My father's eyes (song)

The morning after we finished sitting shiv'a, I took the dog for a walk and considered the fact that I ought to write a song somehow commemorating my father. Almost immediately, a phrase entered my mind, "If I could see through my father's eyes", along with a hint of a tune. When I got home, I made a very rough recording of the tune as it stood onto my mobile phone, so that I would have some form of reference.

The next day I made a demo sequence of the verse, figuring out what the tune should be, along with the accompanying chords. Early on, I established that the time signature would be 6/8 with two bars per chord (most of the time). Using the sequence Dm/Am/Bb/G, I developed a tune then extended the chords so that they would be more interesting (Dm add 9, Am add9, Bb maj7, Gsus4 to G). At times the Dm add9 is replaced by F6/9, Am add9 with C6/9 and Bb maj7 with Bb maj9. Over the past ten days, I've been working on the arrangement; at first, I knew that it was incomplete, but even when it did reach a state of being complete, I still found things to change. The song sounds very cool, due to the loping beat, subdued chords played by violins in the background and a guitar obligato, but now after two days of the same arrangement, I am having my doubts about the orchestration of the first verse. 

But no words! I was stuck on the second line - if the first line is "If I could see with my father's eyes", it would be extremely clumsy to have a second line like "I would see.....". I couldn't think of a synonym for 'see' that would make sense. Sitting in the kibbutz clinic this morning (waiting to arrange blood and urine tests, if you must know), I had a small breakthrough - "The world would seem to be a vast surprise". Once I had this couplet, it was as if the flood-gates had been opened and I quickly figured out what I thought were the words of the song. Being totally modern, I tapped the words into my mobile phone and saved them before I lost track.

After coming home, I looked at the lyrics and tried singing them to the music. Apart from noticing that there are problems with the accompaniment to the first verse (as noted above), I discovered that I had written precisely half a song - there should be three verses of eight lines each, but I had written three verses of only four lines each. Something similar happened before when I wrote four lines for a song's bridge, only to discover that the arrangement allowed for only two lines; that was easier to fix! What was the second verse became the second half of the first verse; I wrote a new, complete, second verse starting with "If I could hear through my father's ears", then extended what was the third verse to a complete verse. Then I started rewriting, changing words here and there. Here are the words as they stand at the moment:

If I could see through my father's eyes
The world would seem to be a vast surprise
Devices that he can't recognise
Communications transmogrified
He fought a war for democracy
Still half the world lives with tyranny
What was so clear is now ambiguous
All moral sense has deserted us leaving no fuss

If I could hear through my father's ears
There'd be the sound of suffering and of fear
The quiet Sundays of yesteryear
Have been replaced with shouting and with jeers
Politeness no longer means a thing
And courtesy has no sound, no ring
Now all the masses are wearing bling
Reducing standards thus losing grace and quality

He's tired now, he has lived too long
He barely hears and now his sight has gone
At least he knew what was right, what's wrong
He leaves this world with his descendants strong
One hundred years filled with so much change
What have we learnt? Tell me, what now remains?
I sing a slow and resigned refrain
Salute the man who taught me modesty, no private gain

I'm not convinced about the final line of each verse, especially the last.

And now the obligatory discussion about the scale of the song. The tune mainly runs on the notes D upto A, with the occasional C below the D, meaning  that the scale is probably D minor. The harmony doesn't help much: the Bb chord suggests the note Bb, meaning that the scale is  D minor, but the G chord suggests the note B, meaning that the scale is D dorian. Only once per verse does the tune escape the narrow range of D to A, when it goes up to C (an octave above middle C) then descends to B natural - so the scale is D dorian. Listening to a playback of the track with vocals, I think that I am going to lower the track by a tone, leaving it in C dorian. This will probably be easier for me to sing.

Bish-a-lu-la

In 1970, I started attending a semi-exclusive youth club that was attached to a church near my primary school; this was where I used to be a cub scout. I write "semi-exclusive" as I was invited to join by someone who I had known in the Scouts; certainly the club did not advertise itself. The club's activities were listening to music (enter Abbey Road, ITCOTCK, early Pink Floyd, etc), playing table tennis (one year we even played in some local league) and in the first year, the occasional philosophical discussion (after all, this was technically a church youth club). 

