What follows are three columns I wrote for the Garrett County Republican at various times during 2017. For the love of a tree, the honor of my father, and the celebration of singing — read on.
Ode to an old friend
Aug. 31, 2017
A great tree grows in my mother’s yard in Mountain Lake Park. It’s a hemlock with long sweeping branches and thousands of plumb-bob-shaped pine cones the size of TicTacs. The pine looks tired, leaning slightly with limbs askew. A hole has opened in its trunk, about five feet up from the ground, and inside is a lively world of insects. Ants file in and out, bringing sawdust with them, or moving their offspring from one level to another. Smaller holes created by birds’ beaks encircle the larger opening. Great piles of sawdust lie around the base, and it’s obvious that the dear old tree is dying. But life is flourishing inside and around it, and its history is rich.
When I was a little kid, the tree was a destination. While it is really just about 25 feet from the back door of Mom’s house, the distance seemed much greater when I was three feet tall. The real draw was the playhouse that Dad had placed at the foot of the hemlock. A press was delivered to the newspaper office sometime in the early 1960s. Dad unpacked it and brought the crate home. He cut a door and a window, and then built a pitched roof and covered it with a rough reddish material to keep the rain out. He placed a flat, flagstone rock at the entrance. I like thinking about Dad doing that, when he was 30-something, seeing a simple crate and thinking, “I could make that into a playhouse for the kids.” And then actually doing it.
We played in that house so much. I remember using a toy broom to sweep hemlock needles out — a futile effort, as the half-inch spears were absolutely everywhere, creating a carpet on the ground and filling the air with that sap scent. For a long time, we had a little table and two chairs inside at the window, and a wooden box in the other corner. When I read the Boxcar Children series, I imagined living in the playhouse like those children in their train car — just one reverie that little house inspired.
Close to the playhouse was a rope swing. It hung down from what seemed an impossibly high branch of an oak. The seat was a board with notches cut out on either end. We would just slide it onto the looped rope, and then hop on. When it rained, the rope would shrink. That made the seat high, and I would have to jump to get onto it. And then my sister Kathryn or one of our many neighbors might spin me, twisting the rope all the way up to the branch, and then let me go. Around and around I would fly, faster and faster, my feet out, my hair wild. When it released from the twist, it would go the other way, and we liked to see just how far we could get it to twist itself back. I don’t know how we avoided nausea, but we did.
Being the youngest of the family, I ended up playing on my own after everyone else had outgrown the playhouse and swing. My cat, a Siamese that Dad miraculously produced from under his raincoat on my 7th birthday, was my pal then. Sahib. He loved the playhouse, and we often engaged in a game of “chase me around the corner.” He would lie in wait as I crept around, and then he would tear into a run, either away from me or straight to me, or right up the hemlock — whatever his cat brain told him at that split second. Such fun!
I walked around the hemlock last Friday, and I smelled the pine and gazed at the places where we played under those boughs in the always-muted sunlight. In my mind, I went inside the long-gone playhouse, and let my memories of it wake up and stretch. I love that tree, and all that went on in and around it. Here’s to you, old hemlock. Thanks for everything.
Bob Sincell
Nov. 9, 2017
My dad died in 2003. I really do think of him every day, as I am certain others do of their own parents who have gone on. There is a picture of him on the wall across from my desk at work. I can look up and see his face at any moment of the day, and I do it a lot. The passage of time does ease the immediate grip of grief, but, as we all know, there is no “getting over” a loss. We learn to live with the absence, and our ever-mending souls adapt. Life is full of joys and fun, and I’m positive that Dad wouldn’t want any of us to linger on the wistful longing that comes in waves sometimes. Then it recedes, like the surf.
Robert B. Sincell Sr. was a veteran of the United States Navy. He was sitting in his tree house Dec. 7, 1941, listening to a radio he had rigged up there. He heard the breaking news about a place called Pearl Harbor. From that moment, at age 15, he was determined to join the fight. He begged his parents to let him go at age 17, and, with great dread, they did. I cannot imagine what my grandparents felt. But they knew he was determined to go and would not rest until they signed on that line. As a mother of three boys, I’m not sure I could have done that.
But he went, willingly, offering himself up as an able, intelligent, patriotic young man. And his experiences, in the end, were mostly safe. He endured dreadfully boring stretches of time, punctuated here and there with heart-stopping moments, like when a bee stung his elbow as he walked along a trail on Tinian, a Pacific Island, and when he looked down, his foot was an inch from a bomb trip wire. Or when he heard or saw the occasional crash-landing of his friends’ planes at the airstrip. Or when he learned of his company’s near demise in the Philippines, which he missed because of a sudden onslaught of “cat fever,” a respiratory illness that rendered him deathly ill. He felt guilt about that, I think for the rest of his life. However, those of us who loved him felt gratitude. It seemed he was meant to survive. And I believe he knew that, too, as when he came home, he offered himself up as a hard-working, dedicated member of the Garrett County community.
