Nice notes having arrived about my reminiscence last week, I thought I’d continue with some family traditions that were once common but that seem now to have all but disappeared, and some community ones which in many places have suffered the same fate.
Do people still have warm, memorable Christmas traditions? I wonder. We used to. Here’s part of my family’s, when my family lived on our little farm in Missouri at a time that doesn’t seem as long ago as it was.
You may have seen “America’s Sweethearts” the 2001 movie about the life of a motion picture publicist. To most people it is a cute and funny romantic comedy. To anyone who has ever been in the publicity business, it is a documentary.
J.D. Hutchison has died. For those of you not familiar with the Appalachian music scene, particularly as manifested in southeastern Ohio, a small introduction to that culture is probably appropriate.
It’s a feeling that comes on, the way you can tell the night before that when you wake up tomorrow you’ll have a cold. Only it’s worse. It’s not a cold, it’s a book. When one writes a book, the last thought that one has, right after the sign of relief that the damned thing is finally done, is the firm vow never to do such a foolish thing ever again.
With this column, “The View From Mudsock Heights” enters its sixteenth year. It began 15 years ago and and I’ve not missed a week since.
Times certainly do change, whether time feels like it is going quickly or slowly. Twenty years ago today, Open for Business went live. It feels like yesterday and a lifetime ago. It’s been an interesting and wonderful journey.
The time was shortly after World War I. The place, almost anywhere that there was an area long enough and flat enough. The sound was the coughing and sputtering of those early engines at the front of any of a variety of war-surplus airplanes. The few surviving military aviators and others who sought adventure had been able to purchase the planes, Curtiss Jenny trainers and the like, and they had set off to find their fortunes.
In the middle of the summer, John Mayer released this album, and it sounded like a Hall & Oates album broke out. I couldn’t help but think of the last hit from Daryl Hall and John Oates, “Everything Your Heart Desires,” as I listened to the lead track on this record, “Last Train Home.” Just as they landed in the top 10 in 1988, this album is an attempt to lovingly remind us of 1988.