At one of these discussions, I was talking with the vicar, who told me how much he admired the Jewish people. Somewhat surprised, I asked why and he said that although Judaism has formal services, it is celebrated mainly in the family; Christianity lacks this, he said. 

One example of such is called נתינה בסתר, "netina beseter" or "hidden giving". My parents used to do this, and so did I: for example, several years ago, one of our neighbours died, leaving a widow and a daughter. As by this time the kibbutz dining room had closed, I decided to cook for these neighbours their meal for Erev Shabbat (i.e. Friday night) as there is nothing worse than returning from a funeral to an empty home with nothing to eat. There was also a long running case of a family whose eldest daughter had some form of cancer - I used to cook for them every couple of weeks. The 'hidden' part of this is that the benefactors might not know who was providing the meals, but certainly the community at large did not know, and this was not something that one would broadcast (modesty).

A few years later, some one took it upon themselves to semi-formalise this arrangement: when a mother comes home after giving birth, people volunteer to cook meals for the coming week or more. Similarly, when someone dies, people volunteer to cook meals for the week of "shiv'a". So throughout this week, every day someone will prepare a hot meal for us. The tendency is to provide more than enough food, so I suspect that our fridge will be overloaded by the end of the week and there may not be a need to cook on Friday night (by which time we will have stopped formally receiving people).

We call this "bish-a-lu-la" (like "Bebop-a-lu-lu") although our daughter pointed out that it should really be pronounced "bishlu la" (בישלו לה), "they cooked for her", where "her" is the mother who has just given birth. As written Hebrew doesn't have vowels, sometimes a word can be mispronounced, especially as this word should really be two (in which case there would have been no problems in pronouncing it).

Eulogy

Father, if I had to describe you in a few words, I would choose concepts such as "dedication", "principled" and "modesty".

My father's first test with dedication and being principled came at the end of his secondary school education in Cardiff (capital of Wales) in 1940 when he was 18, when he volunteered to join the Royal Air Force. Britain was suffering from continual waves of German bombers and only the steadfastness of the RAF prevented an even harder blow. Already in those days my father had heard about the suffering of the Jews in Germany and Poland, and his principles led him to devote his life to their memory.

In 1942, my father's older brother died in Malta while he was serving in the Navy on a mine-sweeper. At this moment, my father's life changed and he turned his dedication towards his grieving parents. This dedication continued until their deaths in 1964 [IIRC my paternal grand-mother died first, her grieving husband a mere three weeks later. My maternal grand-father died before I was born and my grand-mother died three months after I was born, so basically I grew up without grandparents]. We had moved a few years previous to Bristol in order to be closer to his parents, and after their deaths, my parents realised that despite their desire to return to Cardiff and a better Jewish community, they were prepared to sacrifice a few years so that I might be able to attend a high ranking secondary school (aka Bristol Grammar School).

For some reason, I don't remember my father being a dominant figure in my childhood, although there is one incident from the snowy winter of 1963 that is incised into my memory and points out how principled my father was. I had gone to visit a friend and my father had come to take me home. For some reason that I do not remember, we had to travel that day on the bus. As opposed to Israel, there are a fixed number of places on a British bus, and the conductors strictly enforced this number. The bus came, people piled on and on and on, and by the time that we alighted, there was only one spare place. I suggested that my father should sit and I would sit on his lap, but he refused as we would be exceeding the maximum number of passengers. So due the strong principles of my father, we were forced to wait for the next bus in the freezing cold.

I wasn't aware of this at the time, but my father translated his dedication, his being principled and his modesty to positive actions within the small Jewish community of Bristol: he worked for the Jewish burial society, and on Christian holidays would volunteer to work in the major hospital in the city so that Christian workers could be with their families.

After I left home, my father dedicated himself to my mother, following which that dedication grew and grew as my mother's health declined. This dedication grew to the extent that he would not allow anyone else to take care of her. After my mother's death, my wife and I were very apprehensive about how he would continue without his wife after 50 years of marriage.

My father's main hobby - if not his sole hobby - was gardening. Somehow this love of gardening passed over me but was transferred to my wife [this is a self-deprecatory joke]. We had a large garden in Bristol with a few trees and many well looked-after flowers. When my parents moved back from Bristol to Cardiff in the mid-70s, they lived in a bungalow, also with a large and well-looked after garden. Possibly my father's major contribution to Tzora was the large garden that he developed and tended next to his house, until his physical capabilities no longer supported this.

