Cultural Memory

During one of the last conversations I had with my father, he announced to me that he had a new wife, and that she was a very good housekeeper. Whether he was speaking from a kind of twilight sleep state, or from a place of dementia, I didn't know. I just let it roll over me then, but it has obviously stuck in my mind.

The "new wife" (of more than forty years), told me once some forty years ago that "Jewish women don't clean their own houses." Go figure.

I don't clean very often (and we don't hire anyone to clean), but when I do I always seem to have the V'ahvta, a traditional prayer that would certainly have been recited by my female ancestors who went to synagogue, going through my head. The only time I ever recite it is when I am in a synagogue service or if I am cleaning or working in the yard. Maybe that's a cultural memory.

My father's statement (in his state) might have also been a cultural memory, a memory where the value of a wife for a man was her ability to keep house.

What strikes me as terribly sad is that such a memory would spring from, perhaps, the general state of a "woman's place" during my father's childhood in the 1930s. And that state of possibilities for women to be valued in professions other than as housekeepers and caregivers seems to be narrowing bit by bit as we peer into the darker corners of the immediate future.

Of course there are men who don't buy into this idea. There are men who value the work of women in every profession. There are men who know that for a woman to have achieved the status of a man in many professions means that she is superior in her knowledge and ability to a great many men. It is certainly often the case in the sciences, the arts, and the humanities.

I wish there were a name for the generation of women I grew up with. One name for the group of people born in the late 1950s and early 1960s is "Generation J," with the J standing for Jones, as in keeping up with the Joneses. But women had a different experience from men. The jump from being the "inferior sex" to a state of relative equality came in a kind of a burst. 

Girls were not allowed to wear pants to school until I was in the fourth grade, which would have been 1969, and then we could only wear pants on "gym days." Title IX abolished dress codes in public schools in 1972, and we could wear whatever we wanted to school. Roe vs. Wade happened the next year, and suddenly we had sex education classes in school. We also had drug education classes which scared me away from ever trying hard drugs.

As a result of our new-found freedoms, my female classmates and I were under the impression that we could be equal to "the boys" in every arena. When I started elementary school girls could be teachers, nurses, or homemakers, and when I entered Junior High we could be and do anything. In my extremely liberal school system (in Newton, Massachusetts) girls were rewarded for being smart, and smart girls were expected to become professionals in any field they chose to study.

But now, at least in America, there are an alarmingly large number of young men (or men younger than me) who would not vote for a woman for president, even if the alternative were a convicted felon with declining cognitive function, and a desire to be a monarch in an oligarchy. And there are young men who voice the opinion that they should have a choice over what happens to a woman's body rather than the woman who lives in it.

The part of me that physically remembers the "V'ahvta" while I am cleaning also remembers the time when a motivating factor for a woman to get married was to be able to get away from a domineering mother (or father), regardless of whether she loved the man who asked her to be his wife. I am reminded that it was not too many decades ago that "obey" was part of the traditional marriage ceremony.

We need to let the young women in our lives know that obeying in advance is something they should never do. And we need to let young men (of all ages) know it as well.

Around the Fire

While the holiday season suggests that things should be (could be) merry and bright, the news is anything but. So I have spent the past couple of weeks trying to generate a little musical brightness, both through playing and through writing.

This video, which I made yesterday, has the last movement of a three-movement piece for oboe and string trio as its musical basis, and images of fire interspersed with paintings and woodcuts by the Ukranian artist Issachar Ber Ryback. The images I have used in the video are in the public domain, but there are many more great musical images in his artnet link that I wish I could have used.

I hope this video brings a little joy and a little light to three minutes of your day.

You can listen to the whole piece here, and find the score and parts here and on this page of the IMSLP.

Maestra 2023

Last night we saw Maestra on Netflix, and I would like to recommend it to anyone reading this blog (or this blog post). It began as a look at a few of the finalists in the 2022 Maestra Competition as musicians set as well as their lives as women: women who have to compete in a world dominated by dominant men, mothers who have to work away from their children, women who want to be mothers, women who have to make a choice between a career and a family, and women who want to make career moves that can offer a more stable life. And then in the competition phase of the film we as audience members are asked (not really asked, but we all try to develop an opinion) to decide who we think the winner should be. As one can imagine the standards were extremely high.

The film took an enormous of thought, talent, time, and money to make. It was excellently filmed, excellently edited and directed, and created, from what must have been a huge amount of material filmed all over the world over the course of a few years, a really compelling narrative.

