lived for years in a bowl on the counter in the kitchen. The bowl had a fake plastic palm tree on a small island where the turtles used to sit or lie or whatever it is turtles do. Whenever we killed or wounded a fly, we gave it to the turtles. When the last turtle passed away, it was given a solemn funeral and buried in the woods in a tobacco tin lined with cloth. Lots of goldfish came and went. They lasted a short while before taking their final journeys through bathroom pipes to that great ocean in the sky. Duke, the Boxer, who died when he was fifteen, was the pet we had the longest. He was also the best pet we ever had. When I was a junior in high school, we got Gideon the Cat. He used to love the car and would sit on the back of the front seat with part of him resting on my dad's shoulders. He was the first in what became a long line of cats.

All of my siblings and their families have pets. None of us can imagine our lives without one. They offer unconditional love. You can't ask more than that.

Helpless: CSNY

2009-11-18T12:38:00.002-05:00

Deja Vu is one of my desert island albums. I first bought it on vinyl and keep making the transition as technology changes. This was written by Neil Young before he joined CS and N. I think it the best song on an album filled with best songs.

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I Pity the Poor Immigrant: Bob Dylan

2009-11-18T12:24:00.002-05:00

I played the album John Wesley Harding over and over again during my junior year in college. I think the repetition drove my roommates crazy. That was 1967 into the spring of 1968.

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2009-11-18T12:06:00.002-05:00

"Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast."

2009-11-18T11:31:00.002-05:00

The sun just arrived. I hope it dispels the morning chill. It's a November day today.

Wednesday is food day in the papers, and Thanksgiving took center stage in both papers. The recipes sounded delicious, and I cut out and saved many of them. They got to thinking about the holiday itself. Thanksgiving centers on family and food. It has no gimmicks, no candy bags, stockings or presents. It has a table groaning with food and a family together sitting around it. Sometimes the family is related; sometimes it isn't. A stuffed turkey is generally the main course. The stuffing differs from family to family. My mother always made a sage stuffing and so do I. Sometimes I try a new dressing, but it's in a casserole dish, never the turkey. My father loved creamed onions, and it was always one of our vegetables. My mother made a squash-carrot dish, and it was another. We all still make that. Green bean casserole was big when I was a kid, and I still serve it. It's a comfort vegetable. Mashed potatoes are essential and so is gravy. Turnip and sweet potatoes sometimes appeared on the table to complete the list of vegetables. My mother always served cranberry sauce from the can. I thought the ridges were decorative.

My mother called us to dinner. I remember the table looked lovely with its centerpiece and matching tablecloth and napkins. Piled high food dishes filled the middle of it. We'd all sit down together and pass the serving dishes from one to another. Our plates filled. We'd chatter and laugh and compliment the cook.

How joyfully simple is Thanksgiving: a good meal and the family together around the table to eat it.

The Leaves: Mark Spoelstra

2009-11-17T12:46:00.003-05:00

This is from Five & Twenty Questions which was released in 1965 on Electra. It has since been reissued on CD.

Mark passed away in 2007. Here is one of the obituaries: Mark Spoelstra

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Blue Nightfall: Jimmy Lafave

2009-11-17T12:33:00.002-05:00

This is the title song from his 2005 album. It was the first of his I ever heard. I bought more albums right away.

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2009-11-17T12:17:00.002-05:00

"Human beings are the only creatures on earth that allow their children to come back home."

2009-11-17T11:47:00.007-05:00

Today is the day I would choose if I had a menu of days. The sun is shining and glints through leaves and branches. My dad would have said there's a nip in the air, but it's still warm for mid-November. Earlier, I went on the deck to see why Gracie was barking and stayed outside, reluctant to leave the sun. The ground in the backyard is covered in yellow leaves. The tall weeds are wilted and will soon die. I can see through to the back neighbor's house. He's the one who thought Gracie was a wolf when she jumped into his yard. I filled the bird feeders, watched Gracie run around and then sat for a bit. It's a lovely day.

When I was in college, I had to go to the bus terminal in Boston to get the bus to Hyannis. The terminal was behind a western bar which had a giant wagon wheel as a front decoration, and it was alongside an alley walkway. Around the corner was Jack's Joke Shop and a flower shop. The terminal was small. It had lockers all along the sides, wooden benches and ashtrays with sand. A magazine stand was beside a tiny tobacco kiosk. The terminal also had a lunch counter, the sort with pies in glass containers and old, weary looking waitresses. It served every meal but was still a lunch counter. The ticket counter was along the right back wall. When it was cold, bums, as we called them back then, would wander through the terminal to get a little warmth before they were escorted outside again. I smoked in those days, and I remember once, after they called my bus, I put my cigarette in the sand and one of the bums walked over, took it out and smoked it. I was more astonished than appalled.

I usually fell asleep not long after we'd leave the terminal, and I generally slept until Plymouth. Crossing the Sagamore Bridge made me feel as if I were already home. In Hyannis, I'd call my dad who would come and get me. It was always good to be home.

You Were on My Mind: Serena Ryder

2009-11-16T12:52:00.004-05:00

One of the best parts of Coffee is when I get introduced to different singers because I get sent a song or two. Serena Ryder is one I probably would never have found on my own (Thanks, Pete).

You'll find this on If Your memory Serves You Well, her second album. It was released in 2006. The album is mostly covers of songs written by Canadian songwriters. This was, of course, written by Sylvia Tyson. We Five had the hit.

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On the Way Downtown: Peter Case

2009-11-16T12:36:00.002-05:00

This is from a 2007 release, Vanguard Visionaries, Peter Case. The album has ten songs, eight of which Case wrote. This one is a story.

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2009-11-16T11:50:00.002-05:00