(I actually wrote this the day after she died, but haven't had the time to post it until now, hence the slightly out-of-date comments in the last paragraph.)
I knew this day was coming the last time I saw Peter, Paul and Mary on television, which would be about three years ago. That didn’t make the news any less sad when I heard it, of course.
Some of my very earliest memories are of my dad singing me to sleep with “500 Miles” when I was a little kid. Nearly three decades later, I overheard one of my kids in Taiwan singing it. That shows how universal her music was, I suppose. There were plenty of other memories along the way, such as long debates with friends over whether or not “Puff the Magic Dragon” was about marijuana (it isn’t), and listening to then-new LifeLines all the time just before and after I graduated from college. The sentiment of “I could no more stop dreaming/than I could make them all come true” was all too fitting for that first leap out into the real world, which saw a lot of dreams go bust for over a year before I got on my feet.
With that bittersweet memory in mind, I cued up my favorite tracks from LifeLines and No Easy Walk to Freedom last night at the hawker center to accompany my roast duck and Carlsberg. It’s a good thing I was in public, or “I’d Rather Be in Love” probably would have had me bawling.
Thanks for the memories, Mary, and “don’t let the light go out”!
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2 comments:
Dave,
I was never particularly familiar or close to their music but if you get a moment I'd be curious to know who coined this phrase:
“I could no more stop dreaming/than I could make them all come true”
Was it Mary Travers or was it from one of their songs or another source (actually sounds rather like Christopher columbus)?
Cheers,
P
It's from a song called "The Kid," written by Buddy Mondlock (whose songs have been recorded by just about everybody), but I imagine he heard it somewhere else first.
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