As the Lyme Public Hall continues to remain closed, we have been looking for ways to remain connected to our friends and members and to help you remain connected to each other.  So, here is the third issue of “The Newsey”, an email devoted to sharing our stories of lockdown, social distancing and vaccination issues.

We have been eleven months in this peculiar bubble.  We all have stories to tell and “The Newsey” is sharing those stories from you, with you, and with your friends and neighbors.  Some stories are funny, some are sad, some are heartbreaking but they all reflect what happened to us and are a great read.

Please send your story via email to Jackie.  The writer’s name will follow the story.

My part in this so far

The day before the Governor asked us to stay at home last March I went to Staples to buy some office supplies. And while I was there I saw some jigsaw puzzles on sale. One was of balloons floating in the sky. It was very colorful, cheerful and showed many large balloons drifting freely in the sky. I bought it though I had not done jigsaw puzzles since I was a child.
For the next 10 months I did puzzles. I became an expert puzzler. I began by not knowing how to sort water pieces from sky pieces. Yet now I sort all colors in their groups together even as I am finding the outside flat pieces and the corners to start.  And I have become good at them.  Maybe I was even obsessed.  I realized this when one day in December.  I heard my husband say to one of our children, “Well I’m not sure if she will talk to you now as she is puzzling.”  And I didn’t even feel the slightest bit guilty. I was just grateful that I could go on with my puzzle.

But we had our first COVID shot a few days ago and I have just finished with the latest puzzle.  I looked at the undone puzzles in the closet. Nothing appealed to me and I wondered if I should buy another one?  Or is it that the COVID restrictions, the life we live, is in some way different now?  This time is another strange one as the death totals continue to rise while simultaneously some neighbors are getting vaccinated. We have hope and despair intertwined and we lurch from one to the other. We hope that we can get vaccinated, we hope to get vaccinated before the variants get to our area, and yet we know that all around us the virus is far from defeated.

I am not going to do any more puzzles but I am going to make new cushion covers.

Jacqueline Jaffe

The new drum set

I have played drums almost all my life. When I was in high school in Amsterdam, three of my friends and I decided to form a band. One would play guitar, one piano, one would play bass, and I would play drums. Mainly because drums could be bought one by one, and stored under my bed, when not in use. I lived in a household where my stepfather had forbidden me to play a musical instrument. Actually it sometimes felt as if everything was forbidden. We played music in the style of the Everly Brothers. I am sure some people remember them.

I was never that good, but the thing about music is that if you keep going long enough, one’s name goes around. So I found myself playing in all kinds of orchestras, long after my friends had given up.
I mostly played modern jazz, bebop like Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, but I also played in ball-room bands, gypsy swing groups, and even in a version of the musical ‘Hair’. The longest time was in a very successful Dixieland band.

All that time I played on my old and trusted Olympic drum set. I had inherited some money from my grandmother and in the 1970’s I traded in my hand me down collection of drums and bought a proper set. Most drummers liked Ludwig, Gretsch or Slingerland drums, American brands that were very popular. They were too expensive. I liked the English make of Premier, so I got a black set of Olympic drums, a cheap sub-brand of Premier. I still have them. They have followed me from Holland to South Africa and eventually to the US.

That was my situation at the beginning of this year. Then the coronavirus lockdown made all of us housebound. The music stopped. I had put up the set in the small barn next to our house and there I played along with all the greats. It felt good, but it was as if I had been there before. It was all so familiar. How could I keep going until the end of the virus without other musicians? It occurred to me that I could realize my old dream of getting a proper Premier set. Fortunately the internet is inexhaustible, so I found a set on line, just like I always wanted. On a Sunday afternoon in June they arrived on a FEDEX truck from someone in Oregon. Fire-engine red, high quality drums. I love them.

So if you see a red drum set around somewhere, after the virus has been beaten, just know I am not far away. No more putting them under my bed.

Rolf Wolfswinkel