Simon Fraser University Pipe Band Robbie Burns Dinner

Thanks to Anne Lindsay, a rare Scottish lass of great wit, I was introduced to my first Robbie Burns dinner and have been going ever since.  Every one is the same and everyone is different.  The best is the Piping in of the Haggis and the hilarious Ode to the Haggis.
Last year Lorne Kay and I were at the Simon Frazer Burns Dinner. Lorne is a great fan of their pipe band and took me to their Tattoo some decades back. When I solo sailed my Folkes sailboat one winter across the Pacific to Hawaii I loved having along a Simon Fraser Pipe Band CD I played full volume one day when the boat and myself needed some uplifting.
This night we introduced my two Scottish origin friends, Dr. George Chalmers and Jane Fairbairn to the sacred inner circle of Burns Supper fans.  My brother and his family were dressed in Hay Tartan kilts enjoying the Robbie Burns Haggis in Ottawa while we were a few hours behind enjoying ours.  My friend Laura, with her own Scottish Heritage, was again enjoying another Ode to Haggis.  She doesn’t like Haggis but she loves the Simon Frazer Pipe Band and Highland Dancers.
A wonderful night.  At our table we had a man from Edinburgh whose accent was royal.  We also had a man from the Hebrides who told us of his stone house and the hundred other people who lived on the island.  There’s not much more Scottish than that.  The night had George reminiscing about his Scottish uncles and aunts growing up. Jane had done her masters at Simon Fraser and loved being back among some of the alumni.  I am really thankful that I could pass on to George and Jane what Anne once shared with me.  Every year I enjoy the evening even better.
I just love the haggis.  This night of haggis is as close to mass as the secular can come.  I feel all saintly and purified after I’ve had the rich feast of guts and cereal.
The silent auction raises money for the Band which continues win world championships.  What a night!  What royal music! And tremendous dance.
Thank You Simon Fraser Pipe Band.  I had tears in my eyes listening to you.

St. James Anglican Church and St. Patrick

Thanks to the wonderful welcoming work of Father Mark Greenaway Robbins, St. James Anglican Church is a church for people. In the downtown eastside, it’s congregation comes from all over Vancouver including those who live in the immediate area. These include a staunch old group of people who have come to the church for decades long before the DTES became more associated with the troubles that also weekly bring lost souls into the church out of their despair and loneliness.
There’s always coffee and cookies after so I’ve met many fellow parishioners old and young. Being older, I especially like the young families who bring new life to the church.  The children like Gilbert my cockapoo who loves St. James.
Today I captured of a picture of my young friends Kevin and AJ with their three little ones.  I do hope our mutual friends Phil and Elizabeth doing Medical Teaching and Research in Saudi see these pictures. It’s taken just outside St. James.
Saint Patrick, patron saint of Ireland’s day is March 17.  I love the St. Patrick Breastplate prayer. This week is Celtic Week in Vancouver.  I started the weekend off with Connor MacPherson, The Seafarer at Pacific Theatre.
I got out the Hay Clan Kilt but in honour of St. Patrick wore my green blazer.  We’re Scottish on Dad’s side and Irish on Mom’s and all celtic between.  The Hay name has been in Canada and the US since early days, my tendency to walk about coming from a long line of adventurers.
Church was all we made today.  They called Gilbert, MacGilbert.  Having had this spiritual time followed by socialization with friends, Gilbert and I headed home to change.
We’ve just come in from a short walk between downpours.  It always rains here on St. Patrick’s Day here. That’s Gods way of showing he loves the green.
 

Old Blind Dog

It's raining on deck. I'm here in the cozy warm with the diesel stove flames dancing light.  The heat is distributed by the helicopter fan twirling atop the stove. I'm listening to Old Blind Dog's New Tricks Album and the Collection.  The instrumentals of whistle, drum and violin are haunting celtic.  Now the Bedlam Boys song of ancient highland is playing.
I've been reading the wonderful writing of my friend Anne Lindsay.  In northern cabins she had us all playing a background of strings so she could weave her flute tapestry in the sound. Now she's painting pictures of Moroccan bazaars with her Kirkcubright pen. I've just been reading too in Peter Newman's, The Company of Adventurers of the northern Scots lads who came out to Canada with the Hudson Bay Company.
It's been a long couple of days with 50 patients a clinic.
I'm wondering why I've been so long not playing my guitar. It's not something I do well but I have enjoyed it so.  Hearing the Old Blind Dog I remember first seeing them that July weekend so many years ago in Port Coquitlam at the annual Scottish Cultural Festival where extraordinarily strong boys where tossing the timber, flinging telephone posts about like they were toothpicks.  I dream one day of seeing and hearing Old Blind Dog in Scotland.
I've thought it would be grand to sail to the shores  grandparents left to come to Canada.  I'd not be the first to go back that way.  I read of a Danish man and his wife  doing this from Victoria there for no other reason than that his life was enriched by the effort.  I love a tale and an adventure to go with it.  The years run down and the costs of such endeavours always seem too high but when one sets a mind to such a thing it carries through.  God works in mysterious ways.  I did love meeting the elderly gent who sailed solo from Britain to the Maritimes in his 80's.  There's time enough and more.
Old Blind Dog is fiddling the Ferret Set from the New Tricks album. It's got me missing dancing now. So much of my life has been devoted to work and more work and more learning to do more work.  I've no regrets about the work. It's a gift to heal and the education I've had to that end has been unsurpassed.  It's second nature now. There's so much I've learned.  It's a tapestry and a fiddling tune for sure.  I've done a mighty fine jig at times to keep death distracted. I've been privilege to miracles.  Watched the dead rise.  So much sacred in the mundane. All the reductionism of the fearful can't contain the glory of a single moment of those times.
I remember delivering that Inuit baby in Churchill.  The same place where the polar bears chased me.  A night in an igloo with a wild Irish man singing songs of the old country while a blizzard blew outside.  Then there was the home visits in the Mariana Islands where the mad carried machetes they'd used insanely.  I climbed a coconut tree. We drank the delicious juice.
And today I thought of the camel I rode in Israel seeing the camel Anne had jockeyed on her face book page.  Those bazaars with the boys carrying fresh baked flat breads on their heads days before Moroccan Ramadan descended in the old city go unforgotten.
Who'd have guessed I'd be in harbour aboard a steel ocean crossing sailboat with a diesel stove keeping out the cold.  This is a rich and blessed life. I'm so grateful for all the permutations and combinations. Thank you for the music, poetry, dance and song.  It  lifts my heart to hear Old Blind Dog.