What's in Dave's Head

Executive summary:     Donna and Kate sang at Carnegie Hall!      We met up with old friends      St. Patrick’s Day fun      My first NYC subway ride and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge   Carnegie Hall On St. Patrick’s Day, Donna and Kate, both alumnae of St. Mary’s College (SMC) in South Bend, Indiana, performed in Carnegie Hall in New York with a choir comprised of the school’s current women’s choir, alums of that choir, and choirs that are directed by SMC choir alums. In all, 250 women performed, under the baton, as they say, of Dr. Nancy Menk, the choir’s director for 35 years, and accompanied by a 30-piece orchestra. The singers had gotten the music months ago so they could learn it. Dr. Menk sent links to YouTube videos of the songs being performed and detailed notations for pronunciation, breathing, and technical matters way over my pay grade. Then, once the singers arrived in New York, rigorous rehe...

I have an interest in peoples’ names – how they got them and what they might tell us about the person’s background. For instance, my dad was named after his father, Paul Manuel Douglass. I remember asking him where the name Manuel came from – it looks Hispanic, although I’m unaware of any such lineage.   (It’s pronounced “Man-u-el,” rather than “Man-wel.”). He didn’t know and had never inquired. Maybe my dad didn’t share my curiosity. There’s a motherlode of interesting names on my mom’s side of the family. My maternal grandmother’s family, the Harpers, were farmers in central West Virginia. John David Harper, who I appear with in an old black and white photo as an infant, had a wooden leg; I believe he lost it in a railroad accident. I don’t know anything about his wife, Lucinda Jane Evans, other than she bore 10 children whose names, and those of their spouses, are listed below: Child Married Florence Emma Steve Stevens ...

Donna and I recently took a long weekend to visit our son Jack and his wife Erin in southern California. Some takeaways: Jack’s and Erin’s friends are awesome . One night we hung out and then went bar-hopping with Jon, Luis, Eric, Jaqueline, Amy, Ian. What smart, interesting and good people they are. We talked about the future of social media, politics, travel, family. It’s heartening to know that Jack has surrounded himself with such quality people. Klondike and Sundae, on the other hand, are stupid . When we first arrived, the American Eskimos greeted us as if we were ill-intentioned intruders, the little white fluffballs trying to be intimidating. After a few minutes we would convince them that we were benign and they would calm down and befriend and be-cuddle us, until we left the room for five minutes and returned, at which point their little dog brains forgot they had met us and barked and snarled at us all over again. This went on for the first couple days until either ...

I recently picked up a copy of Le Morte d’Arthur , the 938-page telling of the legend of King Arthur written by Sir Thomas Malory in 1469. The misleading title belies the fact that the book is, except for the final 20 pages, about Arthur’s life, rather than his death. The stories themselves were first written in the thirteenth century in French; Malory translated and compiled them into this work while in prison for various crimes that may have included rape, armed robbery, and attempted murder. There is little hard evidence that King Arthur is other than a legend. This is not like the happy, feel-good Disney version of the Arthurian legend. It portrays a darker, more aggressive Arthur, who slaughters hundreds or thousands on the battlefield and uses his position and power to sleep with women. Like King Herod in Bethlehem, Arthur orders all male infants born at the same time as his son Mordred (the product of Arthur sleeping with his half-sister), to be put on a ghost ship to d...

Last year Donna gifted me an Ancestry.com DNA test. According to the spit I sent them, I’m:    38% British    17% South European    14% West European    11% Irish/Scots/Welsh      9% Scandinavian      7% East European      3% Spanish/Portuguese       That surprised me – I thought I was mostly Scots, German, and Swiss – and got me interested in my heritage. I have collected a good amount of genealogical information from my mom, who was our family historian. Most of the information I have is on my maternal grandfather’s side of the family tree. I have records of my mother’s side of the family going back eight generations before me, to the birth in 1704 of Jacob Hochstetler, who emigrated from Germany in 1736 with his wife to the American colony of Pennsylvania. Below is a hair-raising account according to Descendants of Jacob Hochstetler, the Immigrant of 1...

Years ago, I was in the publishing business, specifically of subscription business newsletters. I went from reporter to editor to publisher of groups of regulatory and compliance newsletters for various industries – telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, food safety, information technology, even fashion and waste management. We would trade or rent out to other publishers or marketers our subscriber lists. But because our customer information was such a valuable asset, we took steps to make sure lists were used appropriately by others. For instance, we would “seed” them with phony names so we could monitor who was mailing to them. When mail would come to my address with a fake name, I knew the sender had used our list and could verify whether they had permission to do so. The tactic isn’t used just for mailing lists. Reference works such as encyclopedias and dictionaries include fake entries so they can tell if a publisher is plagiarizing their content. In a recent Washi...

2018 has been an odd year for me. There have been some amazing highlights, such as t he birth of my second grandchild, Cormac Douglass Swanekamp; t he marriage of my son Jack to the wonderful Erin; and t he emergence of Corinne Mae Swanekamp as a remarkable little girl full of personality, humor, and love of her Granddad and Nana.  However, the year for me seems to have been characterized by a general malaise, or more accurately, a general lethargy. I wasn’t able to do much physical exercise for much of the year, and for whatever reason, besides work and  doing some fun things with Donna and some of her siblings , I didn’t seem to do much else at all, except gain weight, watch television and read (okay, and do a lot of Sudoku and crossword puzzles). I’m looking forward to getting back in the saddle. In January I’m starting back in the pool if there are no more spinal issues and I hope to start training for my fifth Chesapeake Bay swim in June – I’ll find out in Jan...