Summer’s End
Still missing John Prine.
When “Sam Stone” first came on the radio it was in the summer of 1971. My brother had been back from Vietnam just a year and though he wasn’t the damaged goods that so many were, he had changed. Sam Stone is about a veteran who returns from the war with a drug habit which in the end becomes his end.
“There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes,
And Jesus Christ died for nothing I suppose.”
Those words shattered me alive.
Summer’s End, one of tracks on John Prine’s last record matches this earlier song in subject and tone. A child coming to terms with the death of her mother from opioid addition.
“Come on home
Come on home
No you don’t have to be alone
Just come on home”
I’ve never been one to anthropomorphize God. Even during my Santa Claus years I played along but I’ve never bought into the notion that some supernatural being would show up annually bearing gifts, while the rest of the year he ran a sweat shop — or, that some some ancient bearded deity lived just beyond the celestial canopy of the sky, where the stars were really just rips in the cosmos through which you could see the light of Heaven.
The biblical notion is that God acts in history in large and small ways. If that’s true then God is decidedly an under achiever. I don’t know if I even believe in God. On my good days , maybe, when I glimpse nature’s benevolent beauty, or feel that flutter of emotion at some flicker of human kindness.
“The moon and stars hang out in bars just talking”
On my good days I can imagine a God with the sensibility and luminosity of a John Prine or Ruth Bader Ginsberg. They came into the world to show us something, to give us something to hold on to, to remind us that goodness and grace can reside in the flesh and blood and bone of us.
“Miss you in the morning, like roses miss the dew.”
On my good days I try to stay open to the idea that the animating power that first lit the stars can also ignite the human soul. It’s hard to believe in much these days, but if there is a God, I’m pretty sure she keeps a picture of John Prine in her wallet.
