"Roots": Little Detour for a snapshot of the Nebo Lutheran Church--and looking forward to a colloquy about events in (the) Ukraine.

Above: the church where I was baptised a Swedish Lutheran in 1946...and don't ask me why this church, though I can guess some of the other details.

As I noted once briefly before, my maternal grandmother, the "Hungarian" woman whose family name is originally probably Czech or Serbian, remarried some years after her first husband's death and my mother was finally given a stable home ( no more being sent away to farms in Pennsylvania in the summer to work for her room and board and learn the hard way that milking cows means you can get kicked in the head and knocked unconscious etc). And being sent to what I heard her describe as a Norwegian Lutheran Church.

Well, Norwegian, Swedish, what did it matter in those days-- 

As I said I was named for this Norwegian American named Lawrence Glesnes who was a close friend of my parents during World War II, and my other sponsor at the Christening was one Natalie Levy, whose photographer husband Nat was a good friend of my fathers from after the War.
I believe these people were also thus being named as those who would look after me if something happened to my parents.

The only other story I have out of this was my mother telling me that at the Christening I would not stop crying and Pastor Olsen remarked how " he will either become a writer or a singer with lungs like that." ( I love to sing but I had to teach myself how by singing along with my records at home when I was in my late 20's. Then at a church service I was invited to attend I discovered that I could also "read music"--coming from having earlier earned to play the saxophone ( which delighted no one but me-- I ordered music from Carl Fischer or whoever in NY and just remember being drawn to any composer who employed saxophones. Kurt Weill and Prokofiev thus came up, although I never attempted anything but old Sergei, I DID get to play and enjoy Weill's "Street Scene" with its " cantillation"-- a note on this from a letter from George Rosen:

"For the specifics, I can't find my any e-mail where I talked at any length about the connection between Weill's melodies and the middle-European cantillation tropes--the little specified fragments of melody that are used to chant/sing the torah portions (also "haftarah"--the related excerpts read in a yearly sequence from scriptural books--not the first five- in Jewish liturgy. They're specified by tiny signs above the written text and are used not only in reading/singing from the Bible, but in a lot of the traditional melodies for important prayers, which are part of the liturgy. There are different sets of tropes--different families of melodic fragments--for the Torah, the haftarah, and for certain specific books, like Esther and the Song of Songs, which are read/sung/chanted at particular related holidays in the Jewish year. (http://www.bethsholom.com/prayer/torah-trope.shtml is a randomly picked site trying to teach the Torah tropes, again, the "tunes" are indicated by the signs above the written line--specifically, above accented syllables in the written line. The signs below the written line are vowel signs. (In an actual inscribed Torah scroll, however, there is no punctuation, either for vowels or tropes.) By the way, take a look as well--for the history of this--at a site http://www.reclaimingjudaism.org/teachings/what-trope , if only for the comment about "Singing in the Rain".

Very roughly, and inaccurately, the Torah tropes are in a major, and the haftarah, in a minor mode. (They're in different modes altogether, really.) But the haftarah ones are the ones I find echoed in a lot of Weill's songs, and also used very strikingly in the introductory song ("The Hills of Ixopo") in Weill and Maxwell Anderson's "Lost in the Stars", which is almost a verbatim setting of the first chapter of Alan Paton's CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY, the South African novel that is the musical's source. "Ixopo" thus, sung by a leader and chorus, is a reading of a nonmetrical prose text, albeit a very "musical" one, which in form and melody would not be out of place in a Jewish service.

In another context, someone at the Coast Guard Training Center on Governors Island in NYC once asked me if I ever had learned to play a musical instrument.  I was surprised by the question, because this hulking young man was a baseball pitcher- manque, who after his stint in the service was offered a job as a pitcher in training by the Cinncinnati Red Sox but chose instead to work in a bank run by his wife's father out on Commack, Long Island.
A friend of the time said to me, " oh that's just a kind of cliche idea of being "well-rounded" ( playing an instrument) --and it sounds as if your pal is in most ways sort of a "cliche" person."
 (The implication being that I was a naturally kind of "non-cliche" person who found all sorts of everyday norms puzzling ( true enough) and always open to question.

But that just makes me a "typical Boomer" if you want to speak about cliches...and, like most Boomers, very read to talk about themselves even if nobody else gives a  damn.

Well, a thousand pardons, but this is after all MY blog and I feel I am entitled to choose to post or write whatever I want, that's the whole point.

I just wish I had something very wise and informative to say about everything that is happening in Ukraine right now, but I feel I should leave that task to my friend Goddard Graves, who along the way has studied " the Ukraine" in great detail ( if he can find time to give me something to print here). In fact,  I think will ask other friends of mine to give me THEIR opinions of all these events in the Ukraine mean to them in terms of the world today...