I appreciated hearing the last movement of the Clara Schumann Piano Concerto (three times) as one of the required pieces, and was delighted to hear music by Louise Farrenc as well.

At the final ceremony I saw the face of Natalia Raspopova, a conductor I know (she was the assistant conductor of the Champaign Urbana Symphony in 2023). Natalia, who is an excellent conductor, was in the quarter finals of the competition.

Orin O'Brien "The Only Girl in the Orchestra"

We watched this thirty-five-minute-long documentary about Orin O'Brien on Netflix last night, and I would recommend it to every musician I know (or don't know, for that matter). It was made by Orin O'Brien's niece, and is not only delightful but extremely inspiring. I offer no spoilers, but if you are a string player like me, you might notice an ever-so-slight change in the way you approach your instrument after seeing her, hearing her play, hearing her students play, and hearing her talk.

Credo

I have a friend who calls herself a "sympathetic pantheist." My personal ethics and what may be deep-rooted genetic memories tend to align with ethics found in Judaism, but the idea of sympathetic pantheism is attractive to me too. I just have to work more at the "sympathetic" part.

My mother became a Christian when I was eleven. She grew up in a culturally Jewish but non-religious family. It was when my father would not join my mother in converting to Christianity that she decided to divorce him. My father was culturally Jewish but did not practice.

I imagine that there were other complications in their marriage, because marriage involves issues that are separate from a core belief system that determines your way of regulating your relationship to what happens in your life, and influences what you think will happen after you die.

My mother found community in Christianity, as well as a new partner. After my mother started going to church, my little brother and I started going to Saturday school at a reform temple. It was never about worship, and it didn't last long, but my we did learn the basics. I also learned, over the years, to love traditional Jewish music and the sound of biblical Hebrew.

My mother died in 2016, after having decades of support from her very liberal Episcopalian community, who valued her for her intelligence and wit. My brother died in a car accident in 2014, a few days after trying to connect with a Jewish community close to where our mother lived, and making peace with the pastor of our mother's congregation, who he had issues with in the past because of her sexual orientation. My father died almost two weeks ago at ninety-four under hospice care after a very long life.

During the mid 1979s when I was studying at Juilliard I had a Christian roommate who sometimes had prayer meetings in our apartment. She saw me as a person to convert. It messed with my mind. I spent far too much time resisting Christianity than I should have had to. Good thing my flute teacher, who was a secular Jew, was there for me to identify with.

In addition to the mid 1970s born again Christian presence that was everywhere, there were various cults popping up, like the Soka Gakkai "chant for what you want" kind of Buddahism, and the followers of Sun Myung Moon. Because I didn't want any future children of mine to be swept up in those movements (or cults), I decided in the mid 1970s that if I ever had children I would let them know that they had a Jewish identity and, if asked to, wouldn't need to follow another belief system. And I also knew that it would be best for them to be able to make up their own minds about whether they wanted to be religious.

That's what I did, and that's what they did.  

My father was not a practicing Jew. I choose to honor his memory for the things that he did that made me (make me) happy and made me (make me) proud of him.  While he was alive we shared many of the same musical beliefs, and we both embraced the idea of doubt when it came to religion. My credo has always been musical.

I live in a predominantly Christian area of Illinois, where many of the believing Christians I know here are very kind people (because they are very kind people). And I enjoy playing "holiday" music for them and with them. I enjoy the happiness that it brings to people (as music is wont to do), but the underlying local acceptance of the texts of the songs as history tends to bug me. It bugs me particularly when I witness it in the public schools. The inclusivity that schools in these parts once tried to incorporate into the winter holiday season has declined during the past few years. 

The holiday season has already started, and I approach it with my usual sense of dread. I'm happy to have musical work, and I'm happy to participate in musical events that make people happy (including religious services), but it is still something that I look forward to being over.

The Unknown Burton

I remember reading The Unknown Brahms by Robert Haven Schauffler shortly before Thanksgiving in 1979. It was in the Juilliard library, and I read it in one sitting. I remember the date and place because it was a very eventful couple of weeks (known to people who knew me then and there, but which I will not talk about here).

I realize that there are things that I would like to make known about my father, Burton Fine, that would otherwise never be known.

