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Christmas Daywander

Dec 26th, 2023
by Jeff Duntemann.
8 comments

Ok, Christmas Day was yesterday. This is a Christmas Daywander, not a Christmas Day Wander. I’m an editor. Such distinctions can matter. Sometimes.

As far as the radio stations are concerned, Christmas is over. Seems to me that after pushing Christmas since Halloween, suddenly it goes poof! and vanishes at 5PM on Christmas Day. I’m a 4-nation mongrel (Polish, German, Irish and (maybe; i have no solid proof) French. My mother was a child of Polish immigrants, and our home culture growing up was Polish.

In Polish culture, Christmas isn’t merely a day but a season, and not one that starts right after Halloween. The season runs from Christmas Vigil (vigilia) on Christmas Eve until The Epiphany on January 6. The Epiphany is also known as the Feast of the Magi, and commemorates the visit of the Three Wise Men to Bethlehem. All our decorations remained in place until Epiphany. This was sometimes problematic if we had a live tree, as some live trees die sooner than others. Carol and I often have both a live tree and a pop-up artificial one. This year we got sick in the runup to Christmas, so we stuck with artificial. We put up a few wreaths (one of them using real pine branches) plus Carol’s childhood Nativity scene, and the Plasticville farm (including animals) that Carol’s family put under the tree when she was a kid. We also put a stuffed Grinch and Max on the bookshelves along with a few other things. The trains did not go up around the tree this year due to the long tail of the worst colds we’ve had in years.

This year, we’re having one of our traditional a nerd parties on January 6, so some of the decorations will be going back into their boxes a little early. But I’m fully prepared to play Christmas CDs until January 6th.

Most of you know that I’m a filker; that is, I write song parodies like “The Zero-G Polka,” which you can find in my book Odd Lots. Some days ago, after imbibing Christmas music for a week or two, the following couplet entered my mind as I sat in front of my shaving mirror, Norelco Triple-Header in hand:

I’m shaving all my white whiskers,
Just like the brown I used to grow…

Fear not, gang. I don’t intend to finish it.

A quick reminder here: I have a short Christmas story on the Kindle store called “The Camel’s Question” for 99c. It’s about the three camels that carried the Magi to Bethlehem—and met the Christ Child, who grants each camel a wish, including an answer to one’s difficult question. If you’re not all Christmased out yet, consider it. Light reading, hopeful, affirming, and all that stuff that I favor. No starships, sorry.

I’ve always boggled a little at an obscure Christmas carol you don’t hear much: “The Boar’s Head Carol.”  It’s from the 15th Century, and food was sometimes hard to come by back then. On the flipside, in English tradition it’s brought into the great hall on a gold or silver platter, amidst fanfare by trumpeters—so I suspect it wasn’t the poor who ate the damned thing. I held off mentioning it here until today, because today is the feast of St. Stephen, and there is a Scandinavian tradition linking the boar’s head with St. Stephen. I also wonder if Good King Wenceslas had a boar’s head in the oven while he was wandering around on December 26th helping random peasants keep from starving and/or freezing.

The question does arise: What parts of a severed pig’s head can you actually eat? Wikipedia doesn’t take up that issue, so I had to sniff around a little, though I didn’t have to sniff far. Thrillist has a long-form explanation, which is probably a lot more than you’d want to know. TL,DR: Meat is muscle, and pigs have muscular jaws. So the jowls are the part mostly eaten, though the author cites his father, who ate pig’s brains for breakfast. I can’t scoff too hard: Our Fry’s supermarket sells jars of pickled pigs’ feet. Given what pigs walk around in, I think I’d prefer the head.

What surprised me most is that people are still eating pig heads now in the 21st Century, including the ears. Go ahead: You eat a pig’s head. I’ll watch.

Ummm, no, I won’t.

So Carol and I are stretching Christmas out a little. after—and not before—the day itself. It will be a mostly restful season. We still have a couple of Christmas movies to watch, and another couple of bottles of Van Der Haute spiked eggnog to sip. Again, Carol and I (and Dash too!) send our best wishes to all of you this Christmas season. The Christmas corollary to my deeply held principle that friendship is the cornerstone of the human spirit is simply this: At the bottom of it all, we are the gifts we give to one another!

