Music and Friends

I was invited to a Christmas Eve "Ham & Lamb" last night at the home of dear friends. "Your appetite and chat" was what I was told when I asked what I could bring.

Two of the triplets (the two girls) - now 36 - were home and there was a large assortment of others including some 'come from aways' visiting for the holidays.

This Ham & Lamb dinner is a custom they've had forever. Dinner starts at around 11 p.m. and finished, in our case, at 4 in the morning.

Their house is incredibly decorated, a miniature village cast upon the stone hearth of the fireplace, a bunch of alders caught in a corner with pictures of their triplet grandchildren hanging from it. A huge Christmas tree selected and cut by the husband and his daughters a few days before and decorated with all their school hand-crafts. Gifts stacked so high they could just about swallow the tree.

One of the guests, a judge out of Toronto with a passion for Michael Collins that we sunk our teeth into for an hour or so, was celebrating his birthday Christmas Day so a little cake was presented to him on the cusp of midnight and we all sang "Happy Birthday" as one of the girls played her guitar.

I wanted to pinch myself a few times, the conversation and the talk of the old times was so perfectly marvellous. Most people there had traced their roots way, way back for centuries and could knit together all the delicate webs of family connections of their founding Irish forefathers and foremothers and the years of their arrival in Newfoundland from Ireland and on down through the years to present day.

The pile of us squeezed around that large dining room table and the laughter and the talk never ever stopped. I felt so privileged to be included amongst all these family members and old friends. When I mentioned this at one point, I felt tears spring to my eyes when the host said:

"We'll have none of that now. Ah, sure you're one of us!"

Yes I am.

On Visiting

Things are folding in around the edges of my technical world. My printers aren’t seeing eye to eye with the laptop. My laptop refuses to recognize my palm pilot. I’ve gone into various help programmes but nothing seems to work. It will all have to wait until I hit Toronto and some high-tech help.

However, I’m still on line and will be for another short while, until the Newfoundland tent gets folded up and Strawbella gets packed and I head out on the annual safari across the eastern stretch of Canada to Ontario.

I’ve got stuff everywhere all over the house and a huge list of what needs to be taken with me. Ansa knows something’s up and always does before we move. She saunters by me a lot. Follows me constantly. Yes, I reassure her, I haven’t forgotten I have a dog, have I ever left you behind? She sniffs suitcases, rattles her water dishes. Something’s afoot, or should that be apaw? Ahem.

I’ve been visiting around and about, a custom that is dying in a lot of the world but is alive and well here. Unheralded dropins for a cuppa or a drinka depending on your imbibement of choice.

Tonight I was at Augusta’s. Apart from anything else I love the feeling of her name in my mouth. She suits her name. Her husband calls her Gus. I never could. Augusta is just too gorgeous a word to misplace like that.

Things you don’t know about people and that fall into your ears.

“Back then, 33 Christmases ago,” Augusta says, after we had settled down with the tea, “When I thought I was in labour with twins…”

“Go on!” I say, “Go on! They were wrong, it wasn’t twins at all?”

“Well, first it was,” she says, “There they were, a lovely short labour and my two perfect little girls!”

“And then,” she says, “Another tiny cramp, and there he was!”

“Triplets?” I say, in awe, “You had triplets?”

“Ah,” she says, “But that’s not the end of it either!”

“Go on!” I say, brilliant conversationalist that I am.

“My triplet grandchildren just turned 6!”

“Don’t tell me,” she adds, “That things like that don’t run in families!”

The stuff we don’t know about people.....