I'll begin with his musical adventures while in Chicago studying chemistry at IIT. As an avid chamber music player, he was well known in the Chicago musical community. At some point before 1952 he met Dieter Kober, who wanted to start a chamber orchestra. Dieter asked my father to be concertmaster, and my father agreed to play on the condition that Dieter study conducting. Some time later (maybe it was months, maybe it was years), Dieter gave my father a call to tell him that he had gone to Europe to study conducting. My father kept his part of the bargain and was the founding concertmaster of the Chicago Chamber Orchestra.

My mother, who Dieter knew from Chicago Musical College, played flute in the orchestra. Dieter thought that they would make a nice couple (they had met at Tanglewood in 1950), so he insisted on picking up each of them and driving them to rehearsals. According to my mother's sister Jeanne, they spent a lot of time in the back seat.

It was a surprise to me to learn that my father had a reading knowledge of Russian. German was the language that chemists around the world needed to understand before the beginning of the space race with the Soviet Union. Then it was Russian that chemists needed to be able to understand. I found out, during a conversation I had with my father about learning Russian in order to read writings by Catherine the Great, that one of the things my father did in the (pre)NASA lab in Cleveland was translate from Russian.

My father played a lot of chamber music when he was in Cleveland (my mother too). It was the Unitarian Church, which performed Bach Cantatas where he got his first real professional break. The story goes that Jerome Rosen, a violinist who later became a colleague in the Boston Symphony, had trouble getting up on Sunday mornings, so my father was called to take his place. The conductor was Robert Shaw. I believe that the first piece he played with Shaw was Bach Cantata 78, which happens to be the first Bach Cantata I learned (because the flute and tenor aria was the first one in the book I had of Bach Cantata arias). It is still my favorite.

I will probably add to this post in the future. Memory is like a funnel. There is only so much that can make it through the aperture at a given time.

But for why not link to the Internet Archive entry for one of his papers? Here's "Stability limits and burning velocities for some laminar and turbulent propane and hydrogen flames at reduced pressure". There's no way I can even wrap my head around the abstract:

The effect of reduced pressure on blowoff, flashback, and burning velocities of propane-oxygen-nitrogen burner flames was studied (oxygen fraction of oxidant, 0.5). The pressure exponent of burning velocity, 0.22, was nearly the same as for hydrogen-air flames; stability loops showed the same blowoff and flashback characteristics as were previously observed for hydrogen-air flames. In particular, for both systems, quenching distances determined as a function of pressure from the points of intersection of flashback and blowoff portions of stability loops were considerably higher than those obtained previously by a stopped-flow method.

Bruch Four Pieces, Opus 84

Here is a recording from a concert broadcast on the radio my father played with clarinetist Harold Wright and pianist Gil Kalish in 1974. It sensational chamber music playing.

You can listen here.

My Father

I would say that the Burton Fine (August 7, 1930 - November 15, 2024) I grew up knowing was a person of tremendous intelligence and tremendous integrity who expressed himself musically in the most elegant ways. He also had beautiful handwriting. It was fluid, unique, and elegant--unlike any handwriting I had or have ever seen.

My father was a puzzle to me when I was a child. He wasn’t at all like other fathers. I don’t remember him ever hugging me or ever telling me that he loved me. I do remember him singing “I want to hold your hand” when we would cross the street. He sang snippets of pieces of music occasionally, and made parody patter songs, which he sometimes sang for us at dinner, but otherwise I don’t remember him singing. But I do remember him practicing.

The greatest memories of my childhood were hearing him practice in the basement. What I remember most are solo Bach (Cello Suites and Sonatas and Partitas), Reger, Brahms (G major Violin Sonata on Viola), Franck (Violin Sonata), and Paganini Caprices. When he practiced he expressed love very freely. Love for the musical line (in any piece of music) is as real as any love from (or to) a human being to me. My mother, who met my father in 1950, married him in the early 1950s, and divorced him in the 1970s, expressed her love through her painting. She always did art, but became serious about it when she could no longer play the flute. My father didn’t think much of her artwork.

I know very little about either of my parents. Both were puzzles. Their first child, my brother Marshall, was not neurotypical. He, like my father, had a tremendous intellect, but neither of our parents, like most new parents in the 1950s, understood much about parenting. They did bring Marshall to Dr. Spock in Cleveland (my father’s first job was at the Cleveland-based government agency that was to become NASA), but anything regarding the autism spectrum, where Marshall self-identified as an adult, was unknown in the 1950s.

