Maggie's Farm

Louis Armstrong first recorded this Dorothy Fields & Jimmy McHugh song in 1934. Versions followed in 1937, 1938 (with 'Fats" Waller), 1947 & 1956 (with the
Sy Oliver Orchestra).

"On the Sunny Side Of the Street"

Grab your coat and get your hat
Leave your worries on the doorstep
Life can be so sweet
On the sunny side of the street

Can't you hear the pitter-pat
And that happy tune is your step
Life can be complete
On the sunny side of the street

I used to walk in the shade with my blues on parade
But I'm not afraid...this rover's crossed over

If I never had a cent
I'd be rich as Rockefeller
Gold dust at my feet
On the sunny side of the street

(instrumental break)

I used to walk in the shade with them blues on parade
Now I'm not afraid... this rover has crossed over

Now if I never made one cent
I'll still be rich as Rockefeller
There will be goldust at my feet
On the sunny
On the sunny, sunny side of the street
`

Thanks, Barrett --and the same best wishes to you & yours. Old Satchmo grew up penniless, fatherless, mother a streetwalker & barfly, back when New Orleans' red-light district was tough & pretty Dickensonian for a kid. If anybody ever had an excuse to close himself off to whatever light angel settled in his trumpet, it was Louie.

Perspective --word actually refers to things visual --a too-familar mental image is of a person who might resemble the person having the mental image, a feller who is walking backwards, who keeps bumping into unexpected difficulties and hidden obstacles and is thus continually off-balance and too reactive to create. He's backing forward, might say being pulled into the future against his will, because the future is not a space (like the good ole here & now is) but a place or destination to where he is being driven by that encroaching malice just behind, odious wispy tendrils drifting ahead, the dark yawning certainty that only a fool would turn his back to --the void. The thing the Robert Duvall character in "Broken Trails" is talking about in his brief eulogy at the funeral of a beloved friend:

"We're all travelers on this earth,
from the sweet grass to the packing house,
from birth to death,
we travel between the eternities"

i guess those words are Larry McMurtry's, the author of at least the first of the so-called "Lonesone Dove trilogy" --i oughtta google it before i post this --but his point is, it seems to me, is that whatever it is that we spend a life moving across, it is, compared to the before and after of it, next to nothing. Really next to nothing, about as close to nothing --at least on a volumetric basis --as it is possible to be, so strikingly next to nothing that it MUST follow (here's the happy thought) that that cruel backwards-making fear trance MUST also be (leaving out en arguendo the topic of the individual whole enormous parallel subjective universes of which there are at least one and lamentably usually quite a number per person) next to nothing.

If so, and i don't see how it could be otherwise, then it is only a part and parcel of the fear spell that the fear spell seems to be the only way to keep ahold of this spark that because it is so close (as close as me is to myself) it blinds the truth --like all of creation can hide behind an acorn if the acorn is close enough to the pupil --the boots-on-the-ground truth that your mind knows but your brain rejcts, that we are so tiny a blink, so mere an eddy in the flow of being, such a smidgen of a fiber in a thread in the mainsail of the ship of time [ed. note: ok enough of that] that we should, when we find life too anxious or too discontented (ok, too immeasurably miserably intolerably anguishing), maybe, in our individual personhoods, try first of all to quit creating in our own selves however much of it we can.

Abe Lincoln is credited with and or blamed for saying "Most people are about as happy as they choose to be".

What a deft way to accuse any apropriately guilty listener of fear of fear itself (thanks, FDR, even despite Amity Shlaes' recent revelations & reminders), or fretting on fretting --fretting away a life fretting about fretting away a life.

Same to you, BD --and thanks --