We come on the Sloop John B.
My grandfather and me
Around Nassau town we did roam
Drinking all night
Got into a fight
Well, I feel so broke up
I want to go home...
Pete Seegar, 1962
It's amazing how many places I've been inspired to go on the merits of
a song lyric ... Marrakesh (Graham Nash), Mozambique
(Bob Dylan),
Zanzibar (The Patty Duke Show theme song), etc. Here I am again
driven firstly by a lyric I've sung many times.
People sometimes wonder why at age 47 I haven't long
since found a
nice woman and settled down. Well, one of the reasons, among many, is
that I feel too sorry for the toothless drunkards at nightclubs who
engage me in lengthy half-coherent philosophical conversation when my
time would be better invested making acquaintance with
some plausible
opportunity. Anyway, this is too far from home for a practical and
meaningful possibility to present itself; but who said anything about
practical and meaningful? The other problem is that the toothless
drunkards, usually equipped with a hard luck tale of a relationship
gone awry, often make too much sense to me.
The Junkanoo Festival, celebrated here around
Christmas and New Years
each year, is probably the loudest, most colorful and boisterous
festival I've ever witnessed. "It'll make a dead
man dance," my bus
driver said, and he was right. I danced. It was still humming out my
hotel window when I couldn't take anymore at
This is probably the first blank-slate travel agenda I’ve
had in 20
years. Actually, there is one thing scrawled at the top of the
agenda: Take it easy!
Here are a couple photos:
Dean at
http://deanoman.com/photos/0105/DSCF0052_2.JPG
Junkanoo Festival
http://deanoman.com/photos/0105/DSCF0068_2.JPG
Back in DC on Monday...
Deano