I came out neurotypical in 1959, and my younger brother Richard, born in 1961, came out really gifted in math and things related to the world of computers, where he has been working since he graduated from college. Marshall and I were compelled as teenagers and as adults to express ourselves musically by playing and writing music. Richard is happy as a choral singer and as an avid listener. Joshua, my half brother, who grew up in the 1980s is, like Marshall, not neurotypical, and he benefited (eventually) from an environment of understanding about the autism spectrum that has allowed him to thrive as a choral singer and as a responsibly employed person.

When Marshall, Richard, and I were children, our father did all the driving in the family. He did all the shopping and all the outings. Perhaps it was to take us off our mother’s hands for a while. I remember being almost five and going in a rowboat on Jamaica Pond in West Roxbury. It was shortly after my father joined the Boston Symphony as a violinist. The story goes that he saw an ad in International Musician one day, took the next day off to practice, flew to Boston, and won the audition. My mother didn’t think he would get the job, but she reluctantly left Cleveland when he did.

I didn’t know until much later that my father didn’t know how to swim when he took us boating. I do remember wearing (and enjoying wearing) life jackets, though. He also took us to the Boston Children’s Museum when it was in its infancy, and took us ice skating at Cleveland Circle. He immediately broke his ankle and had to drive to the hospital in incredible pain. (If I used the word "incredible" when describing something, he would snap at me. "It's very credible," he would say).

We used to go bowling too. And there was a time when we would try to play tennis.

My father taught Marshall to play the violin, and I remember that going bowling was used as a reward for his paying attention. Marshall did not like lessons with my father, who might not have liked to teach him either. But he learned from his father, Nathan Fine, who was, according to my father, as good as anyone in the Philadelphia Orchestra. Like proper Bostonians, we only played candlepins. Our mother never came to the bowling alley.

At seven I was big enough to play the half-size violin that we had. My father gave me an “A Tune A Day” book, and let me teach myself. Perhaps he didn’t want to mess things up for me like he had for Marshall. Richard had no interest in the violin, but he got to have piano lessons, and he became a really good pianist. I became an autodidact.

Our father used to bring me and my brothers to the Tanglewood grounds during open rehearsals on Saturdays in the summers, and eventually we used to go to the concerts on Sundays. Through exposure to the Boston Symphony throughout my childhood I got to hear a lot of really great music. And as a teenager I was pretty much on my own, and I would go to Tanglewood to hear student concerts. Never having the opportunity to be anything other than independent, I enjoyed a great deal of freedom as a young person. If (when) I got in trouble I never told my parents about it. And they never asked.

The Burton I grew up with had a very difficult time telling anything but the truth, or what he felt to be the truth. I imagine it might have gotten him in trouble if he shared his feelings with his colleagues in the Boston Symphony, so he kept pretty much to himself. He read a lot, and knew a great deal about history.

I remember going to a party with him after a concert that was hosted by some very rich people who acted like they were superior to everyone else. I mentioned that I didn’t feel comfortable around those people, and he said that they were people who supported the orchestra, and that we needed to be nice to them. His eventually married someone from a “donor” class family, and grew to be comfortable with it. I prefer to remember my father as a member of the intellectual working class.

When I returned to string playing in my early thirties and I had an instrument in hand, I was able to communicate with my father in his language, and I finally was able to recognize that were cut from the same cloth. When I had the opportunity to play chamber music with him (he came to Illinois to play concerts three or four times), it was always a wonderful experience. He was a truly great musician.

I sometimes hear shadows of the familiar sounds I heard in childhood when I practice. And when I see my hands and arms behaving the way I observed my father’s hands and arms behaving, I feel like he is a part of me, and that best part of him is with me to carry on in music making.

I used to write CD reviews for the American Record Guide, and my father read all my reviews. He would call to talk about the recordings. I loved those phone calls. He would also give me solutions to problems I had with difficult passages in the viola parts I played in orchestra, which I would share with my section-mates. And he would listen to recordings I made of the recitals I played. Some of them must have been painful for him to hear because my development as a violinist and as a violist in adulthood was slow.

A note from Marshall, an excerpt from his memoir.

. . . This was before my father, Burton Fine, was a research chemist with NASA, having gotten his Ph.D. in chemistry from IIT. After leaving Cleveland, he would serve as principal violist of the BSO for 29 years before being demoted in 1993; and he retired on New Year’s Eve 2004.

