Nightflying: The Entertainment Guide

---Michael Acklin
