Just for the record I’m 73 as of the writing of this post and I feel better than I did at 30 but that’s another story for another day. Some time back I had been reminiscing, as we mature songwriters are known to do, about coming from a generation that was not into disposable. Harkening back to my days as a journalist I had been doing my research to back this up. The test was to see how old a person had to be to know what Neat’s Foot Oil was. No one I asked knew what it was and had never revived an old baseball glove using it. We take our time machine now to 2013 and you will find me standing in my living room with the morning sun streaming in and showing me all the cracks and scuffs our worn leather sofa. The dogs, Shiva and Fiona are snuggled in its leather embrace. Behind it, hanging on the coat tree my favorite leather jacket given to me one Christmas by my oldest daughter. Its missing a zipper and the lining is torn but it’s bull hide and fits just like a glove after years of loving use.
The muse whispered in my ear and I agreed that these things were like a mirror showing me me. I sat down the next day with my guitar and decided to try and channel Guy Clark and put all that together into a song. The muse smiled and in about 2 hours I had what was the basic form all done. Oh, by the way, neat’s-foot oil is the conditioning oil I used as a kid on my Nelly Fox baseball glove to keep it from drying out and cracking.