Nanci Griffith Catches Some Sweet Blackbird's Wings

Nanci Griffith & That Sweet Blue Bonnet Spring, Catch Some Blackbird’s Wing Down at the Five + Dime

A yellow dress covered in pink and red cabbage roses, mint and emerald green leaves seemingly holding them to the fabric. She had mousy brown hair, bangs that descended like staggered drapes around her elongated heart-shaped valentine of a face with eyes so sparkling and alive they glittered into the cameras/

Her speaking voice sounded like a small child’s, matching her diction. Her words bathed with wonder at it all – street light halos, Woolworth stores, trinkets and hope, she lit up as she shared what she knew or saw or felt.
Under the covers in a too cold house my much older fiancée didn’t own in Coral Gables, he’d left to go do errands. I could draw close to the oversized television on the table at the end of the bed, sheets pulled up around me as I stared at this anti-Barbie singing smart such smart songs. Miami’s PBS station ran “Austin City Limits” at an early hour, and in the black-out-curtained window, it felt like a Girl Scout meeting gone a little long.

“Austin City Limits” was once truly a Texas texture, as Guy Clark would sing in “Rita Ballou.” Every now and then, they’d pick a few local writer/artists or bands, given them a show. Nanci Griffith, whose name I didn’t know, had just released Once In A Very Blue Moon on small indie Philo Records – and this was a showcase for those brilliantly turned sketches, almost scrimshaw miniatures of small town life.

Her voice, when she sang, was deeper, throaty, had that Stevie Nicks’ vibrato – or a pure, soaring crystalline quality. It melted over the kind of acoustic music that exists in the fertile delta between country and folk, where the violin is more fluid, the steel guitar more diamonds sprinkled across still water. It didn’t straddle the genres, as much as float back and forth like sheets on a breeze when they’re hung outside to dry in the sun.

She was obviously older than me, but was so young seeming, she was the grown-up answer to my far older than my own 12 year old appearance while slinging bylines for The Miami Herald, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Tower Pulse and Southern Magazine. There was a place for us kid-looking people with hearts older and more erudite than our looks suggested. And, her melodies were sweet but salty; the loves and adventures were pure and sized for an actual life someone could inhabit.

By the time Jason returned, I was out of mind about this woman I’d seen in the yellow dress like Helen, my extra grandma by choice instead of blood, wore while playing a guitar almost as big as she herself was. She had an upright bass and a cellist and a licorice whip thin guy who sang, so minimal chic but with this hair, and and and...

Full grown, exfiancee #2 glazed over. But he knew when I got on a tear, it didn’t stop. We got in the car, drove down to Spec’s, the South Florida record chain, and walked in. Me blabbering, him trying to figure out how to decode this problem. Turns out one of the clerks had had “ACL” on, saw the same thing I did – and walked us back to the folk section.

Once In A Very Blue Moon was in a bin for the taking. We did.

Walking out pleased with the purchase, I excused myself from any further conjugal duties and went back to my dorm room. I sliced into the shrink wrap, drew out the disc and put on side one. “Ghosts In the Music,” indeed.

It all poured out, puddled on the cold linoleum tiled floor of a room mostly packed up towards semester’s end. Endearing, charming, unselfconscious, it was small stories, big truths, moments you might not notice – but that might just define you.

It had been recorded at something called the Cowboy Arms Hotel & Recording Spa with the same producer of John Prine’s Aimless Love. I couldn’t know so many of the players – Roy Huskey, Jr on upright bass, Mark O’Connor on fiddle, Phillip Donnelly on guitar – would become figures in my own story, nor that the background singer Lyle Lovett would be one of the singular voices of Nashville’s progressive traditionalist moment.

It was just magical, and perfect. Like a Truman Capote or Willa Cather novel, moments seemed pressed between pages and saved for the ages.

The obsession was such that I called Rounder, raved about this woman from Texas I’d never heard of – writing for The Herald enough I knew lots of record company people in those days before MTV, let alone internets and instant gratification – and asked them to please keep me posted. That I didn’t know what story or who for, but I wanted to write about her, absolutely.

My exfiancee thought I’d fallen into toxic shock from my obsession with Southern and Dust Bowl fiction. He just couldn’t... so we started taking separate cars as the candy-coated voice unfurled these sweet stories. Pulling up, banging what Griffith came to call “folkabilly,” on the cheap aftermarket cassette player attenuating the cassette I’d bought, her voice sounded a bit like a muppet gone tipsy.

Rounder didn’t forget my lunatic raving. They sent me an advance cassette of Last of the True Believers, an even more accomplished and confident album that still did the Currier & Ives meets Norman Rockwell vistas. Her sound had solidified; Rooney’s always tasteful production was at its greatest elevation. Each instrument was its own sparkling diamond around Griffith’s at times guttural, at others shimmering or tender velvet vocals.

Tower Records’ Pulse bit. My first conversation with Griffith via phone was delight; her Texas twang rolled down the line with girlish giggles for punctuation. She conjured a instant friend intimacy that suggested the same kind of friendship that made the innocence of “There’s A Light Beyond These Woods, Mary Margaret” such a covetous thing for a young woman starting to make her way in the real world.

We talked Larry McMurtry, O. Henry, steel guitar as a mood-setter, John Prine, dime store treasures, the journey. She’d had two albums I’d never heard of (again, it was world before the internet made everything instantly accessible), with dreams of having music take her around the world.

She was exotic as peacocks on the front lawn, as familiar as homemade bread or a well-washed linen shirt with a slightly frayed collar. Twee as some found it, she could bite into the world, too. Whether the reeling fiddle of “More Than A Whisper” was a grown-up love’s complicated nature and need for true manifestation, or the rushed and rushing bawdy declaration of life from a whore waiting on a trick “Lookin’ for the Time (Workin’ Girl)” with its profession “This sidewalk ice is cold as steel/ and I ain’t Dorothy, I can’t click my heels...” and the utterly business forward “If you ain’t got money, I ain’t got the time for you.”

Authoritative. Straight to the heart, the gut, the throat. It was a money shot, and she – the little folkabilly goddess in the white anklets and Hooverette house dress – didn’t flinch or waver. To say I loved it would be like saying Chanel is expensive.

