Monthly Archives: December 2012

(I was reminded of this poem by my former student, Skye Nightingale Robertson. Thank you, Skye. I wrote it in 1990 when my brother was a pilot for Delta Airlines and I was getting up early to teach school.)

Just before the clock radio

Snaps on, I am floating in the dark

Somewhere between sleep and waking

Somehow I know

At this moment

In another time zone

My brother is landing

Suspended forty feet ahead of

Wings he cannot see

He grabs a handful of throttles

And pulls them back.

The turbines settle toward silence

Wings flex slightly upward

And the rippling fuselage sags

Toward the black-streaked runway.

For a moment, we float together,

Buoyed by air trapped beneath the wing,

In the second between flying and waking

In the moment between dreaming and landing

We float toward earth

And the dark dawn.


–Dan Verner

One of several instruments that I play badly is the five-string banjo. It’s difficult to play in bluegrass style, and while I can play that style very slowly, I don’t seem to get any better at it. But I’m not here to talk about my musical limitations. The five-string, a uniquely American instrument, has a short top or fifth string which is usually tuned to a high “G.” A banjo may be tuned in several ways, but the most common is the “G” tuning in which the strings are tuned (from the top down) G-D-G-B-D. In other words, when played “open” (no strings fretted), a G chord results.

The top G acts as a drone. It is rarely fretted and in bluegrass style, sounds almost constantly.

Other instruments also make use of a drone. The Scottish bagpipe is one example. So is the Indian sitar.

Songs also  use of drone notes. “Restless,” by my man Gordon Lightfoot, begins with a B on the keyboard which is held during the entire song. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G9PiSiWAwU. The Beatles used a middle-range drone in “Blackbird.” There are high drones on the last verses of “Eleanor Rigby” and “Yesterday.”

The connection to writing is this: the urge to write and ideas for writing form a constant undercurrent for the writers. Every waking moment, that urge and those ideas are present. One of the concerns I have as a writer is that I will wake up one day and have nothing to write about. It hasn’t happened so far, and I don’t think it will and I hope that it won’t. In the meantime, there’s this undercurrent of writing that runs through my life and the lives of other writers I know.

Conptometer, circa 1940

I was talking to a lady about my age last week, about various jobs she had had, and she mentioned that she was once a conptometer operator. I had never heard of such a machine, but apparently they were a kind of calculator that somehow enabled operators to figure taxes and discounts and to enter lengthy numbers (depending on how many fingers they cared to use) all at once rather than serially as we are used to doing with a calculator. These machines were in use from the 1870’s through the 1990’s. They were, of course, supplanted by electronic calculators and computers, but for a while anyhow, they ruled the roost. Just goes to show that there’s always something that we don’t know and that truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

Link to good Wikipedia article on conptometers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comptometer

Speaking of older technology, I was at a holiday gathering this past weekend and someone had a phonograph and played actual LP’s. I can’t remember the last time I listened to an LP. It sounded good.

I was walking along the sidewalk in a local strip shopping center last week, on my way to the music story to buy some guitar strings. About halfway down, I came upon a young man kneeling on a prayer rug in front of his shop, facing east and bowing as he recited his prayers.

He wasn’t blocking the sidewalk and I would have passed by him at a distance of about three feet, but strong within me is a sense that if you’re walking and a prayer is being said, you stop until the prayer is finished. So I stood there until he finished.

He rolled up his rug, stood up and said, “Thank you, my brother.”

And I said, “God bless you.”

I am not recounting this vignette to emphasize my spirituality or tolerance or goodness as a person because God knows I am lacking in all three areas. Rather, I have been taught to respect other people and their beliefs and practices even though they may be different from my own. It was a telling moment, and an indication that the world has indeed come to us.

God bless us every one.