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Thanksgiving is not that great a time for me. My oldest sister's crowd are a bunch of religious fanatics that attempt to use the occasion to proselytize their fundamentalist religion. It's not the same since our parents died. I hate being rude to members of my own family, but I don't hold no truck with religious bullies trying to shove their version of God up my ass, kin or no kin.
I'll be going down to Wilmington to stop by the gathering for a while well after the loud praying is over, then I'll eat whatever I can, but no meat. I'm gonna go without meat for a while to see if that helps the arthritis. After I've made my perfunctory appearance, I'll drive down to the ocean and visit my old haunts to remember my childhood visits there.
Wilmington was a fairly sleepy mid-sized town that observed the blue laws until Interstate 40 was completed. Now it's beginning to seem like the towns and cities at the other end of it in California. The beaches are much better for swimming on the Atlantic end of the road. At least I think so. YMMV.
California does have the advantage of having mountains near the Pacific coast, the scenery is much more spectacular, but the water drops off too fast for the beaches to be good for swimming. Twenty yards offshore and the water gets deep real fast. Not so here. The coastal plains are as flat as a fly flitter for a hundred miles inland, and the Transatlantic shelf reaches another hundred miles or so from the shallow, wide beaches eastward.
Wilmington is not located on the ocean itself, but lies inland about ten miles or so as the crow flies. It's located on the first bluffs above the Cape Fear River. It's a port city, but the ship channels have to be dredged regularly for the ocean vessels to get all the way to Wilmington.
Global warming and the rising of the ocean waters is not regarded as too much of a threat here. Why should it be? It hasn't been that long geologically since my house 60 miles inland would have been on the beach itself, and the remnants of Indian villages have been found on the TransAtlantic shelf ten miles out from the present coastline under 50-100 feet of water.
Humans survived all those tidal comings and goings just dandy. If people want something to worry about that just might destroy life on Earth, at least all the mammals, they should look to the heavens and those persnickety astroids that nay-me-ing them doesn't stop their courses.
The Indians didn't build permanent dwellings or ken the concept of private property. They didn't lose anything when the oceans warmed and flooded their usual campgrounds in the winter. The water's edge was where they found it, not where it was "supposed to be".
It amazes me to reflect on what the Europeans brought to America. Especially in regard to the concept of private property. My ancestors were definitely convinced about that. Accumulating property seems to have been in their blood. The family stories go back as far as can be traced about generation after generation of men who followed the agrarian trip to becoming aristocrats. Not me, but both my younger brothers follow the tradition, and they haven't done too bad at it.
The current economic depression will end all that. The United States is going out of business. All their properties have been sold to the highest bidders, and the new owners are absentee landlords. I'm kinda glad all this waited until I got old to transpire, or should I say... expire?
I went to the gathering and got back an hour or so ago. Interestingly enough the religious nuts weren't there. Their mother, my oldest sister, was fairly gracious this time, and in fact, we had a couple of laughs together. There has been some tension between a niece and myself for a couple of years, and that even seem to resolve itself to some degree. I've never favored family gatherings too much, but this one turned out okay.
I like to practice singing the bel canto warm up exercises I learned while taking some private voice lessons. The one that appears to get me where I wanna go by doing this involves singing the scales and placing an "H" before each vowel to do it. Hay, hee, high, ho, who? For some reason this helps me to sing the pure vowel sounds the quickest. Every time I do it I have to find that pure sound again. If I practice every day for a couple of weeks it gets to where I can pretty much find the pure sound fairly immediately, but if I miss one day of practice it takes longer to get to the pure sound.
Singing these scales while I'm driving for at least an hour means I'll probably sound smooth and polished when I arrive at where I'm headed. This might appear a little false and egoistic to some, but I live alone and hardly ever talk because there's no one around to talk to. Like anything else humans have to learn to do talking has to be done on a fairly regular basis or I forget how to do it for a little while in the beginning.
The interesting thing about my singing today on the drive down to Wilmington is that intoning the vowels really calmed me down. Particularly when I practiced singing in the lower ranges and the frequency of my vocal cords fluttering gets so slow the vibrations have a massaging effect. It seems like I forget this soon after I finish doing it every time, because each time I do practice singing I remember how relaxed and comfortable with myself. There are many times in my life I could have helped myself by singing to relax if I could just remember to do that.
I had a problem when I was taking those private voice lessons that my teacher didn't recognize in order to correct my misconstruing what the vocal cords looked like. He certainly knew something was wrong, but he didn't know what in order to tell me what to do. I don't blame him for not realizing I thought the pluralized term "cords" meant several. In fact I thought the vocal cords were like a set of pan pipes, and learning to sing meant learning to send my breath into a different "pipe" for each note. I still don't have a clue where I got that image.
Later on I got to see what the vocal cords looked like from a plastic model my theater voice teacher showed me. Her name was Helen Steer, and I'm still grateful to that woman. She intuited almost exactly what my problem was. She ushered me into the room where the plastic model of the throat was, picked it up and sat it on one of those oak classroom tables. She told me to sit down in front of the plastic model and took it apart one piece at a time, and took an extraordinarily long time to explain everything there was to know about the human vocal cords and how they worked.
It was only after this woman helped me that I remembered what my private voice teacher was trying to get me to do, and I began doing it, but alone, and five to ten years later. On my way down to Wilmington today I got to a place with my voice that he had described to me many times. I really wanted for him to hear that I finally grokked what he so sincerely tried to teach me.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