Spiking a Christmas Song

Dec 24th, 2023
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

I was going to mess with an ancient Christmas song involving eating pig heads—surely you’ve heard of “The Boar’s Head Carol”—but that may have to wait for another day, ideally after everybody’s already had Christmas dinner.

No, this morning I want to write about something I learned just yesterday, about another Christmas song that Carol and I both like. We’ve never heard it on the radio, and we wouldn’t know about it at all if it weren’t on our very favorite Christmas CD: Christmas Portrait by the Carpenters (1978). The song is the medley “It’s Christmas Time/Sleep Well, Little Children.” It’s on none of our other numerous Christmas CDs, and my assumption has long been that Karen and Richard wrote it themselves, as it’s a little bit whimsical and in spots a little bit goofy.

I got curious yesterday and looked it up. The song was actually written by four men: Alan Bergman, Al Stillman, Victor Young, and Leon Klatzkin. It’s not new; in fact, it was first recorded in 1953. And when I read who first recorded it, I laughed out loud. It was Spike Jones!

Ok, I suspect young people will wonder who that is, and why his name made me laugh. Short form: Spike Jones (1911-1965) was the Weird Al Yankovic of the 1940s and 1950s. He took popular songs of other artists and recorded them in his own satirical style, with manic voices, gunshots, whistles, cowbells, hiccups, and other “special effects”. I came upon Spike Jones and His City Slickers when I was quite young; probably five or at most six. In that era my folks had a creaky old record player and a cabinet full of 78RPM records, including a few by Spike. His best known spoof song is probably “Cocktails for Two.” Note that the linked YouTube item is not a video of Spike and his band performing the song. It’s a sort of primordial music video, with Spike playing a bartender with many of the sound effects done by tipsy men at the bar. I’m sure sophisticates will roll their eyes, but when I was six I thought the song was hilarious.

So when I went looking for Spike’s version of “It’s Christmas Time” on YouTube, what I found is a cut from Spike’s Christmas album—and on this cut at least, Spike himself is notably absent. The song is played straight, with no silly sound effects, but rather a nice choir and lots of harmony. I imagine it’s Spike’s City Slickers band playing in the background. There’s a little bit of goofiness in some of the other cuts from that album, but for the most part it’s just Fifties Big Band vocals playing Christmas standards. Several are on YouTube; listen to a few if you’re interested.

I have to wonder what Spike thought of rock and roll, and what he might have done with it (or to it, more likely) had he not smoked himself to death at 53. He wasn’t a filker (like Bob Rivers of Twisted Christmas) and I wonder if he had imitators. If he did, I’ve never heard of them.

In the meantime, thanks to all of you for reading me in whatever form, and putting up with my occasional Spike Jones-ish metaphors like the Base Four Martians in my assembly language book. Have a fun Christmas, with good food, good wine, good friends, good music (even if it’s a little goofy in spots) and an occasional glance to the heavens, and a word of thanks to God, who gave us the ability to laugh and be silly as we make our way through His beautiful and extravagant creation!

Excerpted from Old Catholics: Christmas Eve II

Dec 24th, 2022
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

I have about 38,000 words down on a (mostly) mainstream novel about a tiny Old Catholic community in Chicago, which has a 1920s bungalow with an altar and a few pews in the livingroom, with the clergy (a bishop and a deacon) living in two small rooms on the second floor. A good part of what I have down takes place just before and on Christmas. I’ve published excerpts here before on Christmas Eve. I don’t entirely know how the rest of the story goes. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish it. But people have told me they’ve enjoyed the excerpts. So today on Christmas Eve, let us return to the Church of St. James & St. Julian of Norwich, just south of Devon Avenue at Campbell. The chapter posted on Christmas Eve 2018 comes immediately before this year’s chapter, so if you’ve never seen any of the story before, you might skim through them before reading further. There are mild fantastic elements in the story, especially a little old Polish lady who can read hearts and predict the future–and talk to dead people whom she considers saints. It’s a gentle, hopeful story about eccentric religious people who have no place in the larger Catholic world, banding together to worship God and heal one another of life’s inevitable traumas. Let me know what you think.