I know a fair bit about what he did as a chemist. Many years ago I read his dissertation, The Solubility of Iodine in Benzene/Carbon Tetrachloride Solutions. It does not sound to me like the work of a rocket scientist; but at the time I read it I could neither know, nor care about, nor even comprehend its practical aspects. I have not seen it since; it must be misplaced in his own house, or hidden. As a rocket scientist, he might have been involved with the Gemini Project. I believe it was classified and remains so, which means I will never know. He wrote 18 papers, mostly for a journal called Combustion and Flame, which I located at the chemistry library at Yale at the time I unsuccessfully auditioned for their music school in 1977. Strangely, the shortest of these--a critical letter to the editor in 1961--became the most widely quoted. Almost every subsequent article would refer to it, freely.

Musically, though, he is a mystery. What I know of his early years is awfully sketchy. He won a composition prize at age nine in his hometown of Philadelphia, where his ancestor, Joseph Fine (1877-1976) came to escape the pogroms of Nicholas III. His prizewinning piece, a cradle song, was orchestrated and performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski. Yet I have been unable to find so much as a mention of it.

At age thirteen he applied to study composition with Menotti and was turned down. It seems he had also been playing violin at the same time; he had several years study with Ivan Galamian, and his father (my grandfather) Nathan (1907-1985) was also an excellent amateur violinist. Anyway he turned there. At some point--for how many summers I don’t know, but it must have been several--he attended Galamian’s camp at Meadowmount. That was probably how he became acquainted with the viola, for it is well known that Galamian would hire a cellist to work in string quartets with three violinists at a time, one of whom would obviously have to play viola. Later he attended Tanglewood (1950) and Red Fox (1954 or so). Despite this musical excellence, he majored in chemistry instead of music while he attended Penn. Why, I’m not sure. Perhaps Grandpa might have told him that music was best left an amateur sidelight. Which is why he wound up in Chicago as a doctoral student in chemistry at the time he married Mom.

My father, Burton Fine, died last night at his home in Newton, Massachusetts. He was 94.

The Last Waltz

Unfortunately there will be no last Harris Waltz. The dance is over. The lights that made the future look bright and good have been turned out. The hall is empty.

We don't know what the building will be used for next, and we don't want to imagine the dark possibilities.

At least I don't.

My only solace is that we have two months of constitutional democracy, impaired as it is by the Supreme Court and the House of Representatives. Maybe there are republicans in Congress who will help put some guardrails in place. But clearly misogyny and racism will continue to bubble beneath the surface of the smiling faces we see on the street.

Harris ran a great campaign. She is a brilliant person and a good person. She would have made a great president. And she could have made a difference. I mourn for the kind of a country she would have helped us become.

Harris Walz IV "Electoral"

She Loves Me

I have been spending my evenings with my violin in the local theater pit rehearsing She Loves Me, a 1963 Broadway show with music by Jerry Bock and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick. The show came right before Fiddler on the Roof in their chronology as a writing team.

It is a delightful adaptation by Joe Masteroff of Miklós László's Parfumerie (1937). Film adaptations of László's play include The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch 1940), In the Good Old Summertime (Robert Z. Leonard 1949), and You've Got Mail (Nora Ephron 1988).

I laughed at the first rehearsal when I noticed that one of the motivic germs of the show is Buffalo Gals, made quite famous in the 1946 Frank Capra film It's a Wonderful Life (the link above goes to a setting of the song in the film). But why is it there? I didn't think that it had anything to do with the song's history.

To quote from a song in The Pajama Game (mentioned below), "I figured it out."

The male lead in It's a Wonderful Life is named George Bailey, and he is played by James Stewart. James Stewart plays the male lead in the Lubitsch film.

The female lead in that film, played by Margaret Sullavan is named Klara Novak, and the name of the Jimmy Stewart character in She Loves Me is Georg Nowack.

In It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey sings  “Buffalo Gals” on his first date with Mary. It becomes “their song.” It is an important and distinct reference to the character of Georg Nowack in She Loves Me. Needless to say, both characters are named George. 

Here are some other references I noticed: In "I Don't Know His Name" there is a distinct resemblance to the song "Matchmaker" in Fiddler on the Roof  (a song yet to be written), In “A Romantic Atmosphere” there  is a snippet from Ochi Chyornye (Очи черные or Dark Eyes) in one of the violin solos, and the "Tango Tragique" makes strong reference to "Hernando's Hideaway" from the 1954 Jerry Ross and Richard Adler show The Pajama Game.

