On Tuesday August 3rd, I slept all day.
No, really.
I just kept sleeping. I slept and slept and slept! I didn’t sleep straight through breakfast, but I diligently went back to bed after breakfast was finished. I knew I’d need it later, and so I just stayed in bed and read and napped and kept the curtains mostly closed all day.
Sometime in the afternoon, I showered and warmed up slowly, singing each of my pieces three times through and feeling rather good about them. I recorded them, to keep myself focused; I didn’t learn this until recently, that recording pieces that otherwise don’t need to be recorded keeps me paying much better attention to all the bits and pieces, as if I’m performing for someone at that moment after all. (It also lets me share tiny tidbits with you, like this one…)
8 3 10 6 22 PM Clip from rehearsal with piano track by MeganElizabethMorris
Then, I sang Dafydd y Garreg Wen because it had been in my head nonstop the last few days. Another song inspired by green Welsh hills… This has long been one of my favorite Welsh tunes and definitely one of my favorite Bryn Terfel recordings. I can’t offer you a mastered track, but I can offer you the tune sans accompaniment:
8 3 10 6 33 PM Dafydd y Garreg Wen, sans accompaniment by MeganElizabethMorris
A fairly literal translation, from the Dafydd y Garreg Wen Wikipedia entry:
‘Carry’, said David, ‘my harp to me’
I would like, before dying, to give a tune on it (her)
Lift my hands to reach the strings
God bless you, my widow and children!
Last night I heard an angel’s voice like this:
“David, come home and play through the glen!”
Harp of my youth, farewell to your strings!
God bless you, my widow and children!
A half hour before dinner, I showed Marty the wonders of the footpath. It was a glorious walk. The wind blew mist that sprinkled on us as we went.
One of the stones we came across set my brain to tugging, and I thought — but I couldn’t remember for sure — that the first name on my genealogy list was Thomas Lewis. So I snapped the photo, even though Marty and I were deep in conversation most of the way. When I got home, it turned out I had been right, though it seems highly unlikely that this is the same Thomas Lewis (and given the proliferation of those same names throughout Welsh history, I’m sure there were plenty of Thomas Lewises running around). But it was still cool to see one there, who even lived at roughly the same time.
At dinner, Maxine made us sweet and sour chicken, and we invited Owen to sit with us. We had met him (along with Elgan and Elgan’s parents) at breakfast earlier that day when I was still half asleep. Owen and Marty and I were the only three at dinner this evening, so this time we chilled and took the time to chat.
Owen is downright stately, a tall and fit man in his later years with a distinguished and intelligent air. He speaks slowly and of many and varied items of interest — a wealth of theater, poetry, and the finer points of the Welsh language. In initial conversations like this one, I had no idea how fond we would become of these housemates! When you stay at a hotel, you don’t come to feel like family with the other hotel-goers. At this bed and breakfast, though, that’s very near what was happening. This particular share of Park Place patrons became very dear to us over the course of Eisteddfod week. I’m sentimental to a fault, for sure, but it’s still true. I’m just the one willing to dwell on it in public. ;}
I sat with my back to the right-hand wall of the dining room; Marty sat at the end with his back towards the garden doors. Owen sat facing me, and we all ate as we talked. I remember that the food was delicious. Owen had something similar, but vegetarian. We talked about food and the Eisteddfod, and Owen told us how he came to be adjudicating for a folk dancing competition, his teaching of the Welsh language, his travels between home and here, and the vagaries of satellite navigation devices. I remember that Marty and Owen had some kind of dessert, and Maxine made me a bowl of fresh fruit. And I remember that this was the beginning of a series of evenings that week where we stayed in after-dinner conversation far later than planned simply because there was nothing better we could imagine doing with our time, right at that moment. It was glorious!
Come to think of it, I guess I didn’t sleep all day. Not in the strictest sense, at least. ;}