Bishop Hughes led them from the kitchen to a small round table standing a few feet in front of the bungalow-church’s front windows. The advent wreath Rob had seen on the Formica kitchen table on Gaudete Sunday was set on the table. All of the candles had seen some use, now that all four Sundays of Advent had passed. Rob remembered the ritual from his childhood: Family members took turns throughout Advent lighting the appropriate candle and reading the prayer before the evening meal. On Christmas Eve, the head of the household had candle duty. So it was that Bishop Hughes struck a wooden match on the side of its box and held it in his left hand while raising his right in blessing:

“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, we gather for one final meal before the birth of our Messiah, the Lord God Jesus Christ!” Bishop Hughes reached out with the match and lit the shortest purple candle, then the one beside it, then the pink candle of Gaudete Sunday, and finally the tallest purple candle. He held out his hands to Mrs. Przybysz and Mother Sherry, who took them and in turn reached out to take hands with the others to complete the circle.

Bishop Hughes tipped his head back, and spoke the prayer as he spoke nearly everything, with force and exultation:

“O Lord, stir up Thy might, we pray Thee, and come!
Rescue us through Thy great strength so that salvation,
Which has been hindered by our sins,
May be hastened by the grace of Thy gentle mercy.
Who livest and reignest for ever and ever! Amen!”

“Amen!” they replied in unison. Bishop Hughes turned and gestured toward the table. Eight places had been set, and atop each china plate was a folded card bearing one of their names-all but the setting at the foot of the table. It bore no card. As only seven people had gathered at St. JJ’s, Rob did wonder why the eighth place had been set at what was already a crowded table. He bent down to peek under the table, wondering if a card had fallen to the floor during the continuous bustle leading up to the Wigilia meal.

Bishop Hughes noticed Rob’s search for the card. “The place at the foot of the table is symbolic of those who share our love for God but who cannot be here with us in the flesh. Our departed, now in the bosom of the Most High; loved ones distant in space and time; the stranger who has no place at any table-“

“And saints,” Mrs. Przybysz interrupted as she bent to place a bowl of cucumber salad and a smaller bowl of horseradish on the table. “St. Ernie and St. Mona both showed up last year. Ernie warned me of evil brewing somewhere and had to leave to go look for it. Mona said we would need a much bigger table soon–and that the fish could have spent another few minutes in the pan.” The old woman sighed. “I do my best.”

“We all do our best,” Bishop Hughes said from behind her, smiling. “God asks no more of us than that. The challenge is to discover the inner strength that few of us realize that God has given us.”

Bishop Hughes pulled Mrs. Przybysz’s chair back. The old woman sat. Rob reflected that it was a signal. He pulled out Suzy’s chair, and helped her scoot in once she was settled. PJ pulled out Mother Sherry’s chair and did the same. Deacon Dan sat, and made a down-patting motion at Rob, who sat beside Suzy. PJ took the last seat, and set his battered leather briefcase on the floor beside him. He looked spooked, and kept glancing at the empty chair at the far end of the table.

PJ sat across from Suzy. Suzy took a library card and a pen from a pocket and wrote quickly in her lap. She poked Rob and handed him the card.

I feel something weird, she wrote. Rob made just a hint of a nod and handed it back. His first impulse was to grin. But…huh? An odd prickly feeling arose in the back of his head behind his ears, like something approaching–or something that was already among them, gathering power.

Rob shivered. He had told himself a thousand times that he did not believe in demonic forces. Whatever he felt did not feel evil. It felt powerful, not angelic but somehow rooted in the Earth beneath their feet. Hell was at the center of Earth, according to Dante and probably half of Christian humanity. Rob tried to focus, desperate to get away from the impression that something malign was creeping up on him.

Then, deep in his mind, a single word, stated quietly but with the conviction of everything high and holy, resolving Rob’s confusion plainly and beyond all question:

“No.”

Flashback: New Music on YouTube

Dec 14th, 2022
by Jeff Duntemann.
10 comments

I posted this entry last year on 12/23. I haven’t discovered a lot of new Christmas music since then, so I’ll repost the entry here in its entirety. This may become an annual thing, plus new tracks as I discover them. So earbuds on and enjoy!

