“A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue,
but the parent of all the other virtues.”

- Cicero

I think I was 13 years old and just starting to develop some musical tastes of my own. I was in a record store in a mall in Indianapolis, flipping through the "S" selections, probably looking for a Rod Stewart album, when I suddenly saw something that froze me in my tracks.



It was stunning to see my name on something other than my football helmet or a gym bag, let alone an album cover. Wow! Somebody with my name had recorded an album! Little did I know that he had actually recorded several albums by that time, and would release more than 40 in his career.

I was almost as shocked this evening when I went on YouTube to see if there were any John Stewart videos and read that he had passed away back on January 19 as the result of a massive stroke at age 68. I couldn't believe that I hadn't heard or read that news when it happened.

I didn't buy California Bloodlines that first day in the record store. The guy in the store said it was folk/country and that was the last thing I wanted as I tried to distance myself from my parents' Glenn Campbell and Bobby Goldsboro records. Ironically, I didn't realize that I'd already heard this guy on some of those old Kingston Trio albums my folks had. Nevertheless I would often check on the album when I was in the store, getting a little thrill each time I read the name. When I got to college I got a lot smarter and widened my musical interests and eventually bought my own vinyl version of the album that Rolling Stone would later rank as one of the top 100 albums of the rock era.

Stewart (and it feels strange to type that), through his work with the Cumberland Trio and Kingston Trio, had been a pioneer in the folk music scene of the early 60s, opening the door for people such as Bob Dylan. In fact, Bloodlines was Stewart's first solo album and it was recorded directly across the hall from where Dylan was recording Nashville Skyline. (Stewart also wrote "Daydream Believer" which was a hit for the Monkees and Anne Murray.) Once I finally owned Bloodlines I just about wore it out, playing it regularly along with an album by Gamble Rogers that featured a cover of one of Stewart's classics, "July, You're a Woman". When I spent a semester in England before graduating from the University of Missouri (my family had moved back to my parents' home town my junior year in high school) I often thought of the lines from the song "Missouri Birds" as I tramped around London:

Missouri Birds flying over old St. Louis
Hear that song they're singing to me
Go into the world, while you're young

I graduated from college in '79 and moved to Phoenix, AZ for my first job, driving across the country in my Pinto while Top 40 radio played "Gold" from Stewart's latest album, Bombs Away Dream Babies.with Stevie Nicks "ooh-oohing" on the background vocals. It was a catchy tune, but I liked the other songs on the album as well, and listened to it nearly as much as I had to Bloodlines. In fact, it was a lyric from one of those songs — "Midnight Wind" — that came to my mind two weeks ago when a friend of mine died in a motorcycle crash. The tune has been rattling around between my ears since then, and it was probably what led me to go to YouTube tonight, only to find that there was one less John Stewart in the world.

I had been fortunate to see him perform in Phoenix while I lived there; he was a local favorite and a loved Phoenix in return, even recording a live album there at one point. I'd like to say that I was at the concert that was recorded, but that would be too much serendipity. In the last couple of years I'd tried to replace California Bloodlines and Bombs Away but most of his music is out of print or available only as an import. Some of his later work is available on iTunes, but his voice — never a particularly strong one — had gotten reed thin and breathy and made me kind of sad.

I was eventually able to get the song "Gold" on iTunes by downloading the soundtrack album for the movie "The Groomsmen" but his older stuff is still elusive. Tonight I went to Amazon, however, and ordered an imported version of Bloodlines before this, too, disappeared. I look forward to re-grooving these songs into my memory banks. Among the many on-line tributes I came across this evening was an especially apt tribute in his own words, taken from "Hand Your Heart to the Wind" from Bombs Away and "Some Lonesome Picker" from Bloodlines.

There's always one more river the sea can carry.
There's always one more soul that heaven can hold
There's always one more star the sky can hang on to
So hand your heart to the wind, let it carry you home.

There's always one more song to sing for the lonely
There's always one more dream to carry you along
There's always one more eagle come flying in the morning
So hand your heart to the wind let it carry you home.

...

And I'm believing, believing,
Believing that even when I'm gone
Maybe some lonesome picker will find some healing in this song

I did strike "Gold" on YouTube tonight as well, but rather than link to that hit (which Stewart reportedly actually hated) I'll post a video of him doing a medley of "Missouri Birds", "Cowboy in the Distance" and "If You Should Remember Me."

