Being A Good Ancestor

As well as a good steward of what has been entrusted to us

July 5, 2008 minutes ahead of stepping off behind A. John C. Moon

In September 1974, I walked up the stairs in the Colonial Williamsburg Fife and Drum Corps Building - a former Courthouse for Williamsburg/James City County built in the 1930’s to replace the Courthouse of 1770 which had been leased in perpetuity to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. By then, my mother, Margaret Ann (Snell) Gill, had been the Registrar at the Department of Collections for two years and my late father, Harold Bledsoe Gill, Jr., had been a research historian at the Department of Research since December 1961. I was joining just in time to rise to the rank of Corporal by July 1976. I’d reach Sergeant the following May and remain at that rank for the rest of my tenure.
The Colonial Williamsburg Fife and Drum Corps is an unusual institution. We were considered child performers and were therefore being paid to perform. All equipment and costumes were issued to us. There was a strict point system of merits and demerits which could result in one gaining rank or losing rank. Just before I had arrived, Mr. Moon, our Musickmaster from 1972 through 1992, had demoted most of the Senior Corps for some hyginx in which they had engaged. I would learn about that at our 60th anniversary from the young man who’d risen to the rank of Sergeant Major about that time. He’d had that top rank from 1974 through 1978, one of the longest serving Sereants Major in our Corps history. His successor was in my generation and had joined the Corps at 9 years old. We graduated in 1981.

Pursuant to the title of this essay, “Being A Good Ancestor,” we were given the opportunity to do just that. As an instructor by the time I was 15, younger boys picked up what I was teaching and went on to be instructors themselves. The generations continue. I recall that at our banquet at which we were celebrating our history, it was noted by one of the drummers from the generation before me that, if nothing else of note ever happened to us in our lives after the Corps, we had the awareness that we had once been a part of an elite performing unit which had no peer during the years in which we were performing.

Essentially, we were unique among Fife and Drum Corps in that we were both in our preteen and teen years in age, and also professionals. Fife and Drum Corps (plural in this usage) abound in the North East of our country but they are generally community-based volunteer units. An adult Corps exists in the US Army, “The Old Guard Fife, Drum, and Bugle Corps,” which is a ceremonial unit performing around the country. The Old Guard and the Colonial Williamsburg Fife and Drum Corps have a common purpose; to put those who hear and see us into a mindset that harkens back to the origins of this country in the latter half of the eighteenth century. We are stewards of that legacy.

What Is This All About?

This is all to say that we are both stewards of the legacy that has been entrusted to us, as well as carriers of that legacy into the future. We are the ancestors of those will carry the tradition forward into the future. Also, it is not just about performing. Music heals. It is all part of a Great Work that is my life. I tend to think of it in terms of alchemy, turning the base into something of value:

The Work here at Harrowings is all about telling the story of my journey both from dawn to dusk and back again - so long as breath remains moving through the body - as well as my journey from the first breath to the rattle of death as noted in “The Healing” by Ghost Light:

I was commenting yesterday about how dorsal vagus nerve trauma can cause us to attempt to fold ourselves up and try to disappear. In the video above you see rhythm guitarist, Raina Mullen, attempt to do just that as Holly Bowling attempts to teach Scotty Zwang piano. The video does a brilliant job of capturing a lot of what life is like from my perspective. “Poets, Prophets, and Kings all duke it out in the street…” That’s what was really on my mind as I started this essay.

You see, it was being observed by someone else that there is evidence that the Iran War is exceptionally unpopular. The Vietnam War was even more unpopular and had people taking to the streets in protest. I don’t see people taking to the streets even as things appear to continually going from bad to worse. I question why that is.

It seems to me that we have folded into ourselves in a kind of unconscious dorsal vagal reaction. It isn’t a response. It isn’t operating at the conscious level. We go through our lives largely unconscious due to having had our nervous systems overwhelmed. We perform as automatons through most of our interactions. This is why “The Work” is so important to me. “The Work” here at Harrowings is about becoming awake and aware of what we are doing as we are doing it. It’s a practice that I extend to my Daily Provisions shifts at Q and Connecticut Avenue Northwest in Washington, DC.

