Christmas? What?

It has been several years now since we have gone away for Christmas, even longer since we had visitors here. Without people gathering for Christmas, it just isn’t really very exciting. However, I hadn’t actually completely repressed the whole idea – until this year.

Without the happy anticipation of visitors/visiting to look forward to, we have at least started thinking about Christmas and getting ready for it in the past after Peter delivers instruments in early December. This year, however, after Peter delivered instruments the first weekend in December, I went to Amsterdam last weekend, and I wasn’t really in any position to think about anything other than work and preparing for the meeting in Amsterdam before that. Now I am slightly shocked to discover that Christmas is supposed to happen next week.

The next problem, of course, is that the boys have school every day until six in the evening. No one really expects me to go shopping by myself, do they? I’m also not quite sure how we might manage to obtain, set up and decorate a Christmas tree at a time when Peter is not here, but the boys are. Our timing is all off.

I missed the point when it would have been time to send packages to the US, because I was only thinking about what I will take with me in January. I did get one package at least as far as London (I hope), which I gave to a friend I met in Amsterdam to take home with her and mail to Kemble from there. That might work. Whether or not the one single Christmas card we send each year might arrive before Christmas now depends on the efficiency of the Austrian postal system – any bets on that?

I wonder whether my sons are hoping for Christmas presents this year? That might be a bit tricky.

Christmas without visitors is seriously lacking something!

Simultaneous rewind and fast forward

A few weeks ago, Paddy suddenly decided to play the guitar. This was a mildly surprising new development, but that’s the way Paddy does things. He just does. With guitars lying around the house readily available, his cello background, his long Martian fingers and long golden hair, and his lovely singing voice, it was clearly not at all a bad decision.

Paddy playing the guitar, however, has plunged both his parents into some confusion, as we find ourselves unexpectedly confronted with old memories of our own respective experiences and the jarring realization of how life has changed at the same time. Peter showed Paddy some chords and how to figure out chords from listening to songs, which Paddy naturally picked up very quickly. Yet whereas Peter spent a significant portion of his younger years hitchhiking around Europe, especially Ireland and Scotland, playing on street corners for enough money for a bus, a ferry, or just something to eat, meeting and playing together with other musicians to exchange lyrics and chords and learn new skills, Paddy did not respond by packing up a guitar and his rucksack to set out hitchhiking around Europe. He just opened a browser and connected to the Internet. With his years of experience with participating in online forums, Paddy quickly found an online forum for exchanging lyrics and chords that people have figured out from listening and signed up on the site to participate. In principle, it works the same way that Peter and I both learned new songs from other people, just faster. Much faster. Much, much faster. And despite all the concerns about young people on the Internet, it is probably safer than hitchhiking too, even though it was my old guitar that usually got me the best rides in my hitchhiking days.

Then there are the songs Paddy plays – Tom Waits, Van Morrison, The Flying Pickets ... songs that also tap straight into long forgotten memories, vividly recalling people, places, situations that seem to be from a different world, a different life in any case. It really is hard not to just melt into a soppy mess of sentimentality hearing Paddy and Peter singing together a particularly soulful rendition of “No Woman No Cry”. If Paddy decides to start singing songs like “Raglan Road” next, I will probably need a plentiful supply of handkerchiefs. Since he is not quite even 16 yet, I can’t imagine what Paddy might associate with all these songs, but perhaps that is what makes the way he sings them all the more poignant.

In addition to Paddy’s guitar playing, last night Christopher and I went to a book presentation with readings from a new book about the history of alternative music in Linz since the late seventies. It was a pleasure to see so many people I have known for such a long time (to the extent that I can actually “see” anyone these days), the readings were delightful, and it was a pleasure to see Christopher’s amusement as he compared the descriptions of then with his own experiences now as an active participant in the young music scene in Linz today. I also enjoyed telling Christopher some of my own stories on the side, but when Peter got hold of the book this morning, he was naturally moved to recount even more extensive alternative and supplementary histories. An argument immediately ensued about who would get to read the book first – although I was the one who bought it, I never even got to stake a claim.

As the past and the present collide and overlap, however, I’m thinking there are probably any number of things that children simply don’t want to know about their parents’ past, just as I doubt that I really want to know everything about my children’s present.