Around that time, Tony Brown rolled into Florida to meet up with Steve Wariner, an artist he’d produced at RCA Records and had just signed to MCA Nashville. The Chet Atkins protégé was that same kind of wide-eyed kid as Griffith’s persona suggested. Driving Brown back to the Howard Johnson’s by the , urnpike after a night of hanging out and closing down a Palm Beach restaurant/boite, I pulled out my advance of the album – and threw it in my cassette player.

I’d made a speech about how I didn’t know whether it could work at country radio, if it made sense for a major Nashville record company, but this was special. He needed to listen. That voice poured out of the speakers of the little tin mosquito Nissan Pulsar I was driving, bounced around the car and lit the piano-playing A&R man up like a pinball machine.

“Can I keep it?” he asked. I let him have it, let him bounce out of my car into the mildew-scented hotel in the grove of sagging palm trees. The next day, his head most likely throbbing, he got in my car, so I could take him to where Wariner was sound-checking. He went on and on about how much he liked it, the writing, the voice, the person singing it.

Said in some ways, she reminded him of Wariner, who he was doing pre-production with. Someone who didn’t want to be more than they were, each sang about a life that was the right perspective for the room. Wariner – beyond the crushing guitar skills and sweet voice – truly was a small-town Indiana kid; Griffith, though, a product the local Texas songwriter rooms dreamed of larger worlds and other places.

The legend is Lyle Lovett turned Tony Brown onto Nanci Griffith. But that day in the sun-parched parking lot outside a strip mall honky tonk, the Elvis and Hot Band veteran witnessed like a new convert. We were two people talking over each other about how incredible this artist was; me saying I was so glad I hadn’t overstepped my bounds, Brown saying he needed to figure it out, but was going to..

At the same time, Steve Popovich, a rock & roll student of all music and the head of Polygram’s Nashville operation, heard “Love at the Five & Dime” – and told Kathy Mattea it was her next single. The West Virginia songstress with the dusky eiderdown voice that curried the folk out of mainstream country product smiled. She’d not followed up “Soft Place To Fall” with a hit, and she needed to breakthrough before it all fell apart.

Driving north on I-95 a few weeks later, “Love at the Five & Dime” came pouring out of the speakers – and it wasn’t Griffith’s version. It felt like a hit, slightly folkie, very homespun and charming in the way it told the story of Eddie and Rita, waltzing the aisles of a Woolworth store. Suddenly, Mattea’s sweet spot was colonized – and Nanci Griffith was a hit songwriter.

Momentum and dominos both move fast. Suddenly, Griffith’s record deal came through at MCA Nashville. She was touring Europe, becoming the queen of Ireland, a nascent then full-on friendship with dean of Nashville songwriters Harlan Howard.  “Letterman” and “The Tonight Show,” Rolling Stone, back when it was every two weeks and excruciatingly hard to get into. Was it Liz Thiels, the publicist? David Wild, the reviews editor, who adored roots music? Was it just how intriguing her special mix of elements was?

Did it matter? Even if country radio found her voice too bracing, Mattea had another #1 with “Going, Gone,” while the touring life saw Griffith become a full-on headliner around the world – and a theater-sized draw in the States, where she also headlined folk festivals.

Free to explore the lives of characters who intrigued her, able to make a good living making music she believed in, it was fluid. She moved to MCA Pop, then Elektras Records, worked with producers Glyn Johns, Pete Buck, Rod Argent, Don Gehman, Peter Collins, Ray Kennedy and served as a comrade and peer to Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Guy Clark, Tom Russell, Townes Van Zandt.

Championing Julie Gold, Griffith’s “From A Distance” so transfixed anyone who heard it, it wasn’t long until Bette Midler recorded it. Midler’s version defined ubiquity for many years, reminding people we are all small and equal, that “God is watching us” not as an enjoinder, but a comfort in our hard times.

Like a good folkie, she lifted people up in song. A later album, The Loving Kind, boasted a title track inspired by the obituary of Mildred Loving, whose Supreme Court case overturned laws banning interracial marriage, and the capital punishment indicting “Not Innocent Enough.” Earlier, Storms’ “It’s A Hard Life Wherever You Go” considered kids without chances in Northern Ireland, impaled racists in Chicago and measured the hope of America’s ‘60s idealism with a chorus that implores, “It’s a hard life, a hard life, a very hard life/ and if we poison our children with hatred, then a hard life is all that they’ll know/ and there ain’t no place in this world for these kids to go...”

“Trouble in the Fields” from Lone Star State of Mind lamented the plight of family farmer, while the dobro-drenched, accordion-basted “Love Wore A Halo (Back Before the War)” from Little Love Affairs measured the outlaw lives of number runners, a Jersey hotel and perhaps some comfort paid for by the hour. Unlikely people, missed or stumbled over, they rose up under Griffith’s sense of detail and zeal.

She would do a pair of covers projects, this woman who’d generously covered everyone from Tom Russell to Robert Earl Keen to ex-husband Eric Taylor, that celebrated her influences. Other Voices, Other Rooms gathered up 17 songs from Bob Dylan, Kate Wolf, Gordon Lightfoot, Jerry Jeff Walker, Woody Guthrie, Janis Ian, Buddy Mondlock and Harry Belafonte with Carolyn Hester, Emmylou Harris, Iris Dement, Arlo Guthrie, longtime collaborator James Hooker and Linda Solomon’s “Wimoweh” boasting Odetta, the Indigo Girls, Kennedy Rose, Holly & Barry Tashian, John Gorka, David Mallett, her father and Jim Rooney.

A supple versatility, a fluid sense of folk made the project seamless – and earned her her first Grammy Award. Best Contemporary Folk Album, an honor that matched the present to the past and the future. Other Voices measured how much veneration she brought to the art of songwriting, the ones who came before. Raising a light for the generations to come, she shone on – and fans flocked to the light.

But Voices’ Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire”-evoking video for “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” duet featuring the song’s writer John Prine that nailed the way reverence, searching, kindness and the echo of emptiness converge. Black and white, grainy, urban, Griffith in white and Prine in black, they are angels living in our world as supernatural forces and mortal beings. Beyond the whimsy, there was a sense of truth matching the reality of being a star in the musical sense.

Just as important as her O. Henry character sketches and embrace of the postcards and polaroids that make up a life, the woman with a mouth like a bow conjured a tenderness that permeated her songs. Love was sometimes perfect and attained; occasionally flawed and wild. But as often, it was failed and someone – usually the woman – was leaving, frustrated, sad, but never beaten by what had transpired.