Goodnight, John.

I saw the news today that American Girl is opening a store in the Mall of America, to complement their flagship stores in New York, Chicago and LA and smaller stores in Atlanta and Dallas (the MOA store will be about half the retail space of the flagships). It reminded me of a post I wrote three years ago about a trip to New York my wife and I made with Tiger Lilly. From the "Gotham Blogs" series:

After the museum we're out on the street looking for our next destination. Suddenly my wife grabs my arm and Tiger Lilly gasps audibly and freezes. What? Did some threat get past my radar? My wife directs my attention to the opposite corner of the intersection and I see that we may indeed be in line for a mugging. It's American Girl Place.

A year ago I had no idea of the marketing volcano that was about to erupt under our feet. Then some black-hearted scoundrel slipped Daughter Two an American Girl catalog - the first one's free, kid - and her life changed. American Girl dolls are a vertically integrated economic powerhouse. The dolls themselves go for nearly $100 a pop, but that’s just the threshold - the dolls represent different eras and ethnicities in American history and most are the stars of one or more books put out by the company and has full line of accessories, not to mention the magazine (catalog) that appears regularly at our house. My daughter and her friends now can recite model numbers, back stories and accessory details with each other the way my friends and I once were able to argue the finer points of a '63 Impala or '67 GTO.

When Tiger Lilly picked her favorite from the catalog - an American Indian called Kaya - we said that if it was that important to her she would have to earn the money herself. A born entrepreneur she quickly grasped the profit and loss mechanics of a lemon-aid stand and the economic rewards of an untapped market - extra chores - to build liquidity. With a seed loan from Mom she bought lemons and sugar, and with marketing advice from me ("put 'Fresh Squeezed' in big letters on your sign"), along with her natural charm and location, location, location she quickly covered her start-up costs and had money to plow back into her business as well as show a profit. This was repeated a couple of more times, and along with the household moonlighting she soon had the necessary discretionary income to buy her doll.

And now we were unwittingly across the street from Mordor, I mean, American Girl Place. It was like setting out for Oz and finding Mecca along the way. I looked around and saw a definite flow of young girls, many with dolls in arms and all with parents bobbing in tow, converging on the store from all directions. We were swept up in the current - as if we ever had a choice - and into the store. The store is impressive in both detail and scope, with three floors of merchandise and a restaurant where you can have lunch with your American Girl doll for just $22 per person. If I’m going to spend that much for lunch with a doll, I want to see the doll cook the meal and then serve it and then give me a quote on painting my garage. Nevertheless the store is jammed on every floor and countless cashiers and floor associates are - like everyone else in New York - working hard. Fortunately there were no meltdowns to be observed such as those we'd witnessed at Toys R Us in Times Square the night before, but I did notice a lot of earnest young faces making a case point by point. After Tiger Lilly parted with more of her profits she'd been saving for this trip we went elsewhere for lunch (Kaya would just die if she knew we’d eaten at American Girl Place without her) and then, since it had stopped raining, we went over to the Central Park Zoo.

We arrive just in time for the Polar Bear feeding and to see another New York career option - bear feeder. At this zoo they feed the Polar Bears by first luring them out of the habitat enclosure and into their dens where they can presumably be locked up. Once that is accomplished a zookeeper enters the habitat and hides buckets of food - fish, apples and some veggies frozen in a block and smeared with peanut butter - in the enclosure. While we’re watching this preparation we speculate that there’s probably some initiation for rookie keepers where, once they’re in the middle of the enclosure with bear chow and an open jar of peanut butter, someone plays a loud recording of a Polar Bear huffing and roaring.

Perhaps TL will grace us with a post of her own with her thoughts on the new store.

I took last week off from work, yet it still turned out to be a pretty full week. It actually started out the Saturday before last when I landed a free "Supporter" badge to the US Women's Open. My company was hosting a Sky Tent on the 14th Hole (in Carl Pohlad's back yard) and the guy who put it all together could only stay the first half of the week and left me his pass, which he said would get me in anywhere but the Patty Berg Pavilion and the women's locker room, I think.

