A Grey Day

Tonight after work I stopped at Homestead Pickin' Parlor and scheduled my next dulcimer lesson with Karen. When I walked in the door, right before my eyes, were a couple of albums by Mimi & Richard Farina. After updating the dulcimer page on the blog here, I knew I had to get my hands on some of their music. I chose the cheaper album which also features an autoharp. There are several instrumental songs on the album, which is exacty what I wanted.

The title suits me as well. "Celebrations for a Grey Day" fits my mood of late when I'm not happily strumming away at my dulcimer. It's been too long since I've seen some live folk music, and I will have to remedy that soon. Having a lesson will perk me up a bit as well, I'm sure. Visiting HPP always is a welcome retreat from the pristine world of my corporate job. They're an old school mom and pop shop with an old fashioned cash register, so after sitting all day in front of a computer with my wireless earpiece taking customer service calls, the low tech world really appeals me. I'm actually longing for old style phones with chords and everything. Oh to have a rotary phone! One of the big heavy black ones that were made out of some kind of ceramic/plastic hybrid. Glorious days of old. As I sit here at my home computer, listening the album I just Ripped to my hard-drive, I sit and wonder at the passage of time. Richard died in a motorcycle accident a few months before I was born, but here I am listening to his music.

The title track to the album is playing which is a medley jam of an assortment of tunes. It somehow works and I'm looking forward to the day when I know enough songs to choose some for a medley of my own. The liner notes are an interesting ramble, wrapped up with a folk musician's point of view.

"Time, tide, and the accident of what the statisticians call birth have conspired to provide us with a tradition barely ours and hardly it's own.  Music, if it has a mind to, can sing about things like that, and maybe set one or two of them straight, yes?" ~ Richard Farina

A passage through time forms between the drone of the dulcimer and the bass strings of the guitar. So many days pass with nothing but work, but in the evening all is music. It is my refuge in so many ways. We are having warm days this week with highs in the 80's, twenty degrees above normal for the start of an October in Minnesota. Some days I just want to go away to the woods for a while, like maybe the rest of my life, and play my dulcimer and snuggle with cats. Life has gotten so complicated, I want something simpler, something full of stories and song.