Monday 15 December 2014

Emily's recital & driving home from PEI

Today was lots of fun. After church Henry picked me up and we went to Emily's Christmas dance recital. She did great!

You can see a watered down version here. I couldn't use the music they danced to in the video because it is copyrighted so I just put a royalty free version of jingle bells on repeat. The music will therefore have nothing to do with the beat of the dancing. In a happy coincidence jingle bells is the actual song they danced to and it is my only royalty-free Christmas song :-)

Emily's dad Mike wanted to be there but had made a commitment he couldn't break.

Then it was off to Works Burger to celebrate.

Such a beauty! Her kindness just shines.

Rootbeer BBQ sauce!

Mom always had people pose in the same spots - in front of the den door inside and the well outside. I always ask for first bite burger photos.

Henry looks like his elk burger is scaring him a bit :-)

The sauce he chose was plenty spicy enough to scare him for real.

I am all about the blur right now.

Listen I had no intention of talking about Mary Lynn today but grief is a sneaky son of a gun. I think of her especially on nights after major life events like this because I'd know she would be waiting excitedly for pictures and a video. So I can defend my heart a bit against that now that I'm aware of it. And maybe you can too coming here to my blog :-)

But today at the concert I was blindsided by something unexpected - the plinking and stopping and starting of the kids playing piano. That's why I included a bit in the video.

It reminded me of the drive home from the funeral.

You see several of our Mennonite cousins made the long trip to pei for the funeral. It would be disrespectful for me to post their pictures but just before they left they sang for us. Maybe I'll post just the sound sometime. One of our cousins has written several books of songs and in a moment of unclear hearing I heard the lyrics of the last song they sang as: "Good bye dear friends it's time to pay the parking man," when it was actually the much more beautiful: "It's time to take the parting hand."

This struck our funny bone during a time when we were as likely to laugh as cry, weren't always sure which was which, and that chorus became embedded in our trip home.

As we started out from Quebec City around 9 am Melissa began trying to play that chorus in an app called Garage Band on her phone. She and Karen practiced till they had three of the four parts recorded. This took until nearly sunset, well into Ontario.

We missed the exit for the short cut through Montreal because I chose that moment to try to help with my limited knowledge of Garage Band. None of us knew enough about the app to know how to sustain notes so we plinked away hit or miss all day long and that didn't bother anybody. It was just something we needed to do.

In the end we made a 38 second video that I would love for you to watch, by playing our song on the phone while recording video on my iPad. What I'm saying is that it's rough. I thought about cleaning it up, we even recorded the bass line but as I believe I mentioned earlier I don't know enough about Garage Band that I could add it. And truthfully I like the video just exactly as it is.

All trip we had been singing things like "good bye dear friends it's time to buy some French fries now" or "fill the gas tank now" and laughing like fools at my mishearing of the lyrics but when we took this video it came from our broken hearts and souls and there wasn't a dry eye in the house.

Anyway here it is.

I'm sure the music is a lot smoother where you are Mary Lynn but we will never forget making our plinky song for you.

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