I spend a lot of time analyzing global climate and energy trends, far-flung conservation efforts, work aimed at improving prospects for the world’s least fortunate and new technologies with promising future applications, the latest being a novel coating, described in Nature, that can in theory cool a building even on sunny days. Much of this screen and road time takes me away from my family, students and home.
So I’m grateful to be hunkered after the first snowfall since we moved into our old brick house in Nelsonville, N.Y., in the Hudson Highlands that I treasure (see my song above).
The kitchen is radiating turkey aromas, my younger son is sifting jazz offerings on Pandora, siblings and parents are en route for dinner, along with the writer and filmmaker Lynne Cherry.
I plan to spend some analog time Friday in my workshop, building a hickory sideboard to go with the dining table I built a few years ago out of field-sawn hickory planks salvaged from a neighbor’s barn.
As I urged on Twitter, I’m hoping folks will eschew Black Friday consumption mania in favor of making things, when possible:
Finally, I plan to make some music this weekend. After focusing on producing my first CD last year after two decades of songwriting and performing with Uncle Wade, Breakneck Ridge Revue and Pete Seeger, I’ve had scant time for tunes of late. Brewing book plans will further limit music making, but I’m determined to wedge it in.
As a token of my gratitude for all I’ve learned from Dot Earth readers, I’m cutting the price of my CD on Amazon.com to just above my costs from now through the end of the year. (Read the Jambands review and a Consequence of Sound feature on my music.) Help support independent music and buy it here. Here are some musical thank-you notes to help you get a sense of my sound and songwriting approach (I call it “simple music for complicated times”).
In thanks to my wife, Lisa, for putting up with my quirks and intensity, here’s “Song for Lisa”:
To the doctors who helped me through one of life’s close calls, my “lucky stroke” in 2011, here’s “A Very Fine Line”:
To the friends and musical neighbors who make the Hudson Valley far more than a pretty place, here’s “Between the River and the Rails,” my song about Guinan’s, a bygone waterfront pub (read more about this “Little Chapel on the River” in Wendy Bounds’s fine book):
Have a healthy happy holiday stretch, from Thanksgiving into 2015.
And a final personal note of thanks and sadness. My community lost a remarkable human being yesterday, Gordon Stewart. A onetime speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, he was best known for creating a successful independent local online and printed newspaper to compete with another owned by Roger Ailes of Fox News. But he was also a theater director, musician and conductor and all-around public-minded mensch. As I wrote on the Philipstown.info site yesterday, “I can only think of a handful — half a handful — of humans I’ve met with the breadth, wit, intelligence, artistic spark, humor and public-minded spirit of Gordon. Too soon gone.”