• Listening to Buddy Miller and letting my mind drift back in time.

The year was probably 1991 or 1992 when walked into WOM on Kaufinger Strasse in Munich, Germany, and put on a pair of headphones and started watching a video of the The Band perform “When I Paint Masterpiece” at Bob Dylan's 30th anniversary concert. I was entranced and went back and back and back again to the store to experience that video, sometimes hitting pay dirt, other times arriving when the video was not playing or even close to starting to play. I was teaching English at Berlitz and so I was poor and buying an album was something I really had to think about. As for video, well, forget it, I had no way to play video. In time I broke down and bought the double CD and could finally listen to the song on my own time, which I did, a lot. And every time I listened to it I thought about making my own masterpiece. I never did, of course. Who does? But just this morning, I put on one of the many, many bootlegs I’ve downloaded recently, this one of Buddy Miller, and I noticed on the info.txt file there at the bottom “When I Paint My Masterpiece”. I played it. It’s great, as good as The Band’s performance. And as I was listening to it, I thought about how much is different in my life now. The biggest thing, of course, is parenthood, followed by marriage. But one other big difference is that I have finally at least attempted to paint my masterpiece, which, with luck will be ready in about a month. Stay tuned.