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Maladies Melodies Allergies

my second COVID booster

There’s a Paul Simon song that starts Maladies Melodies Allergies. I so relate.

My allergies to pollen and the like have been quite severe this season, the worst in years. They were so awful that every time my head hit the pillow at night, within five minutes, I would start to cough uncontrollably. Even trying to sleep with my head propped up wasn’t sufficient. One night I woke up four times, after about 90 minutes each time.

Finally, I started taking the generic version of Nyquil just so I could sleep for six hours in a row. It has a cough suppressant and a nasal decongestant. Likewise, my daughter suffers from seasonal allergies which affect her sleep. She actually stayed home from school a day last week, from sheer fatigue.

I decided that we should each take a home COVID test. As I expected, they were both negative. The other motivation for mine was that I was scheduled to get a second COVID booster. I understand that getting the booster while you actually have COVID is contraindicated. Incidentally, I had no bad reaction, as usual, as long as I didn’t lean my arm on the injection site.

We now have several COVID test kits, some from that time not so long ago when they were a bit difficult to come by. Now they are practically ubiquitous, which is good since I’ve used them a total of thrice in a week. The CDC guidelines in Albany County changed this past Thursday from GREEN to YELLOW, which means masking is no longer optional in church. So before Maundy Thursday and Easter Sunday, I took a rapid test.

Expiry

I was curious about the fact that all the tests we currently own have an expiration date of June 30. This article from Health News Hub states: “The Food and Drug Administration countered Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance by extending their expiration dates. The FDA says it’s OK to add three months to any expiration date printed on a test kit box. (The BinaxNow test kit received FDA approval for an extended shelf life after tests showed the kit components were effective for up to 15 months.)

“Beyond the extended expiration date, results are not reliable.”

Also: “Most manufacturers of at-home tests recommend storing the kits between 35 degrees and 86 degrees. The greatest threat now is delivery during the cold winter months. A test kit left for a day or more in your mailbox at frigid temperatures could freeze the liquid reagent inside a cartridge that comes with the kit, invalidating the test results.”

So, if you see me going into a coughing jag, it’s unlikely that I am spreading COVID, only hay fever. It’s because I’m going to be getting used to sticking a cotton swab up my nose for a while.

Oh, yeah, that Paul Simon song.

Documentary review: Attica

Rocky

If “Attica” is just a line you recognize from the movie Dog Day Afternoon, you should watch the Oscar-nominated, 2021 documentary of that name.

Now, if you were around then, you will discover a lot of details that you forgot, or more likely, did not know at all about one of the most significant prison riots in the United States. “This unnervingly vivid dive into the 1971 uprising… sheds new light on the enduring violence and racism of the prison system…”

A little over half of the approximately 2,200 prisoners took over the facility on September 9, taking 42 staff hostage. They had tired of their brutalizing conditions and sought to be treated like human beings. The stories in the film were told by some of the former prisoners. As one critic correctly notes, “I don’t think Attica glorifies the prisoners, but it does humanize them. That is, it presents them as human beings.”

There were four days of negotiations, including with the state Commissioner of Corrections, Russell G. Oswald. While there were some prisoners who wanted to hold Oswald and other negotiators hostage as well, the prisoner leadership opposed this, saying that they should deal in good faith.

Other people interviewed in the documentary included the families of the guards held hostage. Attica is a small town in rural Wyoming County, southwest of Rochester and southeast of Buffalo. The Department of Corrections is the major employer. Most of the prison personnel were white local folks, while most of the prisoners were black and/or Hispanic, creating a definite culture clash beyond the guard/prisoner dynamic.

During the negotiations, authorities agreed to 28 of the prisoners’ demands. But they would not agree to complete amnesty for the inmates involved with the prison takeover.

Nixon’s the one

The film shares audiotape of Nelson Rockefeller conferring with Richard M. Nixon. The governor assured the President that he would not accede to the demands to go to Attica, a position that Nixon applauded. Then on September 13, Rocky ordered armed corrections officers, and state and local police to retake the prison.

The next thing that happened, you may know. Or not, as disinformation was sent out by Rocky himself, disputed initially by ABC News reporter John Johnson and soon by medical examiners.

But it is what happened AFTER the siege that I had never heard about or seen before. It was quite disturbing in its own right. And that’s the strange thing about the movie. If you don’t know how the story ends, you might get three-quarters of the way through and still hold out for a happy ending.

The movie by writer/director Stanley Nelson got positive reviews from 50 of 51 critics. And the 51st has a snippet that says, “Extraordinary archival footage… You can’t just dismiss it as hyperbole.” I watched it on Amazon Prime.

The thing about Easter

What was familiar is new again

The thing about Easter, the Lenten season before it, and indeed most holidays – is that they are pretty much the same thing, year in and year out. That is not to say that’s a BAD thing, merely predictable. Ashes on the forehead. “Hallelujah” is not uttered during Lent. The Last Supper. Then Christ has died. But wait, Christ is risen? And the promise that Christ will come again?!

