My Ain Countrie

Photos above and below ~ Edinburgh, 2018

My Ain Countrie

The sun rises bright in France,
and fair sets he,
But he has lost the look he had,
in my ain countrie
Though gladness comes to many,
a sorrow comes to me
As I look o’er the ocean wide
tae my ain countrie

It’s no my ain ruin
that saddens aye my ee
But the love I left in Gallowa
wi bonnie bairnies three
My hamely hearth burns bonnie
an smiles my sweet Marie
I left my heart behind me,
in my ain countrie

The bird wins back tae summertime,
and the blossom tae the tree
But I’ll win back, no never,
tae my ain countrie
I’m leal tae high heaven,
that will prove leal tae me
An I will meet ye aa aricht soon,
frae my ain countrie

Allan Cunningham (1784 – 1842)

I remember asking my Grandfather Paul Lindsey, many years ago, if he knew an old folksong entitled "My Ain Countrie." It had to be further back than 1983, because that's when he died. I had come across the song title in a novel I was reading -- in junior high? senior high, college? At any rate, way back before search engines and youtube, so I asked my erudite grandpa instead. He was an expert at reciting old poems and songs, and I thought he knew everything, but this time he drew a blank: "I just don't know that one Honey Girl."

How I would have loved to learn the lyrics and hear the melody, but it didn't happen. Not until today! For whatever reason, after all these years, that title -- "My Ain Countrie" -- came floating through my mind again this afternoon, and within moments, thanks to 21st Century technology, the above rendition and the following information was available to me:

"My Ain Countrie
"A sad late Jacobite song of exile.

"The song was written by Allan Cunningham, an author and poet in the manner of Robert Burns, who was born at Keir, near Dalswinton, Dumfriesshire. Cunningham’s father had been a neighbour of Robert Burns at Ellisland, and Allan became a friend of James Hogg.

"Cunningham was asked by Robert Cromek to help gather old songs for Cromek’s book called 'Robert Hartley Cromek's Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song.' Cunningham successfully presented several of his own imitations of ballads and Jacobite songs as old originals. One of these was ‘My Ain Countrie.’

"The tune is said to be ‘A Gaelic air.’"

Now, if asked what novel I was reading when I first came across the reference to "My Ain Countrie," I would have said it was the funeral of Charlie (one of the Eight Cousins) in Rose in Bloom, However, my internet search tells me that this song appears nowhere in the works of Louisa May Alcott or even Sir Walter Scott.

All I have learned so far is that some version of this song was sung as a hymn at the funeral of Lizzie Borden! I don't think this is what I was reading about back in the 8th grade, or whenever it was. I think I would remember that.

In one of those mixed blessings, the music and lyrics have at last been revealed to me, even though I have lost the original reference. Perhaps it may yet be restored to my memory. Through the portal . . .

Oh To Be Jo March

Happy 184th Birthday to
"The Most Beloved American Writer"

By Norman Rockwell

Today's Google Doodle in honor of Louisa May Alcott

More in the Telegraph and on youtube

I intend to get back around to writing more about beloved author Louisa May Alcott and her beloved heroine Jo March; but until such time, there is this great Alcott Blog to look at, with lots of illustrations!

Stay!

At Dusk From My Hotel Window in San Francisco

“Stay is a charming word
in a friend's vocabulary.”

from Concord Days (p 73)
by Amos Bronson Alcott, 1799 - 1888
American transcendentalist, philosopher, and reformer

(occasionally misattributed to his daughter Louisa May Alcott)



"Then you'll stay, right? Please stay."
Stay, such a seductive word.

from Only Begotten Daughter (p 193)
by James Morrow, b 1947
American novelist of philosophical and theological satire,
science fiction and fantasy

STAY ~ SF Mural Arts

Orchard House

House of my girlhood dreams -- oh to be one of the March sisters!
Surely one of the best loved houses in America!
Orchard House ~ Concord, Massachusetts ~ Setting for Little Women

Favorite lines from Louisa May Alcott:

"Help one another is part of the religion of our sisterhood."
from An Old-Fashioned Girl, Chapter 13, "The Sunny Side"

"Housekeeping ain't no joke."
from Little Women, Chapter 11, "Experiments"

Way back before netflix streaming, I once heard a friend refer to “Commercial Quadrant Cleaning.” I thought it might be some fancy version of Merry Maids! But no! It was her term for cleaning one quarter of each room in her house, during each segment of tv commercials! She said it worked like a charm!

♥♥♥
Here's a more romantic view of tidying up,
my girlish idea of what it would be
like to live in charming Orchard House!

Thanks to my brother Aaron for giving me
this little tray back when we were kids

The Thrilling Quotidian

Sunrise

Thinking back to the beginning of this blog,
exactly five years ago today!
Andy Warhol: “You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.”

Bertrand Russell: "The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."

Brian Andreas: "It's hardest to love the ordinary things, she said, but you get lots of opportunities to practice."

Muriel Barbery: “When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?”
~ from The Elegance of the Hedgehog, 91 [see also Bouquet, Go, Factotum & The Tree Wins]

Susan Cheever: Little Women, Louisa May "Alcott's greatest work was so powerful because it was about ordinary things -- I think that's why it felt ordinary even as she wrote it. She transformed the lives of women into something worthy of literature. Without even meaning to, Alcott exalted the everyday in women's lives and gave it greatness."
~ from American Bloomsbury, 192

Arundhati Roy: “Perhaps it's true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house---the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture---must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstitutred. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.”
~ from The God of Small Things
[Thanks to my friend Sheri Reda for this one!]
Moonrise

“Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.”

William Martin
The Parent's Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for Modern Parents
[Thanks to Jason Dufair & Malcolm Eastler for this one!]

Never Fear

View across St. Stephen's Green, looking south.
~ Dublin, Ireland ~ ca. 1900 ~

"Crossing Stephen's, that is, my green . . . " (186)
from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce
In Little Women Next Door, by Sheila Solomon Kass: The shy cautious narrator, Susan, is watching the bold Alcott kids in admiration and envy as they climb a tall tree and swing from the branches. Watching Louisa May, Susan thinks to herself, "She seemed to know no fear. Her face was glowing with joy. . . I didn't care to tell them all how afeared I was of heights. . . She's braver than I am, I thought. I couldn't explain it. I wished I was different. . . . How did it happen that I was born scared? And they were born brave?" (50).

In Saffy's Angel, by Hilary McKay: The brother, Indigo, is reading a book about the polar explorers: "Nobody Indigo knew had such adventures. . . . They were none of them as strong as steel and brave as tigers, and the least strong and brave of all of them (as Indigo knew only too well) was Indigo himself. Indigo thought about it, and it seemed to him that he had been born afraid of almost everything. He made a list. He wrote down on a piece of paper all the things that frightened him most, and he set about to cure himself" (24).

I wonder what's the odds that I would come across two such similar thoughts in two such different stories? Did these authors create these characters to help "kids" like me deal with their inner coward? Is being "born afraid" (and carrying that cowardice with you into your adult life) a typical childhood worry that authors of adolescent fiction deal with in their novels? It has usually seemed the opposite -- that the kids are all so remarkably fearless, like Nancy Drew and Jo March and the Melendys and Harry Potter & his precocious friends.

But, now that I think about it, maybe I wasn't born afraid. I can't recall being either especially brave or especially cowardly as a kid. Maybe I was just somewhere in between; maybe I was just -- could it be? --normal!

I guess I was fearful of my swimming lessons at age 5 and fearful of my mother's disapproval by age 10 or so. And some real fear set in at age 15 when I took drivers' ed and saw those horrible movies and then had to actually drive a car and be filled forever with the anguish that I would cause another's death (therein lies the root of all my driving anxiety; and also the explanation for why I've never suffered from a fear of flying, i.e., because I'm not the one in the driver's seat, not the one responsible for all those other lives). Fear of driving was soon followed by fear of sex and fear of standing up for myself; and, before I knew it, I had carried all that anxiety from my teens right into my adulthood.

Maybe its still not too late to be brave like Louisa May Alcott / Jo March, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and Stephen Dedalus, who names his only weapons, "the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning" -- and then declares: "You made me confess the fears I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too. . . . I will take the risk" (247, from my very old edition of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce).

Whatever Stephen says, I am intrigued by the possibility that, in manner of Cognitive Behavior Therapy, the declamation of his positive mantra is enough to increase his courage and confidence -- and nearly enough to convince his orbital frontal cortex that indeed he is not afraid. He enumerates the very things he fears the most and, by denouncing, conquers them. You know, it just might work.

Long live Irish lit and neuro - psychology!