music

  • Save the Dancer

    Save the Dancer

    A well-meaning friend once told me to dance like no one is watching. It didn’t take. I dance like people are watching. I was dancing at a wedding recently, (Apache, Jump on it) and it occurred to me that no one cares what I look like when I dance. I know this because if they…

    Read more →

  • Musings at 35,000 feet

       I recently picked up my son and daughter-in-law from the airport and the subject of airliner models arose. My first flight was on a Lockheed TriStar L-1011 equipped with a headphone sound system and I listened to Carly Simon’s, That’s the Way I Always Heard it Should Be. “You say we’ll soar like two…

    Read more →

  • Just a Guy Who Writes Songs

    “I’m just a guy, man, who writes songs,” John Lennon once exclaimed, to a neurotic American man who flew to England to visit with Lennon about his songwriting. It turns out that this crazy man believed that Lennon’s songs were written exclusively about him. Any sensible person knows that this is vanity. But great songwriting grabs…

    Read more →

  • Wind Dancer

    My granddaughter, Holland, just got a new pair of sneakers. She looks down at her feet and marvels that just fourteen months before her feet were tucked in the fetal position. Okay, maybe she can’t recall those moments in the womb before she burst into the world like shimmering sunlit foil. So I imagine for…

    Read more →

  • Word

    “Word” is the shortened form of the phrase: “my word is my bond” which originated with prison inmates and also by my Grandma, who avoided blasphemy by saying,”oh my word”, or “oh my goodness”, which sounds similar to God. Word is equated to God from John Chapter 1. It begins like this. “In the beginning was the Word,…

    Read more →

  • Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.   ~  Victor Hugo I had a reputation as a youngster that enshrouded me like cigar smoke hovering over Churchill on a still summer evening. I sang pretty well. I sang because my church sang a capella and everyone sang. If…

    Read more →

  • Back in the days when my kids believed in Santa and my words had the force and weight to either bless them or crush them, our daughters and son indulged in make-believe, dressing up to become the character of their dreams through the magical powers of the family costume chest. It was magical only in…

    Read more →

  • Flashes of Wonder

    If I wrote like my wife talks, I’d write narrative like a kid writing home from summer camp, “I had oatmeal for breakfast and we played softball and I outran all the boys in a foot race and we had hamburgers for dinner…” But, I write like a Red Bull-drinking cat on a hot tin…

    Read more →

  • I’ve always loved cool…have no idea what it is but I love it. Perhaps I have no idea because cool expresses not one meaning or attitude but many, a cross-pollinated adjective moving fluidly in many cultures and languages. An Anglo can say cool in Chinese (kù 酷) and it means essentially the same as in…

    Read more →

  • Tyler Davis on a recent trip to Uganda, praying with his legs. I was brought to faith in a church that valued knowledge and the intellect. Within the confines of my birth family, I watched my parents enflesh this knowledge into action. And certainly it affected me…clean your room, take out the trash, mow the…

    Read more →