As opposed to my mother, who suffered from serious medical problems, and myself, when sometimes it seems that my best friend is the flu virus [another self-deprecatory joke], my father was never ill. Nine years ago we celebrated his 90th birthday with a party at the Tel Aviv port, and he was lucid and in complete control of his senses. I recently discovered that I had written the following on his birthday card

It's an honour and a privilege 

To have a father such as you

Always caring about his fellow man

With barely a thought for himself

The values you have instilled in me

Are the best a son could ever wish

The only way to repay you

Is to wish you all the best on this

Birthday of Birthdays

But a year or two later, an infection, that for a younger person would be considered trivial, managed to scramble his brain and from that point on, my father began traversing a slope that was at first shallow, but as time went on, became steeper and steeper. It's the slope from which there is no return.

Let us not forget: we must remember and cherish the 95 good years of his life.

Funeral playlist

The deliberately insensitive male characters in Nick Hornby's "High Fidelity" are tasked at one stage for creating a "'Laura's Dad Tribute List". There's one passage as follows...

- 'You Can't Always Get What You Want.'
- 'Just 'cause it's in The Big Chill.'
- 'I haven't seen the Big Chill, have I?'
- 'You lying bastard. You saw it in a Lawrence Kasdan double bill with Body Heat.'
- 'Oh, yeah. But I'd forgotten about that, honestly. I wasn't just nicking the idea.'

Actually, I can't think of a more inappropriate song for a funeral than "You can't always get what you want", but in the film it makes sense. Presumably it was one of the gang's favourite songs. I have read that "Angels" as sung by Robbie Williams is the most picked song for British funerals, but that song doesn't speak to me.

As someone who shares more than one character trait with Rob, the protagonist of "High Fidelity", I have devoted in the past no small amount of time in developing a playlist for my father's funeral, which at the time was putative, but something that was definitely going to happen at some time. Rob says in HF "There aren't really any pop songs about death — not good ones, anyway. Maybe that's why I like pop music, and why I find classical music a bit creepy." I don't agree with him at all.

First off, intended for the time when the coffin is lowered into the grave and covered with soil, I am taking a hint from HF but from a different film, Oliver Stone's "Platoon", which uses "Adagio for strings" by Samuel Barber. I don't know whether this was considered to be 'funeral music' before "Platoon" or whether "Platoon" made it 'funeral music', but it is definitely appropriate and chilling. The comments on the YouTube page show that other people think the same. 

One of the most beautiful pieces of classical music that I have ever heard is Ravel's "Pavane pour une infante defunte" (Pavane for a dead princess). There wasn't much music in our house when I was growing up; my parents were fond of swing music (think Glenn Miller) from the days of their youth (which was interrupted by World War 2) and beat music from the sixties didn't find favour with them. It's a shame that they never got to appreciate this classical piece, although I do remember my mother saying at one stage that she liked Debussy's "Clair de lune" (as the Americans would say, "way to go, Mum!"). This will be the first song after the 'service' finishes, when everyone either lines up to commiserate with the grieving family or else starts walking home. I always find the solemnity of the 'service' echoing around my head for some time, and there is no better way than to accompany it with Ravel's Pavane.

There may not be many pop songs about death, but there are plenty of 'art songs' (those that are made to be listened to, not to be danced to) on this topic, especially in Israel. I chose two which coincidentally (or not) were composed by Yoni Rechter: "To die" as sung by Arik Einstein (lyrics by Avraham Halfi) and "Within the storms" as sung by Nurit Galron, who also wrote the words.

In conclusion, I chose "Old man" by Randy Newman, which is both touching and at times somewhat tasteless. Hopefully people will only hear the tune and the sentiment that lies behind it, but not the words.

I wonder whether other people on the kibbutz devote as much thought and time to choosing a 'funeral playlist'.

When my father died (poem)

In the early 70s, I was very interested in modern poetry and I still have several anthologies dating from that period. In 2007 I mentioned where this interest started - "The Mersey Sound", otherwise known as Penguin Modern Poets 10. Some time after this, I bought both PMP8 and PMP11; I didn't find anything rewarding to my adolescent mind in the latter volume, but some of the poems in PMP8 resonated with me, especially the poems of Edwin Brock. Of course, in the early 70s, there was no such thing as the Internet, and finding information about Brock, or even finding his poems, was nearly impossible. I have a memory, from my university days, of tracking down one of his books in some dusty library and photocopying the poems. I also bought a biography of the poet that appeared; both this and the poems were for my friend Linda.

