Alaskan's Journal

[Rammy]

You need to stop posting these pics. It makes me want to move there. Stop! Stop! Looks so pretty. Its not even started looking like fall here. Still feels like August! So ready for fall.

 

[greybeard]

That 1 is a miracle birch!

All of the rest that I planted died. I am too high up elevation wise.

have you been riding/swinging them?

 

[Alaskan]

have you been riding/swinging them?

??? Huh?

 

[Rammy]

Oops. Rewrite......thought your huh??? was in answer to my post. Misread who you were answering to.
Your pics do give me Alaska envy and wish I was younger and could move there and do what you do. Maybe my next life.

 

[greybeard]

??? Huh?

I forget sometimes, that shooling has changed a lot since I walked those halls.
'One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.'

 

[Bruce]

I'm thinking we might need a bit more explanation @greybeard. Even Google doesn't understand!

 

[greybeard]

Robert Frost, (Vermont's Poet Lauereate) is high among America's most noteworthy writers, and a 4X Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote among other things, The Road Not Taken and Birches
It was, during most of the 20th century, among a small handfull of US written poems that were the normal curriculum of study in Jr High and High school.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44260/birches

 

[Bruce]

Ah, thanks GB. If I ever read that in school, I forgot a really long time ago.

 

[Latestarter]

Don't remember that in my schooling either... GB, you are a fount of knowledge...

 

[greybeard]

I have been thus far, blessed with a very good memory.
We had to learn both of the poems I mentioned.
Also had to memorize 2 verses of one of my favorites, and 'translate' it from Cockney to the class (others had to do the same for the other verses)


You may talk o’ gin and beer
When you’re quartered safe out ’ere,
An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.
Now in Injia’s sunny clime,
Where I used to spend my time
A-servin’ of ’Er Majesty the Queen,
Of all them blackfaced crew
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din,
He was ‘Din! Din! Din!
‘You limpin’ lump o’ brick-dust, Gunga Din!
‘Hi! Slippy hitherao
‘Water, get it! Panee lao,
‘You squidgy-nosed old idol, Gunga Din.’


The uniform ’e wore
Was nothin’ much before,
An’ rather less than ’arf o’ that be’ind,
For a piece o’ twisty rag
An’ a goatskin water-bag
Was all the field-equipment ’e could find.
When the sweatin’ troop-train lay
In a sidin’ through the day,
Where the ’eat would make your bloomin’ eyebrows crawl,
We shouted ‘Harry By!’
Till our throats were bricky-dry,
Then we wopped ’im ’cause ’e couldn’t serve us all.
It was ‘Din! Din! Din!
‘You ’eathen, where the mischief ’ave you been?
‘You put some juldee in it
‘Or I’ll marrow you this minute
‘If you don’t fill up my helmet, Gunga Din!’

(1st & 2nd verses from Kipling's Gunga Din.)