Pockets full of sand

It’s Cinco de Mayo, so I by rights should have something appropriate for the occasion. But Gordon Lightfoot died earlier this week at age 84. And Lightfoot was my North Star.

Way, way back, my BFF and I went to see him at a tiny club in Huntington Beach, Calif. I probably shouldn’t have been let in, because I was under age, but not only did I have some kind of too-cool-for-school coffee drink, I had enough chutzpah to go backstage (not that it was much of a backstage at that place) and take a photo with my Nikon S2 rangefinder:

A lot of years later, I went with another friend to the Universal Amphitheatre to hear him again. This time he was backed up by a band, singers and the whole megillah, and he had a bit of the air of someone who'd already been rode pretty hard and put away wet. He went through some rough patches, but eventually came through.

Even if you’ve never heard Lightfoot, you’ve heard his songs. Seriously—if you don’t know “Early Morning Rain”, you haven’t been alive at any time in the past 50 years.

(I know this will sound antediluvian to Millennials, but when I rode my bicycle from Paris to Santiago de Compostela, I had no iPod, no smartphone, not even a Walkman. I sang to myself, and I well recall blaring out “Now the liquor tasted gooood and the women all were faaaast” as I pedaled through a Spanish village, much to the visible surprise of the residents.)

And so, let’s hear the man himself singing “Early Mornin’ Rain”. Vaya con Dios, Gordon.