We open tonight.

Toys in the Attic

The second of these Two little night pieces for three violas d'amore is a great way to get into the Halloween spirit. There is nothing quite like twenty-one sympathetic strings ringing along with the twenty-one bowed strings in an ensemble of three violas d'amore. Thank you Gheorge and Simona Balan for asking me to write a piece for them to play with Yvain Delahousse, and thank you all for playing it so beautifully.

In the attics of the town, the dolls begin to wake. These are not dolls in the freshness of their youth, the dolls who dwell in children's bedrooms, but old, abandoned dolls, no longer believed in. They lean back against boxes of old dishes, sit slumped on broken-backed chairs, lie face down on attic floorboards. . . .

. . . But on this summer night, when the almost full moon wakens sleepers in their beds, the dolls in their long slumber begin to stir . . .

From "The Dolls Wake" in Steven Millhauser's Enchanted Night.

The moon is a cracked dinner plate

The title is inspired by Steven Millhauser's 1999 novella Enchanted Night. Thank you Yvain Delahousse, Simona Balan, and Gheorghe Balan for expressing all the enchantment. This beautiful performance gave me chills and made me cry.

Variations for Solo Viola d'amore

I wrote this piece for Yvain Delahousse, a terrific young French viola d'amore player. You can hear him play the beginning of it here. Yvain is planning to record a video of the whole piece soon, so you can find out what happens in the course of its four-minute life. I will post it when it is available.

This one-minute segment is the introduction. I think of it as introducing the "issue" at hand. A theme with variations will follow. The "issue" at hand can be any issue that any playing or anyone listening might be dealing with. Life, in all its complexity, is filled with one thing after another.

Writing this piece was excellent medicine for me. I wrote it during a personal struggle that I had to work my way through, and my path from a place of darkness to a place of light was made clearer as a result of bushwhacking a musical path using the viola d'amore as my means of locomotion.

The cover image is one that my mother painted. I don't know where the original might be, but its image gives me the sense of comfort that having tea with someone friendly and accepting (like my mother) can have. And I remember the lamp from childhood. You can find the music here now, and will be able to find it soon on this page of the IMSLP.

But what have you done for me lately?

"But what have you done for me lately?" was one of the key phrases that I remember from my childhood. My father used to say it in a mocking way, and I guess it might have been in reference to me, but it could have been in reference to something he had read or observed. It could have been in reference to something either of my brothers might have said. Nobody will ever know. My father isn't in any condition to remember this or any other of the memorable phrases he uttered half a century ago.

But the odd thing is that the feeling behind this particular phrase informs my experience as an adult in the twenty-first century. And it seems to permeate the kinds of relationships far too many of us have what we used to refer to as our virtual lives on social media.  These days it seems that "virtual" life and "real" life (life as it happens in analog time and without necessarily using mechanical means) are intermingled in such a way that they lack the separation they once had. 

Is a parent supposed to continue to be the source of all things a child might need? If not, when and how does it stop?

[I don't think it stops with death, because I often rely on what I have of my mother, which I experience through her artwork, for spiritual sustenance that I can connect to when I need to, regardless of what she gave me or didn't give me in childhood.]

I wonder if I am alone when  joyous moments in my life sometimes seem like they happened long ago in a place I no longer live (I have lived in the same town for nearly forty years). Even if it is I who did nice or generous things for others, memories of deeds or events seem to fade more quickly than they did in the days before we communicated mainly (it seems) through these rectangles that we hold in our hands or prop in front of us on desks and laps.

I admit that gifts I give through the computer, whether it is ordering things and having them mailed somewhere, or whether it is sharing a piece of music as a PDF, feel less "gifty" than when I hand someone a printed and bound copy of something I have written or an item that I can place in their hands (preferably wrapped).

Maybe this is all just a byproduct of getting older, and I suppose technology changes during every lifetime, if a person is fortunate enough to live a long life.

One saying my father used to utter, "It's easy when you know how," is something he might have learned from a teacher or colleague. Or it could have been something he made up himself. It is, as far as I'm concerned, a brilliant bit of truth that I have found works in all kinds of situations. When I mentioned the saying to my father last year, and told him that it has really meant a lot to me over the years, his response to the saying was, "Whatever that means."

Perhaps in advanced old age, the "country" my father now lives in, you can posess knowledge, but nothing is ever easy.