Futile Horn

05.06.2003 - 12:48 am (sorting it all out)

I've gotten so into this Latin thing that today I headed over to the nuntii Latini website; yes that is right, a summary of the Finnish news brought you in Latin. You can get it read to you in RealAudio, but the woman's accent is rather strange (as if I understood spoken Latin anyway). I read one article, something about how this year's May Day was a big flop because a storm of rain and snow kept everyone inside. Plus of course, the holiday hasn't had the same political flavor since the fall of communism and is now mostly a celebration of spring. I had no idea what the custodes publici were. I mean, "public guards" but what's that? the police? mall security? The next headline says something about how Finland has the cleanest water on earth. Take that Poland Spring!

So I've been playing this cruel unyielding acoustic guitar for a month or two now. Today I decided for kicks I'd try on my old electric. Ooooooh, it's like someone took thirty pound weights off my ankles and told me to go run. Wheeeee! ... Could use a few more strings though. Hmm.

We found among my grandfather's things a construction paper folder with the words "My First Dollar" written in multicolored letters on the outside. It contains a 1899 Silver Certificate. It's marked, folded, and somewhat tattered but completely intact. The center of the front face features an eagle, and small portraits of Lincoln and Grant flank it below. (It looks like this actually.) I found it after my mother unknowingly dropped while sorting out his cufflinks and other jewelry. My grandfather was born in 1913, and I was under the impression that dollar bills weren't normally kept in circulation long enough for it to make it him, but perhaps it was different when the U.S. Treasury had actual precious metals backing the currency. In any case, my mother was surprised to see at as the rest of us, so I don't know if it was the first dollar earned or merely given, or that it in fact was the first dollar of my grandfather and not somebody else. However although the lettering on the folder seems to be in the style my grandfather would use.

My grandmother suffers from dementia and still doesn't understand that my grandfather is gone. Because my grandmother would get up too many times in the middle of the night, they've had twin beds the last few years, and my grandmother still turns his down every night and waits for him to come home. At the wake she insisted it wasn't my grandfather (to be fair you had to look at him a while to recognize him), and I don't know what she supposed we dragged her to the funeral for. There's nothing to be done of course. She didn't understand when my aunt died 25 years ago either.

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn