A Festival Of Nine Lessons and Carols, Twenty Five Years On

Most children, if asked, would say that their favorite day of the year, with the possible exception of their birthday, would be Christmas – or a day like it in other of the world’s religions, when families gather and gifts are exchanged.

If you asked me now, I would say that my favorite day is Christmas Eve, because that is the day of anticipation, a state which is always more tantalizingly enjoyable than the day of realization which is just around the corner. But there is another more important reason.

Twenty-five years ago, I was lucky enough to be part of beginning what appears – now - to be an American holiday tradition, with the first live broadcast in the United States of “A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols” from the chapel of King’s College at Cambridge University, in the old and very beautiful town of Cambridge, about an hour’s train ride North of London.

On Christmas Eve afternoon at 3:00 pm in England (10:00 a.m. in New York), in the chapel commissioned by its founder, King Henry VI and finished by King Henry VIII, the choir of fourteen men and sixteen boys sing carols, interspersed by lessons from the Old and New Testaments read by members of the community and by prayers offered by the Dean of the Chapel.

In 1979, it was not clear that such a presentation would find an audience…a live broadcast from another country and a service not widely known in our country, at a somewhat difficult hour, by a choir of men and boys which produces a sound somewhat alien to American ears, and lessons read in strange accents.

Moreover, we had to surmount technical challenges from AT&T, difficulties in funding the broadcast, and the challenge of our first international live relay.

But we were blessed (and I mean blessed) with assistance from a variety of sources. Charles Watson of AT&T pushed his staff to solve their technical problems; Joe Gwathmey, then of National Public Radio and now of Texas Public Radio, arranged NPR’s fiscal support; an old friend , Walter McCarthy made another significant contribution, and NPR’s technical staff solved all the international linkage problems. (Minnesota Public Radio’s staff took over the following year and have overseen the broadcast since…from the days of transatlantic cable, then satellite, and now ISDN lines.) John Haslam was the BBC producer with whom I laiased (that loverly Brit term) who could not have been more helpful and has become a very good friend.

That first broadcast ran long, but as there was nothing scheduled on NPR’s single line distribution system after the presumed end of our program, we managed to present the whole service. As I remember, 78 stations took that first broadcast; most of them liked it, but there were a few doubters.

From the letters which poured in after Christmas, I was able to develop a sense of hope that the broadcast might have attracted enough interest and support to continue. One woman in Minnesota wrote that “I turned on the radio while doing meal preparations for Christmas Day. I was so enthralled I burned the sweet potatoes. I didn’t care.” Another wrote about listening to the service as she drove from her family to her parents’ home. Her mother had died the night before, and she was going to be with her father for a very sad Christmas. The broadcast was her Christmas service that year. (A year later she wrote to say that her father had come to her home, and they had all listened to the broadcast.) A Californian wrote to say that he listened to the broadcast while he meditated on world peace on a beach in Malibu. Over the years I was involved with the broadcast, there were many letters like that, and they, along with the response from radio stations, made it clear that for a large group of people, Christmas with the broadcast had become not just a tradition, but an important, nearly essential, tradition.

There are have been other more subtle results of the broadcast from King’s. One can find many more local versions of the King’s College service offered throughout our land, some of the English carol tunes have wormed their way into our voices, and - in Cambridge – the number of attendees from the USA at Evensong and Sunday services seems to have increased enormously in the last several decades.

A broadcast tradition, however long lived, is never a guarantee that it will continue. So enjoy the broadcast and then support your public radio station by way of appreciation.

Each Christmas Eve, I am grateful for having been part of the American beginnings of “A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols “ broadcast in the USA, thrilled that so many people have taken the service into their hearts, and deeply appreciative of the friendships which have been a great indirect benefit of my involvement with the broadcast.

Whether you listen to the service, celebrate another kind of holiday, or just remain undecided about it all, I hope your participation in the festivities of the season bring you great joy.

President Kennedy, Four Decades Removed

It doesn’t seem forty years on since the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Time passes more quickly with each decade of life, and the distance of years brings with it a certain residue and altered light which affect one’s perception of those events, and under no circumstances is it easy to feel the same awful feelings in the gut and and head and heart after hearing the news and watching the sequence of events through that weekend, the funeral and the aftermath of it all.

That late autumn day, I was teaching at a school in northwestern Ohio, and it was during sixth period that “the news” began to race around the building. The reactions were those of numbness, tears, a few people laughing – almost hysterically (we hoped) for reasons we never understood . surfaced.

The head of school called for a special assembly. I don’t remember what he said, and I don’t remember the rest of that day. Like everyone else, I was in shock, but we knew it was our job to keep things on an even keel for the students. We did, but only barely.

I had only seen John Kennedy once. He came to a meeting at Harvard shortly after his election. He had been on holiday in Florida and arrived in a black Cadillac limousine with a few Secret Service people. He announced that he was there to get our grades raised, laughed with us, and disappeared into University Hall. He was young, tanned, the picture of good health, and he was our hope for the future. The campaign had been long, grueling, and was not decided until the middle of the next day.

As one of the few admitted liberals in my family, I had supported Kennedy and could not imagine anyone voting for Richard Nixon. My mother reminded me that she cast her first vote for the Socialist Norman Thomas, and my father, wisely, said nothing it all. I considered both responses some sort of forgiveness.

But now Kennedy’s short tenure had come to a tragic end, and Lyndon Johnson was – almost unimaginably – our President….from Texas, rough and ready, with a complex, if not devious, political history of his own.

Most of us in America spent the weekend stuck to our television sets watching events unfold in Dallas, Washington, and Virginia. It was horrific, depressing, and yet there was something noble in act, fact, and restrained grace in the transition from one administration to another under such difficult circumstances, thanks in large measure to the quiet leadership of Jacqueline Kennedy.

One memory haunts me from that weekend. I am convinced it is true, but it is so unbelievable that I wonder about it still. Richard Nixon, by then back in the legal profession in New York, was interviewed at an airport on his way to Washington for the funeral. Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin, had just been shot by a then unidentified person, and the reporter gave Mr Nixon this shocking news and sought his reaction.

Nixon looked into the camera with a serious expression and said, “Two rights do not make a wrong….I mean, two wrongs don’t make a right.” I turned to the neighbor watching with me in my apartment and asked him whether we had both heard the same thing. He agreed that we had, and we fell into a long silence.

Something broke in America with the death of President Kennedy, and it has never been fixed. In truth, I doubt it can never be fixed, and after all these years, I cannot say for certain what that something was. Perhaps a sense of hope that with hard work and by working together, we could construct a just and fair society for all Americans.

One should be grateful for the clarity of youth; it is far different from the clarity one finds decades and decades later.

Good Therapists Can Be Found In Surprising Places

My mother loved dogs, and when she would take “the challenge of this decade” to the veterinarian for a check-up or shots, upon her return she would be positively ebullient.
“Trig got a shot, and I had a chance to visit my therapist.”

She was not referring to a local mental health practitioner but to her dog’s veterinarian. It seemed that a visit to old Dr Palmer provided Mother with an attitudinal boost of some sort, something beyond what the companionship of her four-footeds brought to her soul.

Old Dr Palmer, as he was universally known, was in practice with his son, from whom he was quite different. The father was a Scot – no, not a Scottish descendant, but a Scot – and he abhorred scientific language and any show of pretense. I remember once taking a dog to be seen, and Old Dr Palmer examined him carefully and then said in his deep brogue, “ Aye lad, he’s stook.”

“What?” I said.
“He’s shtook.”
“Shtook, what’s shtook” I asked.
Stook..con--sti--pated,” responded Dr Palmer, making me feel like the village idiot – something I was then when it came to the dialects of the Scots.

But to get back to my story. In my late teens I was quite amused by my mother’s view of her veterinarian as therapist.

Decades passed, and then one fine day, a friend gave me a gift certificate for a hair cut and related activities at a local beauty salon. Full of trepidation, I darkened the door of this place and was placed into the hands of another Karen, a young woman from North Dakota.

If you’ve looked at the picture of me on the home page of my company’s web-site, you’ll see in a nanosecond that I have no hair to cut. I might as well take on the career of “Friar Tuck” in any production of “Robin Hood.”

Undaunted, Karen gave me a shampoo and cut my hair, all with a straight face, and finished up with a facial. I looked into a mirror and notice that many of the gray hairs had disappeared and that I appeared energized, and I felt terrific.

On the drive home, I thought of my mother and her therapist old Dr Palmer and realized that I had found my equivalent. Karen cut my hair for a number of years and then moved with her husband to the West, and I returned to the inexpensive old-time barber shop across the street from my office with its aged copies of Popular Science and such. It was OK, but not OK, if you know what I mean.

Last year, "Karen of My Scalp" moved back to the Twin Cities, and even though there’s less hair to cut and it’s still expensive, the benefits far outweigh the costs.

And if the day comes when there is no hair on my head, I’ll still make my appointments with Karen for a dome facial and polish, because the therapy she provides will still be worth it.

Mother was right, as usual – there’s nothing like a good therapist, especially when they’re not in those “helping professions.”

On Computer Glitches

Most of us who’ve been around computers for a long time – let’s say 10+ years – are familiar with the following: Your computer has been behaving like a champ, and one morning, you sit down in front of the keyboard and discover that everything has turned to a combination of suet and cheese.

Nothing makes any sense, so you start down the familiar trails of detecting what might have gone wrong. In many cases, this takes hours upon hours, and when the glitch comes to light, you are embarrassed to confess to yourself that

a. you hit the wrong key or
b. you dumped the wrong software or
c. you should never have let Uncle Charlie check his email on your machine or
d. you operated the machine while under the influence and should have arrested yourself or
e. you might just have taken a second or two to read the damn manual (or download it

and read it, the more common situation nowadays.

What’s far worse, far far worse, is the realization that the solution was right there, fourteen inches from the end of your nose, and you didn’t see it until you had raced around all the well-trod “paths of fruitlessness.”

When you report this problem and its solution, you never, repeat never, talk about the amount of time expended in the search for the solution. Rather, one talks about the elegance of the solution, the incredible (and nearly instantaneous) detective work required.

One never admits that one was like Miss Marple lost in her own village, Poirot on a bender, or Lovejoy unable to identify an east Anglian antique. As the probable villain in the cause, one chooses to be the hero in the solution…easy when one works alone.

Or am I the only one who suffers from this occasional affliction?

Something similar happened yesterday. I had a new satellite dish installed last week. Because it’s still winter here, the crew used a dish in a bucket of concrete as a stop-gap until the ground thaws, and a permanent installation can be made. Worked like a champ, it did…until yesterday morning.

I made sure the dish hadn’t blown over and then began blaming myself, pretty much working through a through e above, just in a slightly different context. After hours of looking at satellite azimuths and transponder assignments, I was getting absolutely nowhere, and frustration was mounting rapidly.

Time for a break, I thought, and I walked out to the end of the drive for the mail. It was a pleasant day, and I noted that much of the winter’s snow had melted as I came back to the house.

Ba-dum- bum!

The snow had melted, changing the position of the dish, and throwing it out of alignment. Ten minutes and some compass work later, the problem was solved. (OK, so it was thirty minutes – give me a break, would you?)

Fifty years ago, I had a math teacher who thrummed the following into our heads: “RTP,” he said. “Read The Problem.” We generally got this when we couldn’t figure out how to structure one of those algebra problems involving freight trains going from Atown to Bville at certain rates of speed. “RTP” was good advice then, and now, and thought I haven’t forgotten it, I occasionally believe that it can be ignored on occasion. At my peril.

The teacher is gone, but the good advice remains. I had let what I thought the problem was define my possible solutions. I hadn’t read it with sufficient clarity to understand all of it.

“RTP. Read The Problem.” Pass it on.

Remembering Paul Wellstone

A year ago this week, the senior Senator from Minnesota, Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash, along with his wife, daughter, several campaign workers, and the flight crew. He was approaching the end of his re-election campaign and decided to attend the funeral of a friend in northern Minnesota.

It seemed that people either loved or hated Wellstone, reminiscent of the feelings many of my parent’s generation had about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I realize that hate is a strong word, but I thought about it and decided it was the right word.

The reasons for hating Senator Wellstone were (and very sad to say, are):

He was a politician.

He was a liberal.

He was an inveterate optimist.

He was Jewish.

He was balding.

He was short.

He was a former amateur wrestler.

He was a former college professor.

He was enthusiastic about damn near everything.

He enjoyed being with people.

He liked the give and take of the debate.

He stood up for what he believed in.

He never gave up.

Like Roosevelt, he was “a happy warrior,” and like it or not, we are the better for having had both of them pass through and affect our lives.

It appears that we live in a country where debate has two colors – black and white. No room for gray, for complexity, for subtlety. Maybe one day we’ll realize that our lives are not thirty second tv commercials, that we need to think about the issues facing our families and our country, and that we need more than another “suit” to pour the clichés of the day into our ears in the perpetual search for our vote.

Wellstone was an original, and we are still searching for his successor. Sad to say, it looks like it’ll be a while.

Preparing For Winter

We had a very dry summer, followed by a somewhat dry autumn; the leaves lacked their usual brilliant color, but under the circumstances, they did exactly what they were supposed to do – warn us that “it” was coming again.

“It” is the cold and the snow and all the little things which hurry along under their skirts, and these have to do mainly with warmth and safety. If you’ve lived here long enough, you don’t think that much about doing: A day arrives, there is the barely audible “click” in your brain, and everything changes.

The garage is organized so that an automobile will actually be able to fit inside it. This is made possible by moving herbicides to the warm basement of the house so that they will be “safe,” and useable again next Spring when you move them back to the garage so that you can find them again in the autumn to put back in the basement. Unless they have reached their “use by date,” in which case you throw them out recycle them appropriately.

Back in the corner of the garage, the snow tires have sat since the Spring. Now is the time to get them into the back of the car to take them to the tire place where a husky lad will put them on the car and place the “summer tires” in the back of the car. This gives you an early season opportunity to hurt your back or at least say that you hurt your back. What brings relief to your back is to find someone else to do the snow blowing or shoveling. Money is likely involved, but this is a good investment – in fact, among the best.

The same goes for removing the fallen leaves from the yard. Find somebody who will do it for you. Write the check. Complain for no more than three days about the cost, and give daily thanks for the fact that you have chosen to provide employment in our difficult economy and no longer choose to do it yourself.

I have some driveway markers, basically green poles on a spring which help keep people on the driveway. They are an attractive dark green color until you try to find the base in the grassy ground – also dark green. If you wait until the grass is no longer dark green, the ground may be too hard to dig the hole for any new markers. There will come a point when you leave the markers in the garage next to the tires and await perfect installation conditions which never seem to arrive.

The winter clothes which may have been properly stored in the basement (or may not have if summer cold weather arrived as the clothes were finding their own way down a couple of floors). If the latter situation applies, be sure to check the laundry and other nearby locations. Once the clothes are returned to their winter locations, check them for wear, newly observed design and styling flaws, and then put them in the place where they probably should be all the time anyway.

Shovels, ice chippers, bags of sand, and similar tools of the season need to be placed by the front door, and when this happens you are reminded to turn off the outside faucets. In order to do this, one frequently has to step over the winter clothes which were not put away, so one must be careful.

Winter requires an array of footwear for warmth and safety. When I was a kid, we had black galoshes with metal buckles. Ugly and cold, but at least they kept your feet dry. Nowadays you can choose between ugly insulated boots, boots with felt insulation, so big you have to walk like a giant in them, slip-on boots with hearty soles, thingies with sharp points that slip over boots for walking on ice. Beyond that, there are walking sleds (“Sparks, as they call them in Scandinavia), walking poles, cross country skiis, snow shoes.

Others who live here believe that engines are essential in the winter – snowmobiles and similar contrivances. Many of us believe that these provide too much pleasure in the winter and are creatures of the devil, environmentally wasteful, and so, in a word, purposeless. I’m sorry to report that these machines and their brethren seem to be a very popular way of dealing with early darkness and perennial cold and snow – there is almost always the so.

The furnace needs to be checked and tuned, supplies of cocoa and whisky to be aggregated (part of blizzard prevention), extra blankets put on or near the beds, the battery powered radio located in case of power failure), the safety supplies for the car (blankets, ice scrapers (several for different kinds of ice and as back-up), sleeping bag, small shovel, bag of sand, coffee can for individual relief. Inside the house those of us without a lot of hair look around the nightcap to be found, second only in importance to blankets and duvets. Hot water bottles are also a good investment. Not only are they warm, but if you are surprised by them, you can learn the difference between first and second degree burns.

Lastly, the winter vocabulary returns to active use. This is aided by a lot of preparatory discussion having to do changes in the weather – looks like snow, could be unpleasant tomorrow, have to change the oil in the car, better tell the cat, bring in the brass monkeys – all that discussion which is really the way we warn each other and assure each other that we are prepared and prepared to endure it together.

Our vocabularies change, too, so that windchill, black ice, turning into a skid, braking distance, blue wax, kitty litter (a sand substitute), and a whole host of curse words not required the rest of the year arrive as though freshly minted. Other words used during this time are Florida, Mexico, Vegas, California, the Caribbean, Hawaii, even Iowa.

But of course, we never are completely prepared for winter, not even for the gray day when the first white flakes descend from the sky, land, linger for just an instant before the last heat of the ground melts them. That experience is as old as we are, but new and simple and beautiful each autumn.

And then, alas, experience starts to accumulate and linger on our roads and sidewalks, and steps. Outwardly we continue to complain, but secretly we just look forward to crawling into our beds, snuggling under the covers with a good book, surrounded by the quiet of a winter’s night and being grateful just for being warm.