流感激
“... for this Fall rain that shuts me in ...”
Edwin Markham’s turn-of-the-century poem, “感激,” was on my mind recently as I scraped, 用砂纸磨, and swept during an early autumn rainstorm.
I was in the midst of a catharsis project, temporarily swapping thinking for a living for 3 days of hard manual labor on a house built right around the time Markham published “感激” in 1905. (点击 在这里 to hear a reading of the poem.)
The house doesn’t yet have electricity, as we’d opted to keep it off until some of the exposed knob-and-tube wiring can be replaced with 12-2 wire and modern conveniences, such as grounded receptacles. 这意味着没有电力, save for the solar panel battery bank in use on sunny days, and definitely no internet connection.
然而我们还是心存感激.
The day started out with a few of us talking while we worked, but as the group of family and friends in the house grew—some longtime friends, others just recently met—the conversation and work needed a bit of a driving force to carry us along.
In 1905, the best one could do would be to sing songs together, perhaps in multipart harmony, while using hand tools similar to what we are using to restore the house. Thankfully, though, streaming lets us do so much more today. Even though our little group relied on a number of smartphones and a battery-powered speaker to supply the soundtrack, we had almost the entirety of musical history from the last century— and beyond—at our fingertips.
所以我们非常感激.
“That’s the song about zombies,一个人说, as the Spotify playlist pulled up The Cranberries’ classic hit, the lead singer belting out “在你的脑海里, 在你的脑海里, 在你的脑海里” as we sang along.
“Do you have that song by Creed about open arms?” came the question from another, and if it wasn’t on someone’s phone already, we were able to find and stream it easily enough from Amazon or Apple Music, ready for another round of the singalong.
在我们的午休时间, since it was still gloomy outside, we took turns sharing YouTube videos, 从2009年开始 《百家乐软件app最新版下载》 can-can rendition of “It’s Raining Men” to a demo tape version of Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie” by Skylar Gray (who wrote the song’s chorus), the videos kept flowing until our 30 minutes were up and it was time to turn away from the video screen and back to the peeling paint on the screen door.
但我们很感激.
When the playlist eventually got to Meghan Trainor’s signature doo-wop piano line, it led to a slew of songs from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, which then led in turn to Marvin Gaye and even a few bluegrass numbers and gospel tunes.
在今天结束之前, we’d run through two phones’ batteries, but our trusty battery-powered speaker had held its own. The work hadn’t really felt like work—it was more like a singalong that included razor blades put to good use removing layers of poorly applied paint that had accumulated over six rounds of remodels before our fall rain-and-work-a-thon.
然而我们还是心存感激.
The reading of Markham’s “感激” was last on the playlist.
“I thank thee, Father, for the sky, w在这里in Thy little sparrows fly ...” was my final choice as we neared completing of our day’s labor. The overcast day meant work had to end, 就像几千年来一样, when the sky’s light weakened, with deep shadows across the house, making it hard to see w在这里 to scrape and sand.
这一天就这样结束了, 就像开始时那样, 在谈话中, some of it laced with what we’d streamed throughout the day.
我们很感激.
[This article appears in the November/December issue of 流媒体 杂志. 点击 在这里 for your free subscription.]