As we close in on Christmas, I wanted to post a few items I’d found and liked on YouTube. Nearly all of it is Christmas music. (I’ll post some other non-Christmas discoveries in a future entry.)

And that, my friends, is precisely what Christmas music is for.

Now Available: “The Camel’s Question”

Dec 12th, 2022
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

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“Listen, young ones, for I, Hanekh, am a very old camel, and may not be alive to tell this tale much longer. Listen, and remember. If I leave nothing else behind but a spotty hide and yellow bones, I wish to leave this.”

So begins my latest ebook publication, “The Camel’s Question .” It’s now available on Amazon for 99c. It’s a short story, not a novel, and won’t taken you more than ten or fifteen minutes to read. There is a story behind the story, so what better place to tell it than here?

In the spring of 1966, when I was in eighth grade, we were tasked to write a Christmas story. It wasn’t required to be fiction, but it had to be about Christmas. So in longhand on yellow paper I wrote a story I called “Master Melchior and Me.” It was about the camels that carried the Three Wise Men to Bethlehem. We read our papers aloud in class, and when I finished reading mine, the class applauded. I had apparently touched a nerve.

I began with the title, which was inspired by a 1953 Disney animated short, “Ben and Me” about the humorous adventures of a mouse living in Ben Franklin’s house. I actually pictured it as Disney-style animation. Remember that I was 13, and “young for my age.” I was writing fiction already by 8th grade, and tended to picture it in my head as cartoon animation. I think I intended to make it humor, but as has happened so often with me, my subconscious had other ideas. The story was serious but upbeat, about a lesson one of the camels learned from the Christ Child.

Jump ahead a few years, to the fall of 1972. My father was battling cancer and losing, My poor mother was worn out by both working as a nurse, and nursing my father past the crude, debilitating, and ultimately futile radiation treatments. I wanted to give her something that would get her mind off her troubles for a few minutes. I was a junior in college and by then had taken a lot of literature courses. I realized that I had written a fable, which is an ancient literary form in which animals are made to think and talk like humans to put across a moral.

By 1972 I had already lost the original handwritten manuscript, so I started at the beginning and told it again, having in the meantime grown mostly to adulthood and written a lot of things, fiction and nonfiction. I didn’t like the title, as Master Melchior at best played a background role. But I didn’t know what to call it, so I kept the original title. The story, however, was lengthened, deepened, and in some respects moved a hair to one side of being a true fable.

It didn’t matter. I gave the typewritten manuscript to my mother as a Christmas gift, and she was deeply moved by it. The typescript went into her dresser, and Gretchen and I found it after mother died in 2000. I scanned it, OCRed it, cleaned it up a little (but surprisingly little, after 50 years of additional practice telling stories) and gave it a new title: “The Camel’s Question.” Of the three camels, two are fairly ordinary. The third–well, he’s a skeptic and a contrarian, and asks a great many questions about the world and its workings, and the men who dominate the world and the lives of camels.

One of those questions is a doozy.

And that’s where I hand the baton back to you. The story’s out there if you’re interested. It sat in a box for literally fifty years. Better late than never, I guess. It’s dedicated to my mother, who suffered far too much but never failed me in any way. It’s only the third story I’ve ever written with no fantastic elements in it.

Ok, ok. Talking camels. I did the best I could with what I had.

Thanks in advance to all who buy it and read it.

Daywander: On the Feast of Stephen

Dec 26th, 2021
by Jeff Duntemann.
5 comments

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“Good king winter Brussels sprouts are always crisp and even.” This was the sense my little sister made of a certain well-known Christmas carol, when she was maybe three, or four on the outside. We laugh about it to this day. It’s a song that’s just begging for a good firm filking, and I gave it a whack back toward the end of the 1990s. I published what I had here in 2004. The opener was strong:

Bit-king William Gates looked down, with his gopher Steven,
Westward out to Puget Sound, South to Portland, even.
Everyone with Windows played, up from Earth to Heaven;
All but one whose screen displayed Apple’s System Seven.

