Meandering Replies

Song 761: This week the playlist comes around to Blowin' in the Wind by Peter, Paul and Mary, written by Bob Dylan, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. Back in my single-digit years, I would sometimes hear.a song I liked coming from a radio nearby, but I didn't generally pay much attention to them. However, early on during my second decade, a musical trio started getting plenty of recognition in the summer of 1963 from an anthem about rambling answers to major questions, and it soon became the first current hit that got a lot of my focus. The folkie style wouldn't have bothered my parents the way the devil's music did when it showed up six months later, and the values expressed in the lyrics seemed to align with basic Christian concepts, so I saw no conflict between my religion and the hit. I quickly learned the songwriter's name, and over the next few years I would notice that moniker a few times, such as with Mr. Tambourine Man (Song 326), but I wouldn't actually hear his voice until I got to my college dormitory. When I first heard the breezy song, I didn't know how many roads I'd have to walk down before people would call me a man, but even now, no matter how many times some of the cannonballs did fly since then, I don't expect them to get forever banned any time soon! 

500 Years from Now

 Song 760: This week the playlist recognizes In the Year 2525 by Zager and Evans, written by Rick Evans, and you can find a cool YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. Around the time that I went to the graduation ceremony where I got my HS certification in June of 1969, I started hearing a folkie duo expressing their musical predictions of the distant future, and while I had no way to evaluate the validity of their prophetic assertions, I did enjoy listening to their melodic foresights. Actually, still living with a fundamentalist family at the time, I believed that the rapture would come along at some point in the near future, and I did not expect human civilization to even make it to the first quarter of the 21st century, so back then, I felt certain that humans would never get to that same point in the 26th one! Now I don't really know, and I do not dismiss the threat of nuclear armageddon, but currently I do know that sometimes when you have something to do, maybe some machine's doin' that for you, and possibly humanity will advance to the point that if someone wants a child, they can pick a son and pick a daughter too from the bottom of a glass tube.