Rhyme, Meter, Music and Memory
The Melba Notebooks, Chapter X
Dec 26, 1997 Sophie: Di, Ja and Dot and I were talking about an idea. We’d like to try playing some music they like for an hour or two, three times a day. I know you hate most of it, like especially the opera. And Gilbert and Sullivan. Yowling don’t you say? Incidentally Ja will be here for Mom’s birthday. Dot or I will meet hm at the airport. I stuck in what we talked about the music from Ja’s email. Sorry, he’s dense sometimes!
It’s like food for them. Music and poetry are food for their mind. For whatever reason, people seem to remember music and songs from their youth longer than anything else. With Bob and Melba especially, poetry is the same way. Sometimes, when I find them stuck to the dining room table like barnacles looking at stuff they think they are reading, (not!), I can usually get their juices going by asking Dad to quote a poem, like a Kipling. He can’t do it long because he starts to cry. Then Mom takes over. They will go on that way for an hour. When he forgets she fills in and vice versa. Actually she rarely forgets though.
Ja forgets the real stuff: You’ll have to adjust Dad’s hearing aid for him, or use the little pocket radio aid. Otherwise you need to play it so loud you and the whole town will go crazy or deaf or both. So I left some earplugs by the record player. They are wax and work pretty well.
I’ve put most of the records in three piles on the counter: try playing one in each pile about mealtime every day, before or after doesn’t matter:
1) The Gilbert and Sullivans, the Rancheros and Panamanian stuff
2) The Operas
3) The symphonies.
The dose (Ha!) is one or two records, three times a day. No, not by mouth or any other place. Thanks, Di. Like Ja says YAAGDJ. You Are A Goddamn Jewel. (double ha!)
Dec 29, 1997 3PM Di: Well this jewel may crack. They are listening to something awful. But it’s not making them sick. They sure are tough. It’s like rotten milk or old food, they are fine with it! My question is, why are you trying to get me to quit!? What did I do to deserve this.
Dec 31, 1997 9 AM Di: Whooopie.
Jan 3, 1998 Dot: HAPPY BIRTHDAY MELBA!!! # 90!
9:30 Di: Up, bath, Dressed. Like you said, we’ve been listening to all that noise I can’t stand most every day since Christmas. I may lose my mind, what’s left. But they like it. Problem is I have to play it so loud it cooks my brain through the wax ear plugs.
PM: Ja: Great, Di! Take some of the B vitamins for your brain. Today they were talking about the Philippines. Baguio. Tayabas. The earthquake at a Manila hotel when they moved outside to sleep on cots. The guy who polished the wooden floor by skating around on dried coconut husks. The Grete Maersk* freighter that took them home, (1938?) stopping in Hong Kong where a beggar said to me
“ No mommie no poppy no whisky soda”; money with holes; a tilted cable car up a steep hill; and snow on Xmas eve at sea.
Bob never speaks of troubles. Or of accomplishments either; for example he never mentions his central role in the theft of the ‘Stanford Axe’. I hear of that from the news media years later. In the Philippines, I recall the open boat trip to Tayabas; piles of coconuts, a swampy ride on the back of a water buffalo to a remote jungle mine, geckos, the log ladder up to the bamboo structure on stilts, where there was no need to sweep because anything that dropped on the ‘floor’ fell through the empty space between the bamboo slats. I remember dad treating an Igorot miner’s tropical ulcer with a dilute Clorox solution. Or maybe lye?
But more significant was what I didn’t know: There was a sit- down strike by the hard rock underground miners of the Tayabas gold mine. Bob made the mistake of defending them to the administration. He was soon found lacking.. That was why we went home on the Grete Maersk, and the reason we were not in the Philippines at the start of WWII, and why he could not find a job as a mining engineer for the next four years, having to work as an underground miner himself. He was given the job of drilling blast holes and placing dynamite in Holden Washington, one of the largest underground Copper mines in the country then. There he finally met the diamond drill manufacture E J Longyear, who hired him for work consistent with his training. I didn’t know about much of this until the music dredged up so much of the past and exposed it to the present.
* The Danish shipping line of Maersk is still one of the world’s greatest commercial fleets. The first Grete Maersk that carried us to the US was built in 1937, with only a 9000 metric tonne displacement capacity. It took on a small cadre of passengers as many similar cargo ships still do. However it is long gone. The new Grete Maersk is a container ship with a width of 43 meters and draft of 15 meters, carries about 8000 containers, with a a gross register tonnage (GRT) of approximately 98 thousand metric tonnes.