My filk engine ground to a halt after a couple more fragments. I wanted a comic dialog between Gates and the world’s last Mac user; maybe my right brain considered that a reach too far. However, this part is good enough to share:

“Bring me Windows! Bring me RAM! Bring me hard disks spinning!
We’ll show him the Mac’s a sham, and he’ll know who’s winning!”
Burdened thus they roared away, in the monarch’s Porsche…

I hit a wall when I tried to find a rhyme for “Porsche.” The names of expensive sports cars are peculiarly resistant to rhyming. What rhymes with “Bugatti”? “castrati?” I tried rhyming “Boxter,” “DeLorean,” and “Jaguar”. Nada. My 90’s rhyming dictionary app wouldn’t install under Win 7, even, so I scrapped it. And that’s where the filk stopped. Hey, being funny isn’t easy, and some jokes just don’t work, as much as we’d like them to.

Anyway. Carol and I had a wonderful, low-key Christmas together. We went to 10:00 Mass Christmas morning (at our house, midnight is for sleeping) which was our first in-person Mass in a long time. Bit by bit, normalcy is returning. Just don’t expect the panic peddlers to admit it. Tune the fools out.

Carol, remembering the hassles I’ve had trying to keep air in the tires of our hand cart, bought me a dual-power inflator. It’ll chug out air on either wall power or cigarette-lighter power. Before throwing the box away, I wanted to test it on something. So I took it out to the tack shed to harden up the hand cart’s presumably empty tires.

The cart’s tires were not empty. They were not even soft. They were still hard as a rock from the last time I filled them up at the gas station at 64th & Greenway. Figgers. I found a limp beachball in the back of the guest closet that inflated very nicely and had manners enough not to pop in my face. Carol’s sister’s family sent me a very nice Black & Decker cordless screwdriver. I had a similar Ryobi for a long time. Its battery died, and was not replaceable. That’s borderline criminal, since the tool is otherwise superb. (Though now that I have a working cordless driver, I’m going to pull the dead one apart and see if I can jigger in a new battery. I’ve done harder things. The hardest part may just be getting a replacement battery.)

We had a quiet dinner together, drank maybe a little too much egg nog, and cuddled while we watched A Christmas Story. We didn’t pull the trains out this year for a jumble of reasons. Next year, fersure. We’ve already cleaned up the canonical post-Christmas debris. St. Stephen is by legend the first martyr of Christianity. He may also be the patron saint of wrapping paper.

Carol and I wish all of you a blessed (and merry!) Christmas season–and remind you that it doesn’t have to be over yet. We’ll keep playing our Christmas CDs and keeping our decorations up and lit for another week or ten days. Christmas is important enough not to be here and gone in a day or two. That said, celebration must end eventually, lest celebration become ordinary and lose its luster.

Odd Lots

Dec 24th, 2021
by Jeff Duntemann.
16 comments

New Music on YouTube

Dec 23rd, 2021
by Jeff Duntemann.
11 comments

Way back in the summer I posted here about digging around on YouTube for new music, particularly in the realms of melody and harmony. I admit that an occasional hard rock song appeals to me for reasons unclear, a good example being the Gin Blossoms’ “Found Out About You.” The human brain is a weird business, but we’re all nerds here and you knew that.

So, as we close in on Christmas, I wanted to post a few items I’d found and liked on YouTube. Nearly all of it is Christmas music. (I’ll post some other non-Christmas discoveries in a future entry.)

And that, my friends, is precisely what Christmas music is for.

Christmas in the French Alps

Jan 5th, 2020
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

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(Start the saga with yesterday’s entry, if you haven’t read it already.) Once the river cruise boat saw us down the gangplank, the six of us hopped a train in Basel, Switzerland and took off for Geneva: Carol and I, Kathy and Bob, and Alexis and Brian. One of my friends had told me before we left that the run between those two cities was flattish and not especially scenic.

Well. There’s Nebraska flattish, and then there’s Switzerland flattish. Nebraska wins hands down. The land we crossed was rugged, and there were always mountains in the distance in one direction or another. It was a gorgeous ride, and our first look at rural Switzerland. I found myself thinking, if this is the flat part of Switzerland, what must the mountainous parts be like?

