Voices from the past

(Correction from last night’s post. This week marks the fifteenth anniversary of my promising that I would dedicate my first novel to a girl I knew. Apparently I couldn’t do math last night, which is leaving me very frightened right now. And I still owe Meg that novel. It will happen. Not saying it will be good but it will be done.)

Did you guys catch what happens to be the strangest, most macabre coincidence of the year today? The voices of both Piglet and Tigger passed away in the past 24 hours. It is sad to hear that they are gone (and lets face it, anyone who can make Yahoo headlines on their passing has accomplished something in their life) but wow, what are the odds of both going on the same day? It’s just freaky.

I have to admit that Winnie the Pooh was my favorite children’s story growing up. It’s probably because Christopher Robin is the only Christopher that I’ve found in all of children’s literature so I had to gravitate towards him, he’s the best surrogate that a seven year old EC could find. There is a part of me that still considers naming my son Christopher Robin because it would be really neat, except for the fact that I might be condemning him to more name callings and fights than would be appropriate. I do keep this drawing I picked up in England next to my laptop, though. It is of Winnie the Pooh at a chalkboard doing math problems. Somehow it seems to be really appropriate for me, especially after reading The Tao of Pooh. Pick up that book at some point, a very interesting entry point for eastern philosophy.

Ok, that’s enough reminiscing on my childhood for the moment. I don’t know why but I’ve been reminiscing about being a kid again a lot recently. I think it’s because it is summer. This is the time of the year when it was so much fun to be a kid. Summer had just started and you could do whatever you wanted. Plus, everything was new and a thrill. I still remember how excited I was when I finally had a television in my room one summer and I was able to stay up late and watching tv, keeping the volume down really low so my parents wouldn’t notice. I mean, just getting to watch The Tonight Show was like some forbidden treat. I don’t know if you can ever recapture those moments no matter how hard you try. As you grow older you might understand more about life but I don’t know if you ever enjoy life just for the sheer fact of being alive as you do when you are ten years old.

One last completely separate note. I finally found a copy of the Son Volt Live on Austin City Limits DVD. I’ve been waiting for this for months and I’m thrilled that the cover of Uncle Tupelo’s “Chickamauga” is on there. That is one of my top five songs of all time with my favorite lyric “Catch yourself in midair thinking/your dreams can never be bought.” Just think about those lines and how many different ways you can interpret it. I kind of touched on this in my Wakarusa review but I want to mention it again. I admire Jay Farrar as being a great songwriter and I respect the fact that when he gets on stage he plays what he wants to play and not what the crowd might always want to hear. It’s his art and at the end of the day it his choice as to what songs are speaking to him and which are meaningful. But for the life of me, if I had the chance to stand on stage at play Chickamauga every night for the rest of my life I would. You’d have to pry the guitar out of my hands to get me to stop.