Rhyme, Meter, Music and Memory
Chapter X , Melba Notebooks
Dec 26, 1997 Sophie: Di, Ja and Dot and I were talking about an idea. We’d like to try playing some music they like for an hour or two, three times a day. I know you hate most of it, like especially the opera. And Gilbert and Sullivan. Yowling don’t you say? Incidentally Ja will be here for Mom’s birthday. Dot or I will meet hm at the airport. I stuck in what we talked about the music from Ja’s email. Sorry, he’s dense sometimes!
It’s like food for them. Music and poetry are food for their mind. For whatever reason, people seem to remember music and songs from their youth longer than anything else. With Bob and Melba especially, poetry is the same way. Sometimes, when I find them stuck to the dining room table like barnacles looking at stuff they think they are reading, (not!), I can usually get their juices going by asking Dad to quote a poem, like a Kipling. He can’t do it long because he starts to cry. Then Mom takes over. They will go on that way for an hour. When he forgets she fills in and vice versa. Actually she rarely forgets though.
Ja forgets the real stuff: You’ll have to adjust Dad’s hearing aid for him, or use the little pocket radio aid. Otherwise you need to play it so loud you and the whole town will go crazy or deaf or both. So I left some earplugs by the record player. They are wax and work pretty well.
I’ve put most of the records in three piles on the counter: try playing one in each pile about mealtime every day, before or after doesn’t matter:
1) The Gilbert and Sullivans, the Rancheros and Panamanian stuff
2) The Operas
3) The symphonies.
The dose (Ha!) is one or two records, three times a day. No, not by mouth or any other place. Thanks, Di. Like Ja says YAAGDJ. You Are A Goddamn Jewel. (double ha!)
Dec 29, 1997 3PM Di: Well this jewel may crack. They are listening to something awful. But it’s not making them sick. They sure are tough. It’s like rotten milk or old food, they are fine with it! My question is, why are you trying to get me to quit!? What did I do to deserve this.
Dec 31, 1997 9 AM Di: Whooopie.
Jan 3, 1998 Dot: HAPPY BIRTHDAY MELBA!!! # 90!
9:30 Di: Up, bath, Dressed. Like you said, we’ve been listening to all that noise I can’t stand most every day since Christmas. I may lose my mind, what’s left. But they like it. Problem is I have to play it so loud it cooks my brain through the wax ear plugs.
PM: Ja: Great, Di! Take some of the B vitamins for your brain. Today they were talking about the Philippines. Baguio. Tayabas. The earthquake at a Manila hotel when they moved outside to sleep on cots. The guy who polished the wooden floor by skating around on dried coconut husks. The Grete Maersk* freighter that took them home, (1938?) stopping in Hong Kong where a beggar said to me
“ No mommie no poppy no whisky soda”; money with holes; a tilted cable car up a steep hill; and snow on Xmas eve at sea.
Bob never speaks of troubles. Or of accomplishments either; for example he never mentions his central role in the theft of the ‘Stanford Axe’. I hear of that from the news media years later. In the Philippines, I recall the open boat trip to Tayabas; piles of coconuts, a swampy ride on the back of a water buffalo to a remote jungle mine, geckos, the log ladder up to the bamboo structure on stilts, where there was no need to sweep because anything that dropped on the ‘floor’ fell through the empty space between the bamboo slats. I remember dad treating an Igorot miner’s tropical ulcer with a dilute Clorox solution. Or maybe lye?
But more significant was what I didn’t know: There was a sit- down strike by the hard rock underground miners of the Tayabas gold mine. Bob made the mistake of defending them to the administration. He was soon found lacking.. That was why we went home on the Grete Maersk, and the reason we were not in the Philippines at the start of WWII, and why he could not find a job as a mining engineer for the next four years, having to work as an underground miner himself. He was given the job of drilling blast holes and placing dynamite in Holden Washington, one of the largest underground Copper mines in the country then. There he finally met the diamond drill manufacture E J Longyear, who hired him for work consistent with his training. I didn’t know about much of this until the music dredged up so much of the past and exposed it to the present.
* The Danish shipping line of Maersk is still one of the world’s greatest commercial fleets. The first Grete Maersk that carried us to the US was built in 1937, with only a 9000 metric tonne displacement capacity. It took on a small cadre of passengers as many similar cargo ships still do. However it is long gone. The new Grete Maersk is a container ship with a width of 43 meters and draft of 15 meters, carries about 8000 containers, with a a gross register tonnage (GRT) of approximately 98 thousand metric tonnes.
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