We’ll check into that next trip. Matt met us in Geneva, and we stopped for a while at his house before piling into several cars and heading across the border into France. The drive took an hour, and it wasn’t long as the crow flies. Not being crows, we had to deal with endless doglegs on mountain roads. But late afternoon we found ourselves in Morzine, a ski town in the foothills of the French Alps. Morzine itself is at 1000 meters (3300 feet) above sea level, but that’s just the town. All the real action is uphill. From Morzine you can take a dozen ski lifts a good deal higher.

For our second week in Europe we teamed up with several people in Carol’s extended family and rented an entire (small) ski chalet in Morzine. Everybody except for the old folks (like us) were skiers–and a couple of the old folks were too. Me, well, at 67 I’ve never broken a bone, and don’t intend to start now. You ski. We’ll watch.

The chalet was comfortable, if chilly at times on the first floor. The common areas were bright and cozy, with a wood-burning fireplace and lots of chairs and sofas:

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The dining room had huge windows overlooking the mountainsides. That is, when the weather was clear, we could see the mountainsides. Clear weather wasn’t the norm, so I took the shots when I could. This is the view from the dining room, on Christmas Day:

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And this was the view (without any zoom) through a nearby window that was typical of most of the rest of the week:

The ginormous dining table could easily seat 16, but we were only twelve plus a toddler. And the food, good lord, it was like nothing else we’ve ever had. Chef Michael prepared breakfast and dinner, and left fruit and fresh bread on the table for those who would still be in the chalet at lunchtime. This is a standard ski chalet practice, rooted in the assumption that skiers would not be coming back to the chalet for lunch. Carol and I bought ham, turkey, and cheese down in the town center for sandwiches.

Below is Christmas Eve dinner. After the meal we watched National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, a long-time family favorite. Most of us had brought Christmas Vacation-themed T-shirts, and some of us even dressed like the characters, especialy Grandma Wilma, Brian, and Alexis. (Carol bought the two of us T-shirts at our local thrift store. Mine was an XXL, but that’s what was there.)

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It snowed most days, if not a lot. (And Morzine knew how to deal with it.) Christmas Day, however, was crystal clear and brilliantly sunny. The whole bunch of us decided to take the big cable gondola up the mountain to Avioraz, a sort of satellite town that catered almost solely to skiers. Those who ski, skied. The rest of us wandered around looking in shop windows. The streets of Avioraz were (deliberately) under a foot or so of hard-packed show, and could be skied as easily as walked.

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Avioraz, as you might expect, consists mostly of ski chalets, ski shops, restaurants, and bars. We had lunch outside in bright sun–mercifully, there was no wind to speak of, so it was almost warm. Not long after lunch, while Carol and I were walking around (most of the gang had gone even further up the mountain on the ski lifts) I heard bells. And what should come around the corner but…a one-horse open sleigh! Egad, I’d been singing that song ever since I was a toddler, but until Christmas Day 2019 I had never actually seen a “one-horse open sleigh.” Maybe I just don’t get out enough.

We did get out Christmas night, and went to church in Morzine. It was the first time I had ever heard Mass in French, though we had heard it in German when we last visited Europe in 2002.

Sagely predicting that at least some of the week would suffer lousy weather, Matt brought a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of a Bob Ross mountains-and-trees painting. We dedicated a game table to it and got to work on the first day. We worked on it whenever there was nothing much else to do. I had never before attempted a puzzle that large (nor one with such vast expanses of blue) and didn’t contribute a great deal. Carol worked at it a lot, as did her sister Kathy. Brian’s wife Alexis had a near-magical touch with puzzles, and whatever time she spent on it greatly accelerated its assembly.

It took us until the middle of the last night we spent at the chalet, but at some point the last piece clicked into place and it was finished.

The skiers among us were gone a lot, but overall, we talked, laughed, drank good French wine, read, worked the puzzle, and entertained little Molly while her parents were out on the slopes. Molly’s parents, both her grandmothers, and her great-grandmother Wilma were all there, so Molly got plenty of attention. She’s starting to talk, and almost got the hang of “Uncle Jeff” during our week together.