I arrived Saturday during the weather delay and met up with a woman from work who had had to evacuate the Sky Tent during the weather watch. While we were waiting by the ropes for the all clear and looking very official an older couple walked up to us for an update on the conditions. Noticing that my impressive badge said "SUPPORTER", the gentleman asked what that meant. "It means that I'm an athletic supporter," I said, straight-faced. "Let's ask her," the woman said, pointing to my partner.

Sunday was the unfortunate incident with the small but expensive container of chocolate ice cream.

On Monday I told Tiger Lilly we could go to the matinee show of WALL•E, which made her very happy, until I told her I just had to do some e-mails from work first, which didn't. Work e-mail is like a cancerous growth that keeps dividing and multiplying when you're not looking and I knew that if I didn't try to prune it a bit even while on vacation it would turn into a hazardous blob that would frighten Steve McQueen by the time I got back to work. Still, there's a reason I refer to my laptop computer as a "laptrap" and Tiger Lilly flopped resignedly on the couch. (I well know her feeling because when I was a kid my father owned a gas station and every time the family got into the car the trip was sure to include at least one stop at "the station" where he would disappear inside while we waited in the car with nothing but AM radio.) Sure enough, an hour and a half later I was ready to set out, and we made it to the movie in time though we missed about half of the "Play Green!" propaganda being shown on the movie screen to the captive, mostly-kid audience. Darn. Oh well, the commercials will probably have the same effect as those PSAs telling kids not to do drugs.

The movie itself was pretty cute, if not Pixar's best, though I hear the "critics" are lauding the film to high heaven. That's presumably because of the environmental "message" of humans filling the planet up with so much garbage we have to take to outer space. Of course, this is the same medium that would have you believe that Wile E. Coyote can really afford all that stuff he buys from ACME. The first half of the movie was kind of odd as the only "words" came from the communicative noises the robots made, though this wasn't any harder to understand than, say, Arianna Huffington.

In an interesting (to me) contrast, later that evening I watched a show on the Discovery HD channel about what has gone on in the Ukrainian village of Prypiat, which rests next to Chernobyl and was evacuated in 1986. There are those who would have you believe that Prypiat and the 18-mile "Exclusion Zone" all around it are a nuclear wasteland, yet in reality it has become a booming, if unintentional, nature preserve as the forest has taken over much of the city and flora and fauna are thriving. Bears, wolves, elk, birds of prey and all manner of rodents and insects have moved in an thrived, including many species that were thought to be extinct or nearly extinct. You could tell that the narrator, and presumably the producers, were struggling to make sense of this, one moment intoning about this "greatest disaster of mankind" and the "evil unleashed on the earth" in this area that will be unfit for habitation for another 300 years, and in the next moment marveling at the health and diversity of the wildlife that has flourished there over several generations, apparently without ill effects.

Wednesday was the funeral for our friend Joe, which also happened to be the first funeral my wife has conducted. Appropriately, it was pretty much a biker affair as a row of Harley's lined the street in front of our church and filled the funeral procession out to Fort Snelling (Joe was a vet). The Reverend Mother is a biker, too, though she dressed more formally than the majority of the folks who came to the service. She should have worn her "Biker Chick" pin on her dark knit suit, but otherwise the service was flawless and touching.

On Thursday the girls and Ben took off for the cabin, leaving my wife and I home alone and without any plans. We made do, enjoying dinner at a new place, Aura in Calhoun Square (try the great "small plates" - like tapas but slightly larger portions, great for combos), grilling steaks on Friday night and going to our favorite place, Muffuletta, on Saturday night where I enjoyed a fabulous watercress puree and blue cheese cold soup (refreshing!) with orange aioli and cracked pepper for starters, while my wife thoroughly enjoyed an asparagus and horseradish appetizer and a beet salad. The menu changes regularly here so it's always fun to try something new but that night I opted for an old favorite, the Asian burger (ground pork, spicy thai peanut sauce and Chinese cabbage). It was a lovely evening as well, so we sat out on the deck and enjoyed the evening, the neighborhood and each other's company. It's a fun and romantic place, just the ticket if a certain someone wanted to take another certain someone to someplace special for a meaningful dinner!

All in all, I think it was one of the best vacations I've ever had. I felt refreshed and rested all the way up until Sunday afternoon, when I started hacking at the e-mail jungle again!