the man carried letters.
and he wrote songs.
but when John Prine died of COVID-19 on April 7th, I don’t want to imagine that the man died, like so many other victims of the disease, that he died alone.
John Prine, I want to imagine, was never alone.
he wrote songs with the simplicity of the heart…and the fierce intelligence of mind. with an easy turn of phrase, Prine could reach across time and distance and draw anyone closer to the soul of loneliness, the ache of dreams, the hilarity of just being alive…often all at the same breath.
sure, we could take delight that his political insight was terse and cutting. at a time when bumper stickers sported an American flag along with the quip that these colors don’t run, Prine easily countered that your flag decal won’t get you into Heaven anymore.
sure, but we can take even more empathic solace in his illuminating universal points of the small moments that structure our living. the side glance over at a new mother on Smokey Mountain Greyhound, the altar boy lying dead in the snow, or the frustrated faces of those sitting in cars at a four-way intersection with the yield going around and around and around…Prine was always ready with Instamatic precision poetry for our collective family album.
some people say the Prine was a country singer. i suspect by that they meant it as an off-hand remark, placing him in the depreciated realm of dropkick me Jesus through the goalposts of life (which one should admit is awesome in its own right) of twisted hee-haw humor. perhaps they mean country like Hank Williams country: that, that would be okay.
but i say if Prine was a country singer, well then, it’s a country that we all, you me and the world, inhabit as citizens. it’s a Prine song that we could sign like an anthem, making us each proud of our citizenry in humanity.
prejudice, me. i come from a family of post office employees, so the man has my natural sympathies. after all, the man carried letters. he delivered mail to our homes and said “hello in there, hello.”
and when he died, stretched out alone in this loathsome disease, was there anyone, could anyone be there to say…
…John, you’re halfway to Heaven with Paradise waitin’.