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| Peter, Paul and Mary at the Westbury Music Fair, 2006 (Wiki Commons) |
Perhaps it is serendipity, running down the YouTubes some of my friends post on Facebook, and taking side trips allied to what they’ve posted. Maybe that’s how I got to Peter, Paul & Mary singing The Rising of the Moon on the BBC in 1966.
PP&M gave the first really big concert I had ever seen. It was in October 1965, at the Westbury Music Fair, right before I left for college. (Oddly enough, our fall semester began about October 28, some weird arrangement with the Ford Foundation so that people could attend three full semesters a year and finish a four-year degree in under three years if they wanted to. I didn’t want to. I wanted to whole college experience. What I got, of course, since our spring semester ended mid-June after everyone else had been home for a month, was a hell of a time finding a summer job. But I digress.)
Anyway, to bring it all back to Christmas, the first or second year I was living in Bristol, Tennessee (as totally unaccountable as anything in a long and unaccountable life), I saw a TV special listed in TV Guide that I could actually receive with the rabbit ears on my TV. I was too broke to spring for cable. The program was on PBS, and it was Peter, Paul & Mary, a whole hour of them singing Christmas songs.
It was magical. I had no reason to get anything like the warm fuzzies at that time in my life, but that program entranced me, and gave me a kick start I probably badly needed to feel the least bit festive. I was hundreds of miles from people I loved―my mother, stepfather, brother, sister-in-law, nephew. I was in a very strange land, a land where one could forget one’s purse in a Burger King and have it returned two hours later, intact. Totally intact. And the teenager who found it would refuse a reward.
It was a nice land, but a very strange land. A local farmer ran lights around his pig sty, which made me laugh. Another one made a lighted cross out of his metal clothesline pole (I admit, that one made me gag).
I was invited, that Christmas (so it must have been the second one during my Tennessee tenure, because I spent the first in Florida with my mother) to a friend’s family Christmas dinner. Cathy’s family was big, close, and rural. Teetotaling. They were totally unlike any people I had ever, in my New York life, experienced for a New York minute. But her parents, Meme and George, “adopted” me. I never felt a stranger when I was with them, any or all of them. They treated me as family. That year, Meme had asked Cathy what I might like or need for Christmas, and the answer was slippers. I had, it is true, been wearing flipflops because paying for my horse was costly, and some things just didn’t fit the budget. In less than a New York minute, I loved Meme and George―now departed, long since departed in fact. I’ve lost touch with their daughter; perhaps that will come round again.
Life just goes round, though. So here I sit in Cornwall, England, my dog at my feet, my beloved horse 3,000 miles away in the very region I have been speaking of, my husband (a thing I once swore I would never have one of again, thank you very much, until I met Simon) in a room down the hall doing whatever magic he does with high-tech telecom inventions and such. And I still love PP&M. I lamented the loss of Mary some while back. Odetta somewhat later. Incredible singers of my youth, replaced more recently by Hayley Westenra and Celtic Woman.
Here’s an offering from PP&M. Nominally a Halloween song, I’ve always thought of it as a Christmastime tune. The more I listen to it, the more it seems to have Druid overtones, perfectly suitable for Yule.
Slainte!
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