Our trip home was long but uneventful: We flew from Geneva to London Heathrow, then from London to Dallas, where we had to retrieve our suitcases and go through customs. Carol got the two of us TSA’s Global Entry certification earlier last year, and so customs was trivial. We re-checked our bags and hopped a flight from Dallas to Phoenix.

At the airport we ordered up a Lyft ride. The driver told us that airport management was pushing ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft out of the airport, and that he would no longer be serving passengers after a whole raft of new fees and requirements are imposed later in January. The fees are being challenged in court, so the whole thing could collapse if the ruling goes against the city. I like Lyft and will miss it for airport trips, but technology has its way of getting past government interference. It’ll be interesting to see what ways eventually emerge.

Overall it was a wonderful trip, both on the water and in the mountains. I got behind on a number of projects (not least being the final bits of my novel) but it was worth it. On the upside, we didn’t put up much in the line of decorations here in Phoenix, so there was less to put away on our return. Alas, one of the first things that happened was the noisy death of our built-in 1500-watt microwave oven. We ran down to Walmart and picked up a smaller 900-watt unit for…$65. That’ll do until the JennAir repairman can make it out here.

In the meantime, we’re enjoying our (slightly chilly) Phoenix winter, and gradually getting over eight hours’ worth of jetlag. Happy new year to everyone here, and don’t believe the doomsayers: This is by far the best time in human history to be alive!

Five Countries, No Waiting

Jan 3rd, 2020
by Jeff Duntemann.
6 comments

Ok. Some waiting. It’s tough to pinball your way around five European countries in two weeks without a little bit of butt-in-chair time. Then again, it allowed us to catch our breaths. We just got back and I’m still jetlagged. Longitude is a bitch. (I’m only now realizing that keto flu may also be involved. More on this in a future entry.)

But the trip, wow: It was something else.

We’d been planning this for a long time: a Christmas gathering of Carol’s close-in family in Europe, where our younger nephew Matt is working for a few years. Matt, his wife Justine, and their daughter live in Geneva, Switzerland, which is at the extreme southwestern corner of the country. Their townhome wouldn’t hold us all, so we pooled funds and rented a small ski chalet in Morzine, France, about an hour’s drive west. The chalet came with a caterer so that we could enjoy being together without worrying about where to buy food and how to cook it. All told, twelve adults and one little girl spent a week at the chalet.

For us, however, the chalet was the endpoint. To celebrate fifty years together, Carol and I took a week’s river cruise down the Rhine, from Amsterdam to Basel, Switzerland. We’d been wanting to do a river cruise for years, and there’s no better excuse than to celebrate half a century of being in love. Carol and I flew to Amsterdam via London Heathrow. We were joined by Carol’s sister Kathy and her husband Bob, and our older nephew Brian and his wife Alexis.

The cruise began in Amsterdam. The ship was the Amastella, from Ama Waterways. It’s 443 feet long and 38 feet wide. There were 140-odd people on the cruise. I never got a really good shot of the ship because it was so long; definitely follow the link to the company site for a photo. River cruise ship dimensions are constrained by the locks along the river. We traversed ten in a week, and the Amastella barely fit.

We passed a lot of quaint little towns, most of which had their names painted on the river levees, as shown with Filsen, below:

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This part of the Rhine is castle country, and there were castles anywhere there were hilltops. Some were ruins. Some looked rebuilt or at least thoroughly repaired. Many were a mix of ruins and more modern construction. I pondered that I might possibly enjoy living in the one below—but would not enjoy the heating bills.

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Every day there was a stop, and we typically toured the local cathedral and the many Christmas markets. We attended a wine tasting in a wine cave in Rudesheim, which was the first time I had ever been in a wine cave. The wine itself was marginal (I much prefer reds to whites) but at least I was able to put certain recent news items in perspective. (No thanks, Phil.)

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Also in Rudesheim was Siegfried’s Mechanical Instrument Museum. My pictures were not terrific, but Atlas Obscura has a very nice article on it, with excellent photos. Before conventional music recording, to have music people either had to play it themselves (or have other people play it) or have access to self-playing instruments. The player piano is the best known of these, and they were still being made circa 1960, when the family down the block from us bought one.

