More Ruminations

January 19th
At some point tonight a shadowy figure will make its annual pilgrimage to Edgar Allan Poe’s gravesite to mark his birthday. Today is also Robert E. Lee’s birthday, strange bedfellows dates can make. Apparently Poe’s benefactor missed this year. Ironic, Lee’s birthday being the day after Martin Luther King’s.

I’m reading short stories by Michael Bryson. In one he lists the fact that Molson doesn’t sell Canadian in Quebec. Well, Dah! They know their market. It wouldn’t be the first time a product was restyled to suit a local agenda. In the US Lawrence Hill’s Book of Negroes goes by the title ‘Somebody Knows my Name’.
Outside my window a mockingbird has been serenading me off and on all day. It is with great sadness I just read of the death at 63 of Kate McGarrigle, the younger sister in the duo, The McGarrigle Sisters. Their ‘Talk to Me of Mendocino’ was constantly in my mind last year as I camped near Fort Bragg, California with the Redwoods at my back and the Pacific Ocean before me. Aside from owning all their CD’s I have had the privilege of attending two live concerts, one in the intimate Studio Theatre at Harbourfront in Toronto Ontario. Watching them perform live was like seeing one brain in two bodies. They finished one another’s sentences and sensed exactly what the other was about to do without ever looking that way. Their symbiosis was uncanny. Their folk stylings defined an era and I admire them for taking on the music business on their own terms taking a break to raise their families and releasing albums when they were ready, touring in a limited fashion when they felt like it. My sympathies are with Rufus and Martha.
Just read the lead article in this past week’s Onion, that paragon of Faux News published right here in Austin. The Headline reads ‘Gay Teen Worried He May Be Christian’.
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/gay_teen_worried_he_might_be
The story may be a put-on but even so it puts matters in the right perspective.