As a music critic carving a path when there weren’t really women covering music, as a female working her way through six engagements and many suitors always trying to be reasonable as I left, as a girl raised on books and dreams and hopes and songs, Griffith seemed a chimera before me, radiant and resplendent as Our Lady of Bookworms or the Patron Saint of Coffeehouse Angels. Could she really be real?

Any single woman with a career or a drive to find their place in the world – in those days before Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Rickenbacker-downstroked suburban tales – found a richly-colored construction paper fortunecatcher every time Griffith released an album. Those stories of old couples we hoped we’d turn into like True Believer’s “One of These Days,” but also the unflinching make it happen drive of “Ford Econoline” that allows for self-propulsion, for dreams that required some form of screw it.

There was the romance of it all. No matter which album you landed on, that romance of life, the sweet nectar of somebody’s smile or a flick of a wrist taking a cigarette to their lips, it was all spark and igniting properties. Wherever, however, drink it in, swallow it down – and let whatever it was rush to your head. Don’t lose your senses, but go ahead and enjoy every last tingle.

That was the thing about the bookish, kindergarten teacher-looking songwriter: she could smoke’em if you had ‘em and drink’em down with the best. She would show up half kewpie doll, half brainiac and leave the room in ashes, all hearts splayed. Who wouldn’t wanna do that?

Many, many years ago, dressed in a pink and white gingham dress with buttons down the front and pale pink Buster Brown shoes, I went to UCLA to see Nanci and Guy at some hushed concert hall. I made the decision to dress for her people out of respect, but also to honor the way she’d lit my way coming into my own as a writer.

After slipping backstage between their sets to say my hellos, I had to slink out halfway through Griffith’s performance, drive into West Hollywood and make my way to the Whiskey A-Go-Go where I looked beamed in from another galaxy. Security guards a 100 yards from the door couldn’t believe someone looking like this could be on the guest list, nor could the guy at the Will Call window where the show was about to go on. Of course, I didn’t care that at the height of spandex, slashed tshirts and Aquanet, I was a giant neon goody two shoes. I was on the list, and they were ushering me in.

As the Nasty Habits took their positions in the world’s smallest nurse uniforms, I made my way through the snickering throng. Sam Kinison bounded onstage to introduce Motley Crue, who were kicking off their Girls! Girls! Girls! album en fuego. Riling the crowd up, the band came on like a jet engine hitting prime thrust -- the crowd reacted accordingly.

“What the hell do you have on?” asked my surly comic friend when he got back to us. “God, Holly...”

I explained where I’d been, what I’d seen, screaming over Nikki Sixx’s throb and Mick Mars’ squealing guitar. He took me in, started to laugh, shook his head. Dressed like a pirate, with a rag tied diagonally across his overprocessed hair, he pulled me close and hugged me, whispering, “Well, okay, respect.”

Respect. More than anything that’s what Nanci brought the world: respect. She smoked. She drank. She recorded other people’s songs to make sure people heard them, shared duets with everyone from the BoDeans to Mac MacAnally, Tanita Tikaram to Darius Rucker.

She loved Loretta Lynn, could talk about her for hours long before Jack White made her a hipster madonna, and Carolyn Hester, a folk goddess almost nobody today remembers. She never played the ingenue, nor did she throw sex around like a hipcheck in ice hockey.

She may’ve veered towards country radio, or closer to adult alternative at times, but she was always utterly herself. She knew how to be true to her literary influences in her songwriting, yet never lose the thread of who she was most of all.

Now she isn’t. Slipped through a crack in time, just – POOF! – and gone.

A couple years ago, her manager sent me to the house to do some interviews for a possible memoir. She was so happy to see me, remembered times I’d interviewed her, places I’d seen her play and so many friends we had in common. It was sweet and fun, like running into an old friend in an unlikely airport.

She treasured her memories, the people she’d met, all the twists along the way. Talking she’d light up, clearly delighted by the memory. But somehow, she wasn’t ready to tack down her past. Yes, it had all happened. She’d had a miraculous life, done amazing things, seen the world many times over, shared stages with incredible musicians.

But to talk about it, you could feel it weighing her down. If she was measuring her past this way, what else was left? She wasn’t sure, and she didn’t know. Not that we ever talked about that in those terms. Sometimes you just know people who look back too much run the risk of turning to salt and blowing away.

Not Nanci Griffith. She was one who held her own course, made her own journey. Of course, she would quietly slip away while no one was looking, just like one of the girls in her songs. She knew where she was going, knew Guy and Townes and Prine and Cowboy Jack and Steve Popovich and Phillip Donnelly and so many more were waiting.

When you’re headed to that, why would you stay? Long ago, she wrote “Gulf Coast Highway” with two friends, a song about love and death and spring in Texas, parsing the way progress siphons off the delicious parts and places of life. The melody feels like steam rising from a blue line on an old map in that kind of swelter only Southern towns near water can muster, the chords moving slowly like a cloud of melancholy.

Yet, “Gulfstream Highway” is a song of triumph and a letting go. When I heard the news, it was the third or fourth thing I played, because the joy in life’s fading is perhaps the thing -- after all the cultural dissonance, all the lives lost -- we need most.

As she sings towards the song’s end:

“Highway 90, the jobs are gone
We tend our garden, we set the sun
This is the only place on Earth blue bonnets grow
And once a year they come and go
At this old house here by the road

And when we die we say we’ll catch some blackbird’s wing
And we will fly away to heaven
Come some sweet blue bonnet spring...”

www.hollygleason.com

Robin Gibb: Bee Gees, Night Fevers, Disco Apocalypse & Gone

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It started with those swinging paint cans… the jaunty walk… the crease so sharp you could shave with it in the double knit pants… and a world I had no idea about. It all crested on foamy waves of glistening three part harmony, the top so high only dogs could truly appreciate it.
“You can tell… by the way… I use my walk… I’m a ladies man… no time to talk…”

“Jive Talking… telling me lies…”

“Blamin’ it all… on… the nights… on Broadway…”
“Night fever… night feverrrrrr…”

“More than a woman… to…. meeeeeeeee…”

And the near-threat of the sinister enjoinder, “You should be… (swoop swoop) daaaa-annnncin’….”

It was everywhere. If the earlier singles had been treacly and challenging of my young patience – I also hated Barry Manilow and that damn dog Mandy with an unholy fervor – this was inescapable. It was in TIME magazine. Parents were trying to learn to “do tha hustle…,” wearing gold medallions dangling overt their scandalously open rayon shirts.