Dad was one of the co-founders of the area’s rescue squads. He was the first National Ski Patrol instructor in Garrett County. He was the first Emergency Medical Technician instructor, too. He was a Sunday school teacher and an active singer in choir and in the Garrett Choral Society. He married my mother, one of his best acts, and they had us, my four siblings and me. They kept us safe, they fed us, they made us laugh, they showed us the world. They reared us with the understanding that we could always, always come home. The door stood open, no matter what. It still does.
My father was a gentle and kind human being. He trained squirrels to take crackers out of his hand, and he routinely saved little animals that had fallen in our pool. He adored slapstick comedy, and M.A.S.H. He taught us that if you can take a spider or a bat out of your house without killing it, for heaven’s sake, do it! You don’t have to kill something just because you can. Being the youngest, I think I might’ve been extra fortunate, as he had time to talk with me. We would watch the news together and then chat. And I learned so much. He was, I believe, a dove. A gentle, sensitive, deeply intelligent human being. He was shy about his service in WWII because he felt he had it easy for the most part, always saying that “other guys” were the real heros. I disagree. He was a hero to me, and still is.
As we commemorate our veterans this weekend, I will think of my dad. I believe that for him, and for millions of others, the very best thing we can do to remember and honor them would be to stop warring. War isn’t romantic. It’s horrible. We absolutely must evolve to the place where violence is no longer a recourse, so that all people have the chance to live life fully, without fear, without injury. That is what I wish for all vets, and for the world.
Let the harmony commence
Sept. 21, 2017
With the shifting of summer to fall comes another special interval for some of us — singing season! The Garrett Choral Society rehearsals have started, and our church, St. Mark’s Lutheran, has started choir practices, too. After a summer break, the singing always resumes around now, and being back at making music with friends is lovely.
Singing has been part of my life since before I was born. My parents first met as members of the Potomac State Singers. At a practice, Dad came through a back door a little late. A young woman named Shirley Grubb leaned over to my mom and said, “That bass Bob Sincell has the prettiest brown eyes I’ve ever seen,” with which my mom had to agree. (Altos are always leaning over to one another with intriguing news like that, by the way. That’s just what we do. Choir directors love it.) Soon my dad had noticed the pretty blue-eyed second-soprano from Springfield, W.Va., too, and asked her if she’d like a ride home. She declined, as she was perfectly able to walk. But eventually they did go out, and they did sing together for the rest of their union. Some of my earliest memories are of resting on my mom’s lap, my head against her chest, listening to her sing. My ear would be right against her, and the sound was close and muffled, familiar, and most comforting.
Singing was a thing we did in our house. Harmonizing and having fun with the piano was a fairly regular occurrence. My sister and I took piano lessons for years, so there was a lot of practicing (and fussing about practicing). That many years on the piano bench — plus another several playing saxophone — taught me how to be a pretty good sight-reader of music, which helps a lot in choral singing. When singing with others, sight-reading through a piece for the first time is a fun challenge. Well, sometimes it’s fun. Other times it’s annoying and/or daunting. But after going through a piece once, I’m always amazed at how much easier it is just the second time.
Rehearsals to me are much more fun than any performance. Working out the music with the four usual parts (soprano, alto, tenor, and bass) is similar to figuring out a crossword puzzle. “This goes here, this goes here…uh…. this goes here — Oh! Cool!” And that’s how a line of music comes together. On and on we go, working through a piece, discussing key changes, tempos, and how hard it is to sing fourths sometimes.
Those in the various sections tend to have similar characteristics. Sopranos behave and follow directions, altos already know the directions and are happy to repeat them drenched in sarcasm, tenors adamantly want to go over the directions again please, and basses… oh, basses. They ask, after the concert, “What directions?”
I jest. Sort of. In all, we have fun as we make music in this most unique fashion. I don’t think any other animal does what we do with vocal sounds. Throw in a great composer, some excellent directors, some regular rehearsal and you come out with a pleasing work of art.
After months of practice, singers form friendships, especially those who sit together. My decades-long church choir mate has been my sister-in-law, Suzie Sincell. We take breaths at exactly the same time now, no matter how hard we try to stagger our gulps. We rely on one another to help find the notes and learn the part together, and to keep our inside jokes alive and well. In choral society, my partners in chime (yeah, I did that) are Heather Roth and Karen Winkelvoss, without whom I simply can’t sing as well. Ah, I’m glad we’re back. Let’s sing some fourths, girls — with confidence!
Through all the tumult and the strife,
I hear that music ringing.
It finds an echo in my soul.
How can I keep from singing?