This year feels DIFFERENT because we didn’t get to complete the ritual in 2020. Ash Wednesday was February 26 that year. But the church was shut down on March 15, coming back in an electronic form on Facebook the following week, and continuing in some ersatz form. Initially, it was just the pastors and some prerecorded music that the choir had sung over the past decade. Then a handful of people recorded some tunes. A soloist might sing in person, and eventually a quartet.

But it wasn’t until October 2021 that the choir, all fully vaxxed, even began to begin to rehearse. For reasons of socially distancing, half the choir sang on November 28 and the others on December 12. Then we all sang on Christmas Eve. We’re back!

Hiccup

Or maybe we’re not. The resurgence of COVID, specifically, the Omicron variant, kept most of the choir sidelined again in January 2022. But we returned in February. On the first of spring, masks became optional. More significantly the congregation came forward to receive communion. Sitting in the choir loft, it’s one of my favorite things to watch. I might have gotten a little verklempt, though officially, I deny it. It’s probably my seasonal allergies.

At the beginning of Spring, the congregation got to sing for the first time in person in two years. They too were missing what used to be the regular way of doing things.

On April 3, we had what would have felt like a “normal” service two years earlier. The choir and the congregation sang the doxology (“praise God from all whom all blessings flow”). Wouldn’t you know, my allergies acted up again! We also sang the psalter and the communion music.

For Holy Week, more traditional activities on Maundy Thursday and Easter Sunday, albeit with the return of masks. As Joni Mitchell wrote in a very different context, “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”

I have to imagine that those who celebrate Ramadan Mubarak, Passover, or other vernal celebrations are experiencing similar sentiments.

Yazala Abambuti by Samite

Come Thou Fount Of Every Blessing

While looking for another album, I came across Tunula Eno by a Ugandan singer named Samite (Sæm ē tay) Mulondo. It came out in 2003, during the last year of his beloved wife Joan’s life. It is a lovely collection. But I have no idea how I came to own it. A present? Not from my wife. If I got it at a show, I don’t recall it.

The ninth song on the album is Yazala Abambuti. The tune is VERY familiar. In the liner notes, Samite recounts how he was in Syracuse in a restroom, singing this song. He discovered someone humming the tune. Samite asked how the man could know this Ugandan song. The man said it was a Christian hymn.

The tune is called Nettleton. It “was first published as a new tune without any composer listed in John Wyeth’s Repository of Sacred Music, Part Second, published in 1813.”

I searched for Yazala Abambuti and the first item I found was a version by Will Ackerman on a Windham Hill Christmas album. The title translates to “she bore children” according to My Memory.

In the hymnal

Come Thou Fount Of Every Blessing is then the English-language song associated with the tune, with lyrics by pastor Robert Robinson (1735-1790), written in 1757 or 1758.

The lyrics, which dwell on the theme of divine grace, are based on 1 Samuel 7:12, in which the prophet Samuel raises a stone as a monument, saying, “Hitherto hath the Lord helped us” (KJV).

In the second verse, there’s the line “Here I raise my Ebenezer.” This always distracts some, who associate it with Charles Dickens. In fact, “the English transliteration of the name Samuel gives to the stone is Ebenezer, meaning Stone of Help.”

When my daughter and I went to the Presbyterian Triennium in 2019, the theme was Here’s My Heart. It comes from the third verse of this hymn, “Here’s my heart, O take and seal it.”

Listen to: Yazala Abambuti by Samite

Yazala Abambuti by Will Ackerman

Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing – The Tabernacle Choir

Samite, last I knew, was living in upstate New York with his second wife.

My first YouTube video, because COVID

In the beginning…

YouTube A couple of summers ago, I was supposed to read the Scripture for our online church service. My daughter recorded me on her phone, but we were having a difficult time. The reading was only about a minute long. My daughter could only record about 30 seconds at a time. I wouldn’t even try it on my irritating device at that time. Fortunately, Dwight, the tech magician for the church, could piece the snippets together.

Then in the fall, one of my pastors asked me to read Genesis 1:1-2:4 for the Sunday school class that was starting online. It wasn’t a traditional reading, but rather a piece from something called Growing in God’s Love: A Story Bible. The book was edited by Elizabeth F. Caldwell and Carol A. Wehrheim.

Clearly, I needed a different way to record the new video. The reading is nearly three minutes long. Hey, wait! My free ZOOM account allows for recording, doesn’t it? The button along the bottom suggests it does.

I tried a couple of test runs. First, I needed to actually FIND where the video resided. Here’s a YouTube video for that. Ah, the file is an MP4.

Nuts. The sun from behind the blinds kept changing in intensity. On the finished product, my head looks shiny on the top, as it often does. My eye contact with the camera was only so-so. The video, though, was more than adequate for the purpose, I was told.

Channel THAT

Hmm. I think I have a YouTube channel, somehow tied to my Google account. Indeed I do. It has links to other people’s videos I would watch if there were 48 hours in a day. I download the file. Voila, I have my first YouTube video.

I suppose you thought I was going to link to it. Nah. I just wanted to share the fact that because of the pandemic, I did a new thing.

Sigh. OK. Here it is. My favorite is the test video because I REALLY didn’t know what I was doing.