Where have all the flowers gone? I thought about the Peter, Paul and Mary version of this song the other day as I was playing another one of their hits “Puff the Magic Dragon” on my guitar where Eli and I could sing it together. Eli had learned the song at school this year, and I wanted to do it with him. It’s always been a “magic” song for me, because I learned the three finger “picking” method from it.
That was in 1967, and here I am almost 50 years later…and can still just pick up my guitar, and with a couple of minutes practice, it all comes back to me…..
All of those fall nights when I was 17, and had all the basic normal dreams that any seventeen year old might have. Senior year, and trying to figure out what great and important things the future held.
I knew nothing. I still know very little, compared to the overwhelming amount of sheer knowledge there is in the world to accumulate.
What I mainly do know, and have learned in those fifty years is that it’s much more important to sit down in your bedroom and play and sing “Puff” with your five year old grandson (and granddaughters….since I repeated it with Rue and Evie on Friday) then it is to worry about things over which you have little or no control.
It’s better to read them books, and tell them how much you love them.
What’s more important to you?
After Eli went home, after we had finished singing “Puff the Magic Dragon” I prayed that he and Rue and Evie will see more days of happiness in their lives than they can imagine. I wished that their generation can find the answers to the questions that really need to be asked. There are so, so many of those questions.
Then I sat down and started singing: “Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing…..”
Writing for Sanity's Sake 