What Do I Mean by “Becoming Awake and Aware”

As mentioned, we go through our lives, we are trained to be able to walk around without having to consciously think about doing it. It becomes automatic. The same can be said about a number of complex performances in which we have to be trained, from tying our shoelaces, to learning to march and perform. I was struck that when I came back to fifing and drumming that my fingers just naturally seemed to fall into patterns that I’d played last over thirty years earlier. You can see the result in this clip:

From the step off with “Drum Intro/York March” through the final notes over by Market Square’s Compton Oak, we rattle the windows of my hometown. I did an essay about the particulars relating to this art some time ago:

The issue comes when we go through everything in life as if it were a performance that we’ve done hundreds of times before and can perform without a hitch; where we can melt into each other across the generations and seem like a seamless whole:

We sometimes have to be shocked into wakefulness. Otherwise, our lives can pass us by and actions we ought to have taken are not done. Among these, are being good citizens. In the Drummers Call DVD there are interviews with our leaders. In it, John Moon reflects that his staff and himself had produced 500 and some “good citizens” - people who are disciplined in their practice and take those same values into their ordinary lives and make a real difference in this world. I cannot agree more strongly with his sentiments.

From a couple of years before the last clip:

John had been the youngest drum major in the history of the Scots Guard Regiment of the Royal Army of the U.K. before coming to train us. He held a warrrant as a Drummer to the Royal Household. Training of the type that he provided is beyond price. He passed away on March 2, 2022 and the last time he drum majored for us was during the pandemic. We did it virtually and I think it turned out marvelously:

John’s

Scattered over the globe are over a thousand of us now. We are out there being the people that we were molded to be by this experience. For my part, I feel myself to be part of a great whole, no better or worse than any other. I’m simply another iteration of this pattern that we call Homo sapiens sapiens but I believe when we say “sapiens” that we are putting on airs. Wisdom does not appear to be the most common feature of our species. Instead, we remain largely unconscious. Thus we come back to “The Great Work” and whether it is great or not is debatable. “The Work” includes amplification of signals of others.

Last Wednesday night, I saw a live performance by another Williamsburg, Virginia native who was not part of the Fife and Drum Corps but is a friend of many of the generation ahead of mine, Bruce Hornsby. His most recent composition has a great deal of resonance for my current situation.

Memory Palace - Bruce Hornsby from the album Indigo Park

Steam coming from a manhole, tall blue stack
Like an apparition it blurs, the full frontal attack
The gold in your band came from an ancient blast
Need a fortress for protection against a long slow fading past

I’m building my memory palace
Item placement and long thought chains
Prime numbers, I’m running in sequence
Behind the eyes, mnemonic aides
My memory palace

Blank stare but I swear, I’m all there, someone’s home
Is that what I look like? Haha well I guess that’s so
I laugh but I worry ‘bout, worry about, can I make it through?
Make my time of solitude work so that my recall is true

I’m building my memory palace
Item placement and long thought chains
Fibonacci numbers in sequence
Behind the eyes, mnemonic aids
My memory palace

I’m trying to remember it all
Waking dreams, clean and shaped
Sequences, my fortress against slow fade
Memory palace

My mother, as noted earlier, has recently been moved to Memory Care.

I spoke with her on Thursday afternoon briefly. So it goes. I am doing my best to amplify the signals through cyberspace to honor the memories of both of my parents here and while this has become largely about my time in the Corps at Colonial Williamsburg Fifes and Drums, I’m certain that it all is woven together.

I’ve been hinting around at the shocks needed to keep me awake and aware. Everything I an doing here is part of that work and I’m hopeful that more than a few of you are picking up what I’m laying down. We have to act from where we are and the actions we chose to exercise ripple out for better or worse. Let’s try to know better and live up to that "sapiens sapiens” suffix on our genus. We are evolving into whatever is next for us. It’s a slow road and many lead to extinction.

With that, I’m going to wrap this essay up and post it ahead of heading down Connecticut Avenue Northwest here in Washington, DC to take up my position at the Front of House at Daily Provisions on Q Street. If you are in range, drop by. You won’t regret the experience, I’ll warrant!

Onward!

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