This was not the pink and green suburbs, this was bridge and tunnel.crowd Kids aspiring to another world, or possibly even eschewing it in the name of their own euphoric, tantric golden-footed high. Because like music, dancing releases endorphins in a mighty way.

“Night fever… night fee-vurrrrrr….”

They wore white satin, tight pants, had perfectly coiffed hair. They were like Cyclops or unicorns, mythical beasts – unlike the Daddies where I grew up. My friends were crazy for them. Especially crazy for Barry, who’d once again don the white satin for his big duet with Barbra Streisand on the even foamier “Guilty,” not to mention the glaringly pop fondant of Kenny’n’Dolly romping through a Gibbs-penned  “Islands in the Stream.”

Sheesh, they were disco. In a way even Donna Summer, who passed last week at the far too young age of 63, wasn’t. Somehow, they managed to exude nightclub fabulosity without any suggestion of the seamy demi-monde that seemed so intriguing about too much of disco’s glory.

They were squeaky clean, not Warholian. The parents loved them. Heck, the ethnic kids all around Cleveland, Ohio could be seen everywhere in the sans-a-belt slacks and the rayon shirts, gloriously unbuttoned to reveal virgin skin.

None of them were testosteronic enough to actually have chest hair, something the BeeGess seemed to have in glorious abundance, all blown dry and back-combed. They were Ken Dolls, sexually non-threatening, yet somehow manly and desirable.

It was easy to write them off. Until you had a friend who knew something about music listen with you. They’d point out the swooping harmonies… They’d talk about the percussive dynamics, the grooves that would scoop you up… The way the melodies were almost aerodynamically constructed.

“So, you’re telling me…,” the argument would begin, “that these guys are musically sound?”
“Fraid so,” would come the reply. “Unfortunately, there’s a whole lot more Beachboys in here than you want to believe… And just because it’s not so clean and perky, don’t think that the musicality is any the less.”

I said a bad word. It started with “F.”

I had to reconsider everything. Everything.

Whirling like a disco ball with colored lights pointed every which way, the music just kept churning, turning asunder and rushing towards those hooks that glide up, higher, higher, higher. Lyle Lovett may’ve written about “An Acceptable Level of Ecstasy,” but this was the aural equivalent of an amyl nitrate capsule busted beneath your nose.

Not that I did whippets or whipping cream canisters. But I knew the sketchy kids, and they loved the stuff. Talking in that same falsetto squeal, sucking on helium and acting like outlaws.

Maybe the technical achievement warranted extra consideration. I just couldn’t tell anyone… I mean, really?

And, truth be told, it was thrilling to see John Travolta burn down the dance floor, all liquid and serpentine, snap movements and quick spins. Nine years of modern dance, a lifetime of “dancing school” to properly ballrioom and an odd addiction to the jitterbug with my friend John Griener who could flip, roll and slide me any number of gravity-defying ways.

Flesh covered poetry, melted like caramel maybe. Better than figure skating… and somehow libido-inducing, even for a kid whose hormones hadn’t kicked in yet.

It was a time: those thick harmonies of “How Deep Is Your Love.” Pillowy or downy. Like jumping into silky clouds or whipped cream mountains that you’d never hit the bottom of. Narcotic in a super-sweet way.

Play that stuff late enough at the Ground Floor’s subterranean lounge, and the quiana dresses would swirl as the gropping and steam began to rise. You could only hope melt into another, the forensics suggested to a kid with dinner plate-sized eyes, sitting in a banquette taking it all in. And take it in I did.

So, this was the suburban jungle – and the Bee Gees, if not the guide, were certainly the game caller. Effective. Technically excellent. A veritable trampoline of hormones and want to, blown dry to perfectly feathered hair, an Italian horn or coke spoon dangling down where the buttons found the holes and the heels always flashing, the soles and hips moving snap snap snap.

To not know is frustrating, but somehow sweet.

Sitting here, thinking Robin Gibb had been the miracle we all needed to believe in, I wish I didn’t understand. I wish – with all the death that’s been tumbling since Steve Popovich checked out last spring – that this pinwheel of untimely deaths could… just… STOP.

62, 63 is young. Too young. And these are not deaths by misadventure. Too many good times coming home to roost; the eternal Russian roulette of high living, fast cars and the disco inferno of random coupling in a bathroom or balcony beyond the falling starlight of a refracted mirror ball.

No, this is cancer. The thing we’ve been trying to cure fo decades– but that is taking more, not fewer lives as chemo barns and dialysis centers become profit centers. It’s what no one wants to say…

And like my innocence, it lays slaughtered if undiscussed before me.

But we’re getting to the point where whistling by the graveyard isn’t working any more. It’s too hard to pretend all these hands aren’t getting folded, one after another, every week it seems. Heck, every day if you’re really paying attention.

Earl Scruggs so profound a passing, no one mourned Doug Dillard, who dieded last week. Or Robert Nix, the drummer from Atlanta Rhythm Section, who found his way to the next realm at 4 a.m. on Sunday; I only know from Georgia Satellite Dan Baird’s Facebook page, where a sucker-punched gap-toothed rocker posted from the precipice of his own disblief...

Dillard, obviously, because of both his stamp on Southern California country rock from the Eagles to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, as well as being one of “Those Darlings” on “The Beverly Hillbillies” has a certain amount of roots traction, but what about a guy whose band’s greatest claim to fame may be turning the turntable from 33 1/3 RPMs to 45 RPMs when playing the single “Imaginary Lover” yielded a performance that was oddly similar to Stevie Nicks during Fleetwood Mac’s witchiest success?

They are falling like dominos. It’s getting to where every day you expect to hear about the next one. You won’t know why, or how… Just that we’re hemorrhaging these artists, these forces of music back when music really, really meant something.

Even the stuff you didn’t really like: it stamped you in ways that defined you.

Each one who passes, like rhinestones on a Nudie Suit or sequins on a disco tube top: enough go and you feel moth-eaten, shabby, bare. More like a welfare motel than a place like the Chelsea once was. Not squalid chic, just broke down like a hooker who’s turned too many tricks and can’t remember the Johns names any more.

“Baby, right/” you say, too numb to even engage, too disoriented for anything more than getting through it.

Worst part is, I never got jaded. Some hit me harder than others, but they all gut me in different ways. These deaths all tell me things about the passing of time, bony fingers tugging at my wrist, papery whispers echoing in my ear about inevitability.

Wasn’t it all supposed to be gay and fey and shining? A miracle of tempos, white people finding the beat, tossing their Well Balsom’ed manes as the blocks of dance floor light up beneath their feet.

Isn’t that how I remembered it? Isn’t that how it was? So how does it all end like this?

Ronnie Dunn won the CMA Song of the Year for a rafter-clearing gospel ballad called “Believe,” It contains the lines: “I can’t quote the book, the chapter or the verse/
But you can’t tell me it all ends… with a slow ride in a hearse…”

It’s hard to believe these days. What to think, heck what to know.

Everything you ever thought is shifting. Even as the rhythms rise up, wave after wave of harmonies breaking all around you, the memories flooding back.

It’s the end of another day, another star has twinkled that last time, surged bright than black. There’s a void where the light once shone, and my eyes sting from the tears and the squinting.

This is more than vulnerable, teetering here on the abyss of gone, gone and more gone.  What was once an object of parental torture, watching adults do things incredibly embarrassing, while telling you “hey, I’m hip…” That was agonizing and laughable. Ironically, now that I’ve attained the age of reason and knowing, it’s just agonizing – and I’m not, as Todd Rundgren sang, sure what to feel.

I can put on my disco slippers, slide into the night, turn a couple New York Hustle steps, raise a glass of champagne and think about “Auntie Mame.” She the lose-it-all-and-laugh broad who declared, “Life is a banquet, and most of you sonspfbitches are starving.”

Yeah, maybe that’s the post-disco-decadence-apocalypse battle cry.

Live now. Live deep. Live real. Live out loud.

Take it all in. Taste and savor. Touch and exult in the texture of skin, salt, loss, velvet, satin, burlap, canvas, but especially love.

I find myself – a person chronically closing phone calls with “I love you” anyway – making sure people really know. Because we don’t know. Anything more than right now, anything more than here we are. Maybe that’s enough, maybe that’s all there is.

Maybe we should just throw our hands in the air, and enjoy the ride. After all, there’s no money back and it is what we – like Robin Gibb – make it.

