and you are kids, to me. I’m sixty-eight. I’ve written a letter to Mark Knopfler, who I adore. I haven’t heard back, I didn’t expect to.  I only discovered him six months ago. I listen, for the most part, to NPR. Way back when, in the seventies and eighties, I mostly played tapes in my car, heavy on Jackson Browne and (oh, God, I can’t come up with the name) the guy who sang about, the dogs are hungry all the time. About Mississippi. My tape player was stolen in Boston in the early eighties and I never replaced it.

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Why does MK touch me so? Well, for one thing, we grew up together. When he sings about ‘Before Gas and TV’, it hts me in the gut. I remember when we got our first TV. I remember our first car, that it was our first car. My mother’s extended family had a communal car, but until my father came back from the South Pacific after WWII and set up his own household, we had no personal auto. I would have been about five at the time.

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Beyond that, as a writer of verse, I admire his economical use of mundane language to express complex emotions. I am frequently stunned by the depth he conveys with a few seemingly throwaway phrases.

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I am going to submit a piece to Huffington Post: ‘What is it about Mark Knopfler’? Or some-such. Expressing my reverence for the man and his music. Will it get published? Probably not. I don’t give a damn. This is something I feel so deeply that I have to try. I’ll get a nod to Sly in there somewhere.

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Let's see. Who else can I write to? This is the proverbial 'Throw a plate of spaghetti against the wall and see if it  sticks', but, what the hell, right? You know who I'd like to give a piece of my mind to? The damn Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They haven't inducted Mark, and from what I read, they don't plan to. His music isn't ground-breaking, according to the R&R powers that be. Yeah, so they coast on their greatest hits, and he's still creating extraordinary new music. Screw the snobs. (If you read the comments on YouTube, you'll see that Mark Knopfler fans are fanatics. With good reason, I say.)

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Jesse Winchester! The 'dogs are hungry all the time' guy is Jesse Winchester. Jesse, RIP. (He just died.) I've loved you for years.You are another voice I never tire of.

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You know, that's what I want on my tombstone, if I have one. 'What the hell, right?' pretty much sums up the way I've lived my life. (Actually, my husband and I have plans to donate our bodies to Yale. If they'll have us.)

--edited by Mimi Speike on 11/14/2014, 9:29 PM--