Brock's section of PMP8 begins - indeed, the book itself begins - with an appropriate poem called "When my father died". Looking at it now, it doesn't seem so appropriate, and it transpires that my memories of this poem are mixed with another in the collection, titled "A moment of respect".

When my father died (Edwin Brock)

On the day my father died
    all the hoops in the neighbourhood rang
    skate wheels shrilled on summer pavements
    and I in my blakey-boots clanged one foot in each gutter

On the day my father died
    girls were running autumn-eyed, with wild hair
    and hand of silk; peg-tops had come round again
    and in the sky the angels were as plain as wings

But on the day my father died
    white faces fell from every window
    and every house found rooms of tears to hide
    while I, joy-jumping, empty-eyed sand on the day my father died

Now my father dies a little every day
And the faces from each window grow like mine

A moment of respect (Edwin Brock)

Two things I remember about my grandfather:
his threadbare trousers, and the way he adjusted
his half-hunter watch two minutes every day.

When I asked him why he needed to know the time so
exactly, he said a business man could lose a fortune
by being two minutes late for an appointment.

When he died he left two meerschaum pipes
and a golden sovereign on a chain. Somebody
threw the meerschaum pipes away, and
there was an argument about the sovereign.

On the day of his burial the church clock chimed
as he was lowered down into the clay, and all
the family advanced their watches by two minutes

One sentence of my father's has remained stuck in my memory for at least fifty five years: it is better to be early by half an hour then late by five minutes. 

Monty Newman, 1922-2021

 I am sad to say that my father died during the night, following a short illness. More later.

Relative date fields

Our old pre-Priority ERP system had what I considered to be extreme flexibility with regard to date fields. One could enter a date (e.g. 07/07/2021) but one could also enter a relative date such as -7 or +7; in the first case, this would translate to 01/07/2021 and the second would be 13/07/2021 (or maybe 14 - I don't remember). Priority has a different kind of flexibility: when a date field appears in data entry mode, one has to enter a date, although there is auto-completion: no need to write the year if the date is in "this year", similarly no need for a month if the date is "this month". There is no need for the slashes but one has to enter two digits for the day, so it would be enough to enter "07" which would be replaced by 07/07/2021 (actually, there's another short cut for "today" - "+". Pressing "+" again gives tomorrow and so on). But when a date field appears in data retrieval mode, one can either enter a date as above, or choose from a predefined list containing values like "Beginning of the current month", "Beginning of the previous month", "End of the previous month" or even "End of the next month". Over the years, I have become to appreciate these predefined values as it makes defining saved queries such as "retrieve all orders entered in the previous month" very simple.

In the OP's management program (my private quasi-ERP system), I figured out a way to implement auto-completion a few years ago, even though I suspect that the users haven't cottoned on yet. With the advent of saved queries,  the right side of my brain has quietly been contemplating how to implement relative dates. The pieces fell into place a few days ago; originally I had considered having a database table ("when the only tool one has is a DB manager, every problem can be solved with another table") containing the name of the relative date as well as a formula for calculating that date, but the formula part had me stumped. I realised that it would be much easier to define a new component, based on a combo box, into which would be loaded the various relative dates; the combo box would have a GetData method that could either auto-complete a date entered manually or could calculate the real date from the relative date.

This is an aspect of Delphi that I haven't used very much (defining new components) but it turned out to be much easier than expected. I also discovered that changing the component (adding things that I didn't think of at first, like font or width) could be done simply without the need to reinstall the component into the user library.

The code required to check the value of the combo box has changed from what it used to be, but now that I've figured it out, I can use it wherever I need to use a TRelativeDate.

All of the above lead me to consider whether I could develop a TSavedQueryPanel: a panel that includes a list box containing the names of saved queries, along with the three speed buttons. The panel would have methods for loading the saved queries, adding a saved query, executing a saved query, updating a saved query and deleting a saved query. If I'm not familiar with defining new components, then I am doubly unfamiliar with developing new container components (i.e. a component that contains within more components - hence the panel). But there is a problem with coupling - all of the methods mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph require access to a database and this would be extremely difficult to generalise. I shall pass this problem over to my right brain who is currently unemployed.