An orchestrion is just that: not merely a player piano, but a whole player orchestra. The museum has several, including one that has and plays six violins, all mechanically. It’s done with a revolving circular horsehair bow. The violins are tilted against the bow when played. Drums, chimes, and other instruments are often present, and the overall effect, given that it’s all stored as holes in rolls of paper, is uncanny.

The lighting in the museum was not the best, and the only reasonable photo I got was of the Weber Maesto, which was at heart a sort of player pipe organ. There’s a YouTube video of one in operation, and the quality of the music is startling.

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In Speyer was something I had not heard about until just before the trip and did not expect: The Speyer Technical Museum. Even now it defies description: They have machines of all sorts on display, with an emphasis on vehicles and aircraft. (They do have some boats and two submarines–and 25 sewing machines. I counted.) You can walk through the bigger submarine, although if you’re the least claustrophobic, don’t. Bogglingly, they have an entire 747 mounted at an odd angle literally 75 feet in the air, and you can climb down a ladder into its baggage compartment. Not boggled yet? Although the stairs up to the 747 can be arduous, if you have a nose for thrills you can slide back down to the ground in a (long) stainless-steel playground tube. (My nose for thrills is notoriously absent. I took the stairs both ways.)

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Above is an aerial view from the 747 platform. Inside is an incredible, jam-packed collection of damned near anything that moves. (Below.) Lotsa cars, planes, boats, trucks, locomotives, and military vehicles, including a halftrack motorcycle. Oh–and a merry-go-round.

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A couple of snapshots can’t do it justice. If you’re ever anywhere near Speyer, do not miss it–and plan to spend a couple of hours, minimum.

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The architecture was an attraction no matter where we went. The building below (in Freiburg) is one of the coolest structures we saw. Alas, the tour guide told us what it is now (it may be an ex-rathaus) but I’ve forgotten.

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Among the cities we saw, Strasbourg (in France) was my personal favorite. Its cathedral is dazzling, especially its 3-story tall astronomical clock. I was unable to get decent pictures inside the Cathedral, but there’s an excellent article (with good photos) on Atlas Obscura. The clock shows planetary motions out to Saturn, phases of the Moon, sunrise and sunset times, and lots more, with all sorts of interesting mechanical gimmicks, including a mechanical rooster that crows, and a parade of the Apostles past the figure of Christ happening each day at solar noon in Strasbourg. And all this in a device built in 1843, with roots centuries before that.

I’ll get to the Christmas markets shortly, but in front of the Freiburg Cathedral there is a longstanding farmer’s market selling locally grown produce of all sorts, practically every day. Squash, carrots, bell peppers, leeks as long as my arm, and parsnips you could kill a man with:

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How all this produce survived to the end of December seems mysterious. I wonder how much can be had in late February? Greenhouses? If I’d known more German I would have asked.

I haven’t been in Europe a lot, and never over Christmas, so the Christmas market phenomenon took me a little by surprise. In virtually every town we visited, there was a Christmas market, and we saw most of them. It’s like nothing I’ve seen here: substantial booths selling Christmas food, ornaments, wine (especially gluhwein, which is warm mulled wine; white or red, your choice) jewelry, and handicrafts. German potato pancakes (kartoffelpuffers) and many kinds of sausages were everywhere.

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The handicrafts were generally winter clothing, including a booth that takes the cake for the most socks I have ever seen in a single 15 foot expanse, ever:

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In the absense of an English translation of the little sign above, I might have thought they were selling gummi socks candy. But no: In German, “gummi” means “rubber,” and “Strumpfe ohne Gummi” means “socks without rubber.” I’m not sure why that’s a selling point, but he had two signs to make sure no one misunderstood.

We didn’t buy much. I had brought plenty of socks, and whatever we bought we’d have to drag home in our suitcases, which were already plenty heavy.

Frieburg was the last stop on the cruise, and the next day we docked at Basel, Switzerland, having visited Holland, Germany, and France. One final note: The food on the Amastella was superb, by far the best food on any cruise we’ve taken. The service was wonderful, the staterooms comfortable. I needn’t have worried about souvenirs; the three or four pounds I gained on the boat were more than enough.

And that’s where I’ll stop for today, given how long this entry has turned out to be. Next entry: Christmas with family…in the French Alps!

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