The Songs My Grandmother Sang

My grandmother was the quintessential grandmother. She was jolly, rotund, and since we could never get her angry, we never tried. One of the things I will never forget about her, is how she suddenly would burst into song. Sometimes it was a hymn; “Come Thou Almighty King” was a frequent, or songs from long ago wars such as “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the boys are marching;” from the Civil War or “I have come to say goodbye Dolly Gray,” from the Spanish American War, a time she experienced as a child. The frustrating thing about these tunes, was she would usually only belt out the first lines or perhaps, in the case of a hymn, the first verse.
Often the songs she sang were from her school days. “Dicky Bird, Dicky Bird, Dicky Dicky Bird; How I’d like to fly with you; Dicky, Dicky Bird,” would come echoing out of the old camp window into the surrounding beech wood, where she and my grandfather lived. “Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen; We dare not go a’hunting for fear of little men,” I later learned was from a poem by William Butler Yeats. “A hunter on the hill, who gallops forth at early dawn to shoot the startled deer; All fresh at early dawn;” was a German folk song, “Der Jaeger aus Kurpfalz.” Her elementary education predated World War I when things German fell out of fashion.
But there was one little song she sang, and again, only the first verse, that always touched something with me. “Come little leaves, said the wind, one day; Come over the meadows with me and play.” I could always picture the leaves of past summers being blown over the fields as summer ended. Even now I remember the tune, and recently found the entire poem, which I am attaching. If I close my eyes, I can still recall past autumns and meadows, long since disappeared under construction, and hear my grandmother singing to us the lament of a dying summer.
Come Little Leaves
COME LITTLE LEAVES
by George Cooper

"Come, little leaves" said the wind one day,
"Come over the meadows with me, and play;
Put on your dresses of red and gold;
Summer is gone, and the days grow cold."

Soon as the leaves heard the wind's loud call,
Down they came fluttering, one and all;
Over the brown fields they danced and flew,
Singing the soft little songs they knew.

"Cricket, good-bye, we've been friends so long;
Little brook, sing us your farewell song-
Say you're sorry to see us go;
Ah! you are sorry, right well we know.

"Dear little lambs, in your fleecy fold,
Mother will keep you from harm and cold;
Fondly we've watched you in vale and glade;
Say, will you dream of our loving shade?"

Dancing and whirling the little leaves went;
Winter had called them and they were content-
Soon fast asleep in their earthly beds,
The snow laid a soft mantle over their heads.

My Grandfather's Favorite Joke

You never think that your grandparents were once young, at least when you are young yourself. However my mother's father was young at one time, and the glimmers of his younger days would creep through in stories in which he usually referred to himself as "an observer."
He was a civil engineer, and oddity in the 1920's being a college graduate from the University of Connecticut in 1912. After working for several railroads and the United Fruit Company in Jamaica he ended up working for the Maine Highway Department, surveying and planning the roads that would push through the distant farmlands and forests to connect Maine's far flung towns. Often the survey crews were gone for weeks at a time, particularly in the winter, when travel home was impossible and they would be holed up in some northern town where the sole source of entertainment was the bar in the local "hotel." Many hotels in Maine, back in the day, were just bars with a few cots upstairs so that they could meet the letter of the law and sell hard liquor. I stayed in one such hotel back in 1964, but that is another story for another time.
At any rate, to fight boredom, the crew would invent things to do, and sometimes form "societies" and "clubs" which required an initiation, something the founders never did themselves, and the new guys were none the wiser. One such club was the Order of the Burning Straw. The initiate, probably well oiled by the time, would be required to drop his pants and hold a broom straw between the cheeks of his butt while it burned down to a stub.
But I digress. I remembered Poppa's favorite joke the other night just as I was falling asleep, and my chuckling forced my long suffering wife to ask why I was laughing at such an odd time.
The story goes as follows: There once was a medical student, who was prone to wild binge drinking, which usually left him hurling violently and then comatose. His friends admonished him telling him that some day he would "puke his guts out."
One weekend came, and after a particularly spectacular spewing event, he passed out. His fellow students went to the lab, and brought back some preserved intestines and organs, which they had been studying, laid them around the inebriate and left.
The next morning he appeared ghostly white and said, "You fellows were right. Last night I threw up my guts, but with the aid of God and a long handled tooth brush I got them back in."

Flatology

Thirty years ago, my wife and I quit secure teaching jobs and moved into our unfinished house in Harpswell, ME along with a newborn daughter. I fancied myself an aquaculture pioneer, who, along with my two partners, were going to be the oyster barons of Casco Bay. We did realize that it would take some time and a lot of hard work before this came to pass, and also knew that we would not be able to pay ourselves for some time. So, for the first months, the time we still call the “winter of ham hocks and beans” we pulled through as best we could, eating copious amounts of soups made of various dried legumes, government cheese obtained from a senior center and beer made from molasses. I worked nights as a “checker” in the warehouse for LL Bean, a great job for someone with OCD and one weekend a month would travel to Rochester NH where I was commander of a US Army Reserve infantry company. I would spend the two weekend nights on a cot in the armory as the drive back and forth was too long. My days were spent on the water tending to our young oysters.
In the spring, when Heather was old enough to be left at a sitter, Susan got a job working for both the Regional Hospital in Brunswick and Bath Memorial Hospital as the infection control coordinator. I immediately assumed her job was to make sure the infections were equally spread between the two, and the doctors referred to her as “The Bug Lady.” One of her first scores was informing a physician he would wash his hands between patients.
One of the first friends she made was another nurse who had the job of continuing education coordinator. She became a dear friend and would come over to the house with her husband for visits.
On one memorable visit, she either had forgotten what it was I actually did, or wanted to find out just what it was I did, for she asked, “What is it you do?”
Without batting an eye, I replied, “I’m a doctor.”
“Aren’t you going to practice locally?” she asked, without hint of skepticism.
“Well, I’m on a hiatus while I try oyster farming. Besides, my specialty is very narrow, suited mainly for teaching hospitals, but I would be happy to come in and do workshops for the nurses, if you like.”
“What is your specialty?” she asked taking a mouthful of blueberry muffin.
“I’m a flatologist.”
At that point the muffin spewed across the kitchen counter in a spasm of laughter.
“I’m serious,” I said. “It is my experience that nurses are woefully trained in a subject that could be used in evaluation of a patient. I’ll bet you don’t even know what the three cornerstones of the science are.”
She allowed that she didn’t, but that I would probably tell her, and I obliged. “Tone, texture and bouquet,” I said. “Think about it. If people could not pass gas, they would blow up and explode. The human race never would have survived one generation. So, if you detect the hint of a rectal zephyr, don’t be grossed out, nay rejoice, for what you are witnessing is a life being saved.”
I never did give the workshop, although delivered the lecture many times to an adoring public, one of whom was my friend’s daughter. She used it as the core of a high school essay and was awarded an “A.” I realized that had I done the same in my day, I probably would have been suspended from school. How times have changed. And, by the way, the plural of flatus is “flati.”