Stan Hitchcock-View From The Front Porch-September 16, 2013

It's such a beautiful breaking of the dawn, you almost expect to hear a drum roll and cymbals crashing as another day steps out on stage. God's creation is always perfect, His taste impeccable and His timing to the second.

Every new day is something special for me and Old Buck The Colllie, as we wait in happy anticipation for the first light. Course, my coffee gets me revved up, and Buck is just naturally alert and on guard, at my feet, like two old Sailers, on the late watch on the Bridge of a Ship.

I find the Front Porch of the old farm house to be a shelter from the storms of life, a place of reflection on the blessings, and a place where a prayer prepares you for the coming challenges.

You young folks that think that Life Challenges get smaller and less important as you get to the place in the Road where I am, well, that ain't exactly the way it it. Your mistaken view of someone with the approximate age of Methuselah hanging on their shoulders, is out of the race for the finish line, shoot, boys and girls, this is where you have to really kick your self into overdrive, and keep on pumping. When you hear someone like Jerry Foster and Jimmy Payne doing the great songs that they wrote years ago, and doing them with great joy and enthusiasm, and watching a crowd of folks soaking them up like they were brand new....man, it gives hope to all of us that have been on the music road for so long that we have wore out a hundred pair of boots. Ok, maybe only seventy five or so...but most of them have been resoled several times. In fact, I have wore out three or four pair of feet in the process.
I was sitting in a Hotel Room in some city somewhere in the 70's, writing a song, after one of my shows. I glanced around the Hotel Room at my stage clothes and my old Tony Lama's and realized that they were getting about as wore out as I was...but, hey, these were my special boots....I couldn't sing a song without them, i thought...a superstition like some of us musicians have...so, on the pad that I was writing the song on...I sketched the pair of boots, kicked off on the floor. Nothing arty about the picture, but it had significance to me at the time...kinda like a place holder of where I was in life at the time. I got them repaired and they still live in my closet, after all these years, but that night in some Hotel still was a reminder of the wear and tear that the Road would do to a singer of sad songs.
stan