Covering Lightfoot

I lift my acoustic guitar from its cradle with great reverence. Recently restrung and tuned, I Travis pick the notes and sometimes melody interspersed of a Canadian folksinger. I heard him once in a field at Brown University in a long-ago spring, then missed him in Torrington, Connecticut after his name appeared on a theater marquee I saw while canvassing for Bernie in ’16. I once carried a guitar on the streets of Providence in a different epoch, but I was not mature enough to stick with lessons at the music store. Now I play the plaintive chords and notes under a gray sky in the fullness of early summer of that balladeer now gone. It is beautiful in a sad way.