Father's Day 2014: from Dan to Dad

How does the song "Sutter's Mill" lead all the way to memories of my dad, and of a board game played on winter nights?

Let me try to explain ... but I'll have to give you a tour of my messy brain, which works the way it does now in part because of the internet, the enabler of all information in this day and age.

So, this song, Dan Fogelberg's banjo-driven, country-westernish "Sutter's Mill" appears now and again in my aforementioned gray matter, darting through my synapses like a comet flashing through the sky.  The song comes unbidden, and leaves soon after it arrives.

I first heard it at the Apex Scala movie theatre in Siam Square, Bangkok, as a preview-preview before the trailers and movie.  Its earnest, slightly mournful lyrics have eventually won me over.

In the song, the titular John Sutter is responsible for touching off the great California Gold Rush, when he happens upon bits of gold in a stream near his aforementioned mill.  It's an interesting story as stories go, elaborating the great onrush, how people heard of this discovery, and then came like "hordes of locusts," overrunning his property.  The following verse describes the larger picture:

Some would fail and some would prosper

Some would die and some would kill

Some would thank the Lord for their deliverance

And some would curse John Sutter's Mill.

The end of the song contains the kicker, for after all was said and done, Fogelberg sings, "... Old John Sutter went to meet his maker, With not one penny to his name."

Decry Fogelberg all you will for his gentler, softer ballad style but the man knows a story when he sees it, and there is a river of misery at the edges of this song, of greed that destroys and of the larger forces of history at work.

And so, when this Fogelberg nugget appeared yet again unbidden in my head, off I flew into Internet-land, to Wikipedia (the source for all knowledge), because I was curious about the actual Sutter's Mill and about Fogelberg.  

The remains of Sutter's Mill
(image courtesy of CA State Parks)

The historical tidbits about the song are essentially correct, although liberties have been taken, which is the artist's prerogative (sorry history majors).  Sutter's trusted partner, James W. Marshall, technically found the first piece of gold, and Sutter did have financial difficulties at the end of his life, but things were a little rosier than being penniless.  

Having satisfied my curiosity about that song, I went to the singer's biography, and found out a few facts about Fogelberg of which I had been unaware.  He married three times, had no children, and he died in Deer Isle, Maine, of prostrate cancer at the relatively young age of 56.  

My roving eye, fuelled by the dopamine rush that seemingly accompanies all successful internet usage, came upon the opening paragraph in his wiki-biography, which listed out Fogelberg's major hits, including Leader of the Band.  I had a vague recognition of this song, even though I couldn't help but conflate it with the Shangri-La's song "Leader of the Pack."

On my messy brain went, via the video portal of Youtube, to rediscover this bit of Fogelberg.  It's a song that can hit you in the chest, where Dan spells out his feelings about  the relationship with his father.  In one of the more poignant verses, he sings:

The leader of the band is tired and his eyes are growing old

But his blood runs through my instrument, 

and his song is in my soul

My life has been a poor attempt to imitate the man

I'm just a living legacy to the leader of the band

It's about choices, about going our own ways in life, about some wishes unfulfilled, and how we carry on the lamp lit by our parents, but the glowing coal at the heart of this is Fogelberg's honouring of his father and his father's influence on him.

I felt a little teary-eyed hearing this, with my dad being so far away on the other side of the world and, in his own way, noting the verse above, feeling tired, and with his eyes growing old.  And yet things weren't fully personalised for me, as I only faintly remembered this song.

And so my obsessive searching had one more stop to make, deeper in the text, before I landed on something I recognised,  a bit more personal, another Fogelberg song, "Same Old Lang Syne."

Again weighing heavy on the melancholy side (a Fogelberg specialty), this song spells out the blow-by-blow details and emotional ramifications of his chance encounter with an old flame on Christmas Eve (which actually happened), and their eventual departure into the snowy, then rainy night, all to the ending wail of a saxophone:

We drank a toast to innocence

We drank a toast to now

We tried to reach beyond the emptiness

But neither one knew how

Loves lost, holidays, and the cold of winter.

Image courtesy of blogs.yahoo.co.jp

And this, finally, was how I found my link through the years to my own memories - me, somewhere around junior high school days, the moody adolescent; and my hard-working dad, one winter night, handing me an early Christmas present, my first WWII board game, "Panzer Leader," which involved countless cardboard pieces, a pair of dice, game boards showing the terrain of Europe, and a complex rulebook, which allowed me to painstakingly recreate battles gone by.

This is what music does, of course.  It is locked to our history - it pushes us back to the times and places in our lives, and acts as a signpost of where we have been.  For me, it was a signpost of this happier moment, far back in my adolescence, with the clicking of the dice in my hands, the safety and security of a warm home on a winter night, and the poignant verses of "Same Old Lang Syne" whispering in the radio in the background.

For me, as well, this song becomes one of many signposts that link me to my father, the man who has always been there for me in all of his wonderful complexities - as the storyteller who read the Sunday comics to me as a child; as the mechanically-inclined car enthusiast who gallantly tried to encourage his non-mechanically-inclined son to follow him into the garage on Saturdays; as the computer specialist who saw the first days of the machine that would revolutionise our lives; as the docent-hiker, who led me up mountains and into the woods ... and, of course, as the gift-giver, who knew just the right game to hand over to his introverted son all those Christmases ago.

And so, in the end, I must wish my dad a happy (early) Father's Day, with much love, from across the world.  I am your legacy, trying to do the best I can and find meaning in this life ... with my messy brain and all.

Ice cream with dad on Star Island