The Parting Glass

Well, 2020 has come to a close…

How are you feeling?

How about a beloved Scottish/Irish song which — I have read — is often sung at the end of a gathering of friends (in the player at the beginning of this blog post)?

That’s what the WordPress blogging community has felt like to me this year — a much-needed and much-appreciated gathering of friends.

I toast you one and all!

Looking back on the past year, I see that my response to Covid-19 entering our lives has been two-fold.

Both involved connecting with other human beings via music and stories.

My first response was to lead nightly half-hour sing-alongs via Facebook Live (which I had reluctantly learned how to use for my Music Together classes).

These sing-alongs lasted for several months and consisted of one Broadway song, one Beatles song, one original song, and a few favorites from the pop/rock/folk canon per night.

I also looked up the history of each song and shared a brief story about how they each came to be written.

A small community of singers/listeners — for whom I am very grateful — developed around these nightly sing-alongs.

I was also very grateful to have a daily musical goal — selecting, researching and practicing a short set of songs to share each evening.

Since all of my public gigs at libraries, retirement communities, synagogues, coffee houses, etc. were cancelled, these nightly sing-alongs gave my life some structure and meaning — and an uplifting sense of connection with other human beings.

Thank you to all of my Facebook sing-along friends and relations!

Then it was time for my summer camping sojourn on Cape Cod — which is also when I focus on writing new songs.

The sing-alongs stopped, and when I returned from the Cape, I shifted my focus to learning how to release music via digital music platforms… and to blogging.

I hadn’t written a blog post since March — but began again in September.

Like the sing-alongs, blogging is a way to connect with other music-loving human beings while sharing some of my thoughts and feelings about what is happening here on planet earth.

Thank you to anyone and everyone who devoted a precious few minutes of their lives to reading one of my blog posts this year.

And thank you to those who composed their thoughts and wrote a comment, too!

I have been honored to see the total numbers of visitors and page views continue to rise each month.

Pianist Doug Hammer and I recorded “The Parting Glass” a couple of years ago when I was learning a bunch of Irish-related songs for an hour-long musical program in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.

It uses the same tune as another song called “Sweet Coothill Town,” which is about emigrating from Ireland to America.

Doug and I have been excavating the past 20+ years of our musical collaboration — almost all of which was recorded so that I could have piano tracks with which to practice/learn new songs — in order to find music gems we can polish and share.

I am very grateful for Doug’s gifts at the piano keyboard as well as his gifts as an engineer and audio archivist.

Let us hum along in honor of the end of 2020 and all that we have lost — which may include friends, family, and other beloved members of our community as well as many ways of being in the world (going to the movies, eating in a restaurant, attending a sports event, etc. etc. etc.) which we might have previously taken for granted…

Deep breath in.

Deep breath out.

I look at our human response to the challenge of Covid-19 as a preview of our human response to the even more enormous, profound, and far-reaching challenge of climate change.

Who will listen to our scientific community?

Who will remain in denial?

Who will be willing to change DEEPLY ingrained assumptions and habits and hopes and dreams — about how often we travel, about how large our houses can be, about how many cars we own, about how fast and far we can drive, about what we eat, about how we use water, about how much electricity we use to write and read blog posts, and on and on and on — in the days and weeks and months and years ahead?

As the father of one of my friends used to say, “The jury is still out…”

Deep breath in.

Deep breath out.

Thank you to Doug Hammer for his ongoing presence in my musical life here on planet earth.

Thank you to the wonderful photographers at Pixabay for their beautiful images.

And thank YOU for reading and listening to my last blog post of 2020.

May continued hand-washing, continued mask-wearing, continued social distancing, and much-needed vaccines allow us to return to some sort of new, post-pandemic way of life in 2021.

If you are curious to hear more music, I’ve released a couple of songs in the past week.

You can click here to listen to the Frank Loesser classic — “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”

And you can click here to listen to Irving Berlin’s beloved “Count Your Blessings.”

Now I will end with a lovely dog-themed image that I found on Pixabay.

Deep breath in.

Deep breath out.

A happy and healthy new year to you and yours!!!

ps: You are always welcome to visit my website, and you can find me on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music and other digital music platforms.