Friday night I sat with my youtube and enjoyed the music of Kenny Loggins and Paul Simon and Dan Fogleberg. I remembered the misfit teenager who was listening to such different and countercultural music and wishing to visit the Netherlands to Graceland. What far and distant lands, these writers led me through. Places I may never see with my eyes, but have visited with my heart. I am grateful for the imagination to have seen and travelled with many a prolific American writer, through their music. I am grateful for the hippie generation, before me and the folk writers who taught us to dream of other lands and to dream of peace and better lives.
I give the study of the beauty of American songsters and others to my children and wish them to grow into the fruition of the dreams that the "Innocent Ages" lend to them. Dan Fogleberg especially comforted my aging heart with his lyrics of beauty and true exposing of himself. He was real. This is me, he seemed to say, Not at all perfect, just growing.