The Desert’s Quiet, Cleveland’s Cold

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It's cold. Damn cold. The biting, frozen from the marrow out kinda cold that chills you 'til you shake, lips turning just the slightest bit purple. When the wind whips off the lake, down Euclid or Prospect or Carnegie Avenues, the arteries of commute from the East Side in, it tears your flesh -- without even making an incision. Cleveland, Ohio on a winter's day is just that cold. Brittle. Brutal. Kinda like the way a diamond sparkles. And yet, vicious as that cold might be, Cleveland -- even in the winter -- is my home. Or rather where I come from, steel money and grand old buildings and ethnic neighborhoods that still are. Where I was forged... born and raised. And so it is, that I'm in pink sweater and a pale blue scarf scratching at bus doors, trying to find an old friend in the name of a song. Not that he didn't know I was coming -- just that the cell phone wasn't working, and there was a merge between my past and farther back past that was fixing to be present, and sometimes it just ain't worth the chance of something going sideways. It was an almost "as if" diesel sniffing moment, the kind where you know there's nothing you can say or do, knowing it doesn't matter that you're on the up and up - in an "Almost Famous" for everything moment, it's a rejoinder of "Top of the ramp with the other girls." Only there aren't any other girls. It's too cold even to be stalking the names on the ticket. Still when you are as you are, you know in the end, it'll be okay. Give it a minute, it'll right itself; everything'll be fine. Give it a minute, and even a girl with vertigo can find the calibration -- because there's safe harbor in songs and old friends, the reasons to believe the human condition transcends, if you'll cast after the truly great writers. Lyle Lovett, John Hiatt, Joe Ely, Guy Clark -- in reverse alphabetical order -- are that. Each a voice distinctly, uniquely their own, and yet utterly embodying some facet of America that is universally noble, even if it's only in how it captures our imagination. Joe Ely the rogue drifter, Someone who wandered up from "The Wild Ones," hellbent on making Mexico under a moon barely more than a sliver with a horse that's spent or hidden on top of a railcar. Rough hewn, a bit torn about the edges, intense and restless. Not for the faint of heart -- writing songs with a stiletto or straight razor across a heart of Spanish leather. Guy Clark, the manliest of poets. Reserved and dignified in a way that makes a denim shirt seem formal, and rolling one's own cigarettes regal. He pulls truths from common things, shines light on grand realizations that seem like just another moment, offers heroism and sweeping love across moments so like our very own. John Hiatt, the soul-grinder with the Ozzy Nelson touch. A voice like dredging the Mississippi, leaning into songs like it's the final turn -- and tempering the chunky funky zealous noise of the joyful perk with a turpentine soaked barn-board beauty of relentless fidelity, cavernous loss and devotion that makes a dog look fickle. And Lyle Lovett, the quirky hipster haiku painter. With that low slung growl, courtly prowl and the ability to capture the most ephemeral feelings like fireflies in glass jars, he warps the lens, exaggerates the rhythms and rolls us along with him. Doleful like black Irish mourners, wry like Dorothy Parker and quick to connect dots that seemed like stars across the heavens, he can sail a magical tapestry of characters, details and truths as if he were merely breathing. Together. Again, Just like the first time -- at the now long gone Bottomline in New York City, brought together by the then head of the Country Music Foundation, eventually to be the Director of the National Endowment of the Arts Bill Ivey almost almost two decades ago. Two decades. Almost. These men intertwining the lives already lived so fully. Three Texans and a Hoosier. All "critically acclaimed." Legends pretty much to people who follow that stuff. Clark being, of course, the eminence grise -- and standard by which all other Texas singer/songwriters are measured; and Ely, the rocker from Lubbock who'd opened for the Clash when they first hit big, whose Honky Tonk Masquerade was a fierce insurrectionist treatise that captured ears but somehow never quite made him the rocker he wanted to be. Hiatt, a veteran of the LA punk/country rock scene and a writer of merit -- even from a different side of the tracks, moved to Nashville to slow down and created the magical Bring The Family with its truth in the Norman Rockwell reality-based sketches. Lovett was the kid, a jazz merged with Texas songwriter aesthetics that had a sweetness that got in your veins and made you yearn for an innocence that was so blithely aware of what was around. Even then, they all had lives and stories. Even then, they'd covered continents and miles. Even then, they'd dream and laugh and drink and wander -- wondering about how it all held together, seeking insight with their details and lost nights with those mornings that somehow always broke your heart. If Guy Clark, Joe Ely, John Hiatt and Lyle Lovett were bound by anything, it was their willingness to see the truth, to own their stuff, to be willing to own up to what hurt, what stung, what brought them to their knees. In leather pants and a concho belt, Ely understood swagger -- and Hiatt's flannel shirt and khaki pants suburban camouflage was comfortably reassuring; Lyle was the uptown chic sleek sheik in his well cut suits and cowboy boots and well, Clark was a pressed white shirt, black vest, black jacket man most nights -- utterly elegant in his understated being. Way too different, yet strikingly the same. Always ones to unravel the threads and then twist them together again, sometimes in lost bars in strange nations with all kinds of people inhaling the tales like air. And they talked even better, it must be said. And their act -- though more the gracious easiness with which they open up their souls like guitar cases waiting for thrown money -- has gotten better with the passage of time. Or maybe it's that we've all had more time to find experiences that've been inside these songs, so we've learned them to be true, to have felt their core settle on moments all their own. Which is how I found myself in Cleveland, in the bitter cold. I had come to pay off debts, seeking something I didn't know could be sought. Yet, as so often is when you live in the wind, it's not the roots that hold you up but the currents that blow you from place to place -- if you'll relax enough to ride them. There was a singer once, a folkie. From my hometown, too. Had a quasi-rave-up spoken-word party vamp about being "a skinny little boy from Cleveland, Ohio, come to chase your women & drink your beer." It was quite festive and the party hearty college boys liked chanting it with staggeringly eroded grasp of the consonants anywhere cheap Pabst or whatever 3-2 was being tapped could be found. And the rallying cry was fine, but it didn't tell the story. No, no; this man crafted intricate little gems of exquisite detail, and put them together on actual vinyl records for his own Fiddler's Wynde label. I was beguiled by bridges that soothed, "Sweet child I hear you been crying, leave your sorrow far behind when you're through/ Each mile, no matter how winding, leads me/ Home is where my heart is, my heart stays with you" and songs about "Gunfighters Smile"s that summed up everything about the way that I'd come to live beyond the shadows, somehow forgotten in the far corners of the night. "Gunfighter's Smile" was a celebration and an elegy and a manifesto by which I seemed to live, a kid with licorice whip legs and a ponytail whipping around as that golf club swept up, scrapped the sky and finished high. A grown-up kid, chasing a dream I didn't quite understand, traveling around and playing golf tournaments I was never quite equipped to win. "Here's a song from a bottle of whiskey, here's a song from a Holiday Inn/ Here's a song for anyone who's ever watched the daylight sweeping in/ Let it come from the other side of morning, let it go to the other side of night/ It's where your dreams are, they're only what you make 'em, you only make 'em if you try, So close your eyes, let it all come back, one by one let the images files Gone, but not forgotten, through the eyes of autumn, I can still see your, gunfighter's smile" Alex Bevan wrote those words about bravery and beauty, chasing things you don't understand, squaring up and squaring off, shoulders back, head held high. It haunted me for years -- and led me along on a course of reading the credits, knowing that the singers don't always write the songs, but sometimes the writers sing, And he kept the pilot light lit for that notion -- me, a capricious kid with a good hustle sneaking into bars and college coffee houses in a pink buttondown shirt and slate colored Levi corduroys. A 13-, 14-year old girl, who looked about 10, figuring the same clothes would help raise the recognition factor -- forgetting the pictures of me in the newspaper, the ardor of my devotion and the fact that I was just so young going to communion with a sacrament of songs. It set me up for a life of finding clarity in the hollow spaces within the chords, understanding in