As I age I become more ambivalent. I realize that death, as it stalks me, will make me the equal on earth of all men. The legacy has some moderate importance, I'm not Churchill, nor MLK. I think that the Mexican's have something right in the day of the dead. Sitting sharing memories of those who went before, passing that along to the younger ones, in an organized fashion has some appeal to me. Perhaps it is out of fear that I pass and become irrelevant.

I study the past in spurts. Right now the project is to get my catalogue of masonic music completed. A database with the title, tune, type of notation, date. But the purpose is the study of the influences on the music from the age of enlightenment through the Victorian era, the Temperance Movement, and to the present day, where the sound of music is no longer heard in Masonic circles. The preliminary framework will get the scrutiny of my son the anthropologist, then I might publish it. Or not, just curiosity drives me most days.

I am no scholar of the USA. As a youngster, (around 10) and the eldest, I was once let out of school to travel with my grandparents to their mobile home in florida for 2 weeks, my Mother was having the 6th child and I was..well in the way so to speak. I came back a sort of 'civil rights' activist from then on. Signs on water fountains, change-rooms at the beach, and so on. My grandparents were not racists, my grandfather suffered the effects of WW2, but they were aghast at the fact 'the help' talked to you in restaurants, chewing gum. Canada was Victorian by comparison, the waitress would never be familiar with you, nor talk about the weather.

Our marching band still travels some, and I always room with Vern. Vern and I get along great, but a lot is made about oblique references to my black lover, and the guys have at us all the time, but we give it back. Like high school kids. Vern plays snare and I ride him about learning a horn. If someone is getting off the bus at the US border it's always Vern. Odd. He has a Canadian passport but born in South America.

Music is a language. It offers so much in so many variations. We will never understand it all, nor master it. Many great, and not so great musicians pass through. Some I regret spending the time to see, others lift my spirits and send me on a new flight of fantasy.

Canadian songbooks used by school children in the 50's and 60's are full of spirituals. They were revered, sang, and the words faithfully mouthed by grade school choirs.

Now that wouldn't be acceptable. A great debate springs up once a year when a parent sees the N word in "To Kill a Mockingbird" and wants the book banned from the schools. Then the rhetoric heats up about teaching high schoolers the history, good or bad, and to see things as they were.

In the end, I'm one day closer to dust. I learned how to deal with that, for now.

John Conley
Musica est vita