This cardboard record was included in a magazine promotion. Lyrics include “Oh that Roll-a-matic, adjusts to any kind of beard and skin, makes you wish you had a double chin” and “Ain’t misbehavin’, I’m shavin’ myself for you.”

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

Happy 253rd birthday, Robert Burns! My Scottish grandmother Agnes Greig (Ross) Rennie used to tell me his poems “To a Mouse” and “To a Louse” as stories. She always had a framed picture of him prominently displayed, and her frequent fond references to Rabbie Burns gave me the vague notion that he was a relative or old family friend she knew as a child back in the Old Country.

If I had any Drambuie in the house, I’d raise a proper Agnes Rennie toast to him tonight! But I don’t, so I’m settling for a cup of tea in one of my grandmother’s Scottish teacups, and listening to my favorite poems from the Librivox’s wonderful Robert Burns 250th Anniversary Collection.

It finally looks like winter here! It was a steady, gentle snowfall, more decorative than disruptive. A good day to be outside taking pictures!

We still haven’t had any snow worth mentioning — I haven’t had to break out the shovel yet. But it’s definitely winter!

It’s not really winter — the weather is mild, and we haven’t had any real snow here yet other than one surprise snowstorm in October when the leaves were still on the trees. (But even that was only an inch or so where I live.)

I don’t really like having to deal with the snow. I hate dressing for it, I hate shoveling it and I hate driving through it, but I do like taking photographs of it. The weather we’ve had so far this winter has just left us with something that’s not even winter. It’s no season at all: no light, no color, no flowers, no plants, no snow. Nothing.

Newbury, Massachusetts

It’s not until I started using SoundHound to identify music that I realized how often in the past I have heard an unfamiliar song that interested me and tried to remember a snatch of tune or lyrics to try to look it up or ask around to find out what it was, and just never did. I also like using it for very familiar old songs when I just can’t remember (or maybe never knew) the title or artist.

The other way I use SoundHound is by speaking a title and/or artist into the phone and letting it do a search. This is handy when someone refers to a song I’ve heard of but can’t remember. You can also sing into the phone as a search, but I seldom do, and SoundHound seems to have trouble recognizing my renditions for reasons possibly related to my singing ability.

This app does so much more, but it’s these two that have enriched my life. Hear a song, and get an instant identifiction; think of a song, and instantly
hear samples. Amazing!

When I was a little girl, I used to love to rummage around in the drawers of my father’s desk or in various little boxes around the house where there would be random small objects like buttons, which didn’t interest me, and foreign coins, which did. I don’t know where most of these coins came from, other than the ha’pennies my grandmother brought back from a trip home to Scotland. But I loved touching the coins, studying the words and images, feeling the foreignness, dreaming of travel.

Now I have accumulated a lot of foreign coins from my own travels, and they’re completely disorganized, all mixed up and sitting in various small containers. I still like spilling them out, and looking through them, remembering past trips and dreaming of new ones.

This photograph has been around for as long as I can remember. When I was a child, it was in a big box of unsorted photographs my mother kept in a cabinet in the living room. I used to love going through those old photographs, spreading them out on the coffee table and looking at them individually. Many were people I knew — my mother as a child, my Scottish grandparents and great aunts and uncles. This one, and a few others of this girl, fascinated me because they were taken in Scotland and were family members that I had never met. I imagined going to Scotland and meeting this girl and pictured us running through hills of heather together, although I knew that of course she wouldn’t be a girl at all anymore, she’d be my mother’s age or even older. I remember asking my mother who they were and her answering rather vaguely that she thought this was [someone] and her daughter [someone].

But who? I don’t remember what she said, and there’s no one else left who might know. It looks like it was taken in the 1920s, which was when my grandparents emigrated. Was this taken on an outing before they left, or sent to them in a letter later? Was this the wife and daughter of one of my grandmother’s brother, William and James Ross, who remained in Scotland when their mother, stepfather and four sisters left for America? Or was my grandfather the photographer, and are these members of the Rennie side of the family? I’ve done a little work on Ancestry.com, trying to figure out possibilities, but I have no idea.

I love the photograph anyway, especially the smiles on their faces and the comfortable affection of the girl’s pose. Someday I hope I’ll solve this mystery. I’m hoping that someone else has another copy of this photograph, or other photographs of this woman and girl, and they’ll find this scanned image or I’ll find theirs and we’ll connect. Stranger things have happened. I truly believe that photographs have a way of finding their way home.

In the meantime, I post this as a reminder to everyone to identify everyone who is in a photograph. When photos are new, it’s so obvious who the people are that there’s no reason to record this information, but as the years pass, photographs (printed or digital) can get scattered, and the information can be lost.

As a child, I found the idea of the old year going out as an old man and the new year coming in as a baby to be a profound and moving metaphor, and I still do. I know it’s been a difficult year for many people, but it’s been an exceptionally good year for me, thanks to the birth of my first grandchild. Still, there were some hard days for me this year and many things I regret, and I’m happy as always to see the old year end and a fresh shiny new year begin. I am eternally optimistic, and as each new year begins, I always see it as a fresh start. I go way beyond New Year’s Resolutions — I always think that in the new year I am going to be totally different, really get my act together and become a new, true best version of myself. This feeling always wears off by mid-January, but somehow I always believe that this year, things will be different!

Happy New Year to one and all!

The final episode of the series was just released. It opens with Clara looking straight at the audience and saying, Thank you, everybody, this is my last show. I’m pretty damn old!” Later she speaks a little more about aging: “Nothing great about getting old, it’s terrible, you can’t do what you want, it’s just…but…I always say God put me here for a reason. I don’t know what it is, but he probably does.”

She truly saved the best for last, and in this episode she shares her mother’s recipe for old-fashioned tomato sauce, made from fresh tomatoes, nothing canned. She ends with the words “This is the perfect ending to a perfect show. I love you all, goodbye,” but then we see her welcoming a young child, presumably a great grandchild, and feeding pasta and sauce to a new generation.

This show is shining example of family history. Christopher Cannucciari is capturing and sharing his grandmother’s cooking and her spirit in a way that will help her live on in the lives of her extended family (which thanks to YouTube includes thousands of us. It’s also a lesson in oral history. Many elderly people are not particularly comfortable sitting down and talking about their own lives if you just try to interview them, and they may be much more comfortable doing what Clara’s is doing here, which is sharing a skill in the spirit of helpfulness. Her memories are shared in the context of talking about her family and how her parents managed to keep the family fed during the Depression.

Thanks for the memories, Clara!