the words. It was a good trade for a girl a little too old for her peers, a little too wise for the bars and far too young to get lost the way grown-ups do. Then there came Emmylou Harris. Rodney Crowell. It led to Guy Clark. Joe Ely, a flickering blue hot flame opening for Tom Petty at the Lakeland Civic Center, pressed against the stage at a General Admission Show -- having cut a day of my Freshman year of college to see Petty's homecoming concert and finding something else in the bargain. Rosanne Cash was a line into Hiatt, and Crowell. The Geffen Records so smart, yet so obscure- - a guy who had an old soulman's voice, wrote almost by dragging a hook across the curtains, ripping away that which would obscure and letting light pour over it all, and all of it wasn't pretty. Not that I really knew these people, just knew their music. Lived between the grooves on their records. Found things to laugh about, weep about, open up the veins of frustration, pump my fist and whoop with glory for. So it was, in Boynton Beach, Winter Park, Coral Gables, Florida. But along the way, I picked up a pen, started writing -- about music. Showed an insight beyond my years and a knowledge far beyond casual. And The Miami Herald needed a country writer, and so it was I came to start knowing the rogues of the road, the poets and pirates who stole songs from what they encountered and gave back perhaps even greater truths than they even found. "Don't make friends with the rock stars," the late great gonzo rock critic Lester Bangs cautions young William Miller in Cameron Crowe's memoir movie about coming of age as a baby rock critic "Almost Famous." Draw close to the flame is what he means, but it's your job to keep them honest, to remind them of what really matters, to keep them making music over money, not just money from music. Still, it's hard. They are, so, shiny. And they break your heart, sometimes. The venality of vanity and ego obscuring whatever tender -- or hormonal in the lust sense -- place that song came from. Their honest experience crushed and eradicated under the tonnage of fame and fawning. Yet, you can't help but want the music to matter, to mean more, to connect to the people who need it. Like that kid in a pink bedroom with a canopy bed, breathing the heavy night air and the rock & roll pouring out of WMMS in the lost hours, bathed in that odd glowing blue from the radio. She was saved by the songs and the FM dial, the records she'd spend hours pouring over and seeking. There were others like her -- and the mission was to make their mission easier. If you shared insight and wisdom, laughter and occasionally tears, not to mention good meals and whiskey, or tequila, red wine or whatever with the spinners of yarns, then so be it. It heightened the insight, the ability to conjure the essence of where the songs emerged. And so it came to be, in all kinds of countrys, with good conversations and spun notes that could just take your breath away. Tower Records was vital then, a force. Their Pulse, working off the premise "we listen to a lot of records, we write about the ones we like," was a magazine that shared my taste, letting me write about so many of the artists I loved and lived for. It was Pulse that put me in Clark's line of fire. An interview in a garret office in the top of a rambling office building that had once been a house on Music Row, a farflung discussion of discipline and influences, Townes Van Zandt and dignity, reasons to and the things that matter, for an album called Old Friends that creaked in the right places and turned truth to pure elixir with an oaken voice, a gravitas of old libraries and a warmth that drew you closer. Lovett came before even his big time national record debut, a quirky quilt of jazz rhythms, minor keys and sketches of people and places the Texas Tom Waits might've followed. But swiped with wonder and a dearness that drew you in, and that shock of hair, that tilted smile that was as much a part of his "aw shucks" self-deprecation when you'd shake your head, marveling at how he put you "there" at "Closing Time," when you should "unplug those people" or on "This Ole Porch" where moments pass like "a plate of greasy enchiladas, with guacamole salad." Lovett was most unconventional. Capable of such delicate intricacy, yet also able to engage arousal without seeming dirty. "You Can't Resist It" had such self-awareness of pheromones bursting in air, you could get dizzy from the frisson, while "God Will" recognized the humanity that fires jealousy and disgusted indictment in matters of love and straying nether regions. Always unassuming, Lovett sometimes felt like the most erudite Hansel to my Gretel in the valley of the infamous, turning up where I'd be chasing stories, singing songs that made faraway places, people I'd never known real. The other kid seeking -- or rather not quite knowing he had -- a place at the table, but having one by virtue of his gifts as much as his desire to be there. Ely had just kept slugging. A rootless tumble cactus, determined to be heard. Did his time in the hardscrabble LA rock fringe, opening for the Clash and trying to understand how Lubbock fits in with all of that, like so many ravaged post-Hollywood refugees, he finally figured home is what set him apart, and so the honky tonk ferocity of Lone Sar juke joints infused his insurrectionista refusal to fall in line with MTV, Instead he seceded, putting out the fierce Lord of the Highway on the label that gave the world smooth newblueser Robert Cray. At the Hyatt House on Sunset -- far above what becomes the nightly river of the starving to be famous, where Led Zeppelin would decamp during much of their Stateside conquest -- we talked about running away with the circus, vast horizons and the need to burn for music. A few hours later, in bolero tie and black close-cut denim jacket with a lean mean band, he would singe the Roxy with no frills, take-no-prisoners rock & roll. It was a commanding commando performance. A burst of guitar, a blaze of glory and into the night. Ely seemed to like it that way, Hiatt remained more elusive. But he had a way of showing up in corners. Everyone knew he was brilliant, but like Ely, it was an unconventional record -- actually pulled together by John Chelew, one of the guys from McCabe's Guitar Shop -- that had a pilot light that turned home fires into mirrors of "me, too" and "Lipstick Sunsets" into sigh-inducing moments of romantic rapture everyone wants to see their own lives smeared into. Whimsical, as well as mournful and insightful, Hiatt's soulstew would find its dawn with Bring The Family -- and just keep churning. Slow Turning bringing even more. And then there would be the hits for Bonnie Raitt, Rodney Crowell, Rosanne Cash -- and lots more, People who knew, who reveled in their lives would get the joke, ride the updraft and melt into the pools of feeling that offered temerity with the wheeeeee! Thanksgivings spent with each and every one of them, Dinners eaten, field trips taken, dressing rooms passed through, All part of the journey to a place where I didn't ever know I was going, to a moment where it all turned around and the path had seemed to be blown clean. Only the memories and the moments, and the laughter, and the songs. And the funny thing about songs is they often have three dimensions. There is the song itself, a thing of perfect creation that tells a story all its own The keys, the pauses, the way the words seem to ride the progressions and the images they leave. Perhaps they show you things, paint pictures, reveal hidden places or carry you further inside your own heart with what they express about the writers own life, emotions, past or hopes. The song itself is potent, but then there's the song and how you hear it: where you are and what you're doing, what those moments hold (or don't). It is the collaborative part of loving music -- the place where you bring your own reality and fuse it onto it. Then whenever you hear that song, it puts you in your own truth, your own reality -- deepening or tempering. An alchemy unanticipated, yet powerful beyond reason. And then there is the song transformed: play it for someone else, share it if you dare. See how it hits your friends, or someone across a bar. Watch the shifts, wonder -- or ask -- what they're feeling, getting from it. Share your stories, your reactions, find things you'd never seen, or merely cement what you have: in the song, in the friendship, in the recognition of yourself in someone else. The bonds forged over music are some of the strongest I've ever seen. Unlikely alliances, too, because of artists, voices, writers, songs, all bound up in truths most people would never articulate, yet knowing that "you got that, too" is the sturdiest bridge I know. Living in the wind, roots are not a terre firme proposition. It is what you grasp as you fall, fly or hurl by -- and you cling to the things that are weightless. Like songs. In moments when it all falls apart, it's the music that often puts it all back together. Don't know why, just know that's how it seems to always happen. Like sitting at my mother's grave, Clark's "Let Him Roll" rising like the rumble of far off summer thunder. Low, serious, strong, yet reassuring. And "The Randall Knife: following me around, like a ghost of consolation, an old friend who -- though unseen for almost a decade -- has the ability without doing a thing to remind you of your core strength, even as you're haunted by the jagged sense of what has happened. And so it was. Time melted. It was then, and it was not. The past and future turning into one. Alex Bevan, the singer who raised me right, to revere the singers of their own songs, had given up a weekend with his new bride to sing at my mother's funeral. For a woman best described as "a force of nature." A woman he barely knew, but a child he'd seen grow up. Alex, with that dimpled precious smile, still a student of the game and a believer in how good it could get, someone who would love this night as much as anyone on the face of the earth. Of course, it made sense to take him to this show, to introduce him to the people who picked up when I'd wandered off to Florida, then LA. It was a holy duty. And a delightful task. A reason to reach out, seek out these people who I knew from long before I midwifed dreams, made bold-faced music matter in ways most people missed. And if John Hiatt couldn't resist changing Ronnie Milsap to Kenny Chesney in his Nashville decompression rave "Memphis in the Meantime," no one laughed harder than the people in my row -- a swap to honor a decision I'm still not quite sure I made. And yet, I did. Somehow, not even quite sure why. Just did. Just wandered off the path, into the jungle of great big show business. Football stadiums, magazine covers, red carpets, cloaks, daggers, awards and private jets. Not for me, mind you, I just spin the plates, keep the time, toe the line, and watch the stars rise. Still for all the contretemps at the bus, some things never change. Old friends who have stories to tell, who laugh at your jokes, who smile just 'cause -- and who sing songs that still take you apart from the inside out. It's like Lego's with bent notes, "Introduce us," Lovett says. "They don't know me here," I respond. "But we do," Indeed, we do. Know each other like the back of our hands, even with all the mysteries and missing years. Remembering things, polaroids no one should've noticed about days or nights or minutes that overlapped somewhere out there in the wind. That's the kind of knowledge that brings you home when you can't find stars to steer by. Whatever is tangled or whirling, somehow eases up enough to poke through for the answers you can't quite find. For these are the people who love you even when you're missing, and who're happy to see you when you finally reappear. Onstage, they pour their hearts out. But it's as much about the faces in the crowd who see their own realities, conflicts, conquests in those songs. The fans are there to genuflect at the altar of the songwriters, but they're also there to have communion with the ones who sanctified their reasons and recognized their doubts and pain. It is a powerful exchange, but a little lonely for the ones up on the stage. Even as they're seen, they're never really known. Except occasionally, when a lost girl from the past who's asked far too many questions to ever be polite, who's trolled the docks and sidewalks of their lives seeking where it all comes from. Earlier that evening, at dinner in a linen tableclothed restaurant, the waitress leaned over to Lovett and whispered in his ear. Ely had been telling us about his roadpoemjournal that was about to come out -- Bonfire of Roadmaps, shipped on his birthday from the University of Texas Press -- and talk of the dates and the length of time they'd been doing these shows, the kind of easy catch-up banter that marked the passing of time before a show, A little girl at the next table, not much more than 8 years old, didn't wanna bother, but had seen him, and the waitress had said she'd see, And so Lyle Lovett got up, walked over, knelt down by the child and talked a few moments. She was, of course, coming to the show; and yes, she had a favorite song, and absolutely sure he'd play it. "If I Had A Pony" is whimsical. It is a prelude to a freedom a child couldn't quite know they'd one day truly yearn for. It stood as a contrast to my own request -- for "LA County" about a jilted lover who drives all night to slaughter the girl on the altar of her wedding, an insistent bit of strummage that contrasted that bit of ghastly against the beauty of the vast scattered sparkling lights of LA from above. Dark though it was, the beauty in the misery balmed me when I'd first moved to LA, and didn't have the sense of humor to fit in. Too Midwestern, too serious, too tender, it made no sense to me -- and so I could drive Laurel Canyon and Mulholland Drive, staring out at the diamond vastness and cry. I knew just how he felt, that guy with the gun. And yet, I also knew there are some obsessions from which you can't run. Kinda like the prodigal woman in "Let Him Roll," and the song's object loving a girl about town named Alice, who used to be a whore in Dallas, it doesn't matter where you run, the truth will always find you. Looking down the row at Alex Bevan and his new bride, my dear friend from before First Communion Bridgett Bowden, now McWilliams, and her husband Jarvis, who to me shall always be Jarvie, I saw the glow. They saw what I saw, they were moved by the hollow point bullets of Ely and Clark's fugitives pleas of "Letter To Laredo" and "Magdalene," the piety of Haitt's quavering "Have A Little Faith" or Lovett's courtly erosion of same with the jazzy slink of "What Do You Do." Towards the very end, Lovett talked about Guy Clark's impact -- Old No. 1 being the album every young wanna be writer would listen to until it became part of the double helix geentic coding that defined their mind -- and being able to gather up stories of those who'd known Clark back when. From that place of reverence, Lovett introduced a song that his forebear had written, but never recorded -- a song he let the young Texan have called Step Inside This House, a song that held up the dreary every day items as treasures beyond price because of the memories they held. It is a quiet song. A talking tour to someone you're trying to engage with, offering the meaning behind a painting someone gave you when they couldn't return the ten, a book of poems read cover to cover -- dearly loved, a gift from a girl you couldn't quite get there with. It's a soothing song that shows what truly matters with an intimacy that's almost blush-inducing... and it evokes everything about why they, their songs, this night matters. They are conjurers, these men. They put you in all kinds of places, feelings, scenes -- and then they bring you home. They know how to go deep, to startle, to brush you off, to make you smile. They leave you feeling more: alive, aware, clear. It is a gift. Looking at my oldest friends, looking at my old friends, I couldn't help but marvel. Of late, the path has been overgrown and tangled. Not much makes sense, and yet, still I walk on. Sometimes there's no other choice. Keep walking, look around, maybe something will look familiar as you make your stations of the cross through life, And so it was in an old theater in Cleveland, Ohio. Clark's wife Susanna wrote a song with Carlene Carter once called "Easy From Now On" that embraced the notion of shedding the trauma and drama, relinquishing one's need to save the world or at least someone hell bent on drowning and taking you under -- that let it all go by "getting off where the crossroads meet," Sometimes, though, it's at the crossroads where it all comes together. "Saturday night, I'm gonna make myself a name," the song, which has been sung in full gossamer glory by Emmylou Harris, continues, "take a month of Sundays to try and explain," There is freedom -- one way or another -- at the crossroads. On a Saturday night, in the chill of a loading dock, watching my friends mount a bus and settle in for the night, I smiled. Inside the venue, a few more friends, still trying to process what had truly happened, waited. Right in the middle of them all, I turned. Everyone walked away with something different, hopefully something more. I would drive and drive all night, past the places where I became the girl who would become the woman I am now. A woman I wouldn't be without all of them, and hopefully, for anyone else who can ever find their reason in the music, it is a truth that brings them even when they don't know why. The men would head to Louisville. Set up those 4 chairs, 4 mics, 12 bottles of water -- and conjure more people's lives with their tales. My friends would go back to their worlds, smiling and wondering how it happened, so much could be said in so very few songs. And me, I'll sit up again too late, marveling at what I have been blessed to see, the way my life seemed to go and the people I've met along the way, It ain't that what I do will ever be noticed, but more what I notice as I go. Sometimes what you recognize is more than enough reason. These days, beyond the footlights, that's how it seems. And so it was in Townes Van Zant's sparely beautiful "Pancho & Lefty," the notion of the ending of two explosive lives wound down: "The desert's quiet, Cleveland's cold/ So the story ends we're told.." But stories like these, well, stories like these go on and on. That is the wonder of them -- like the road, they do go on forever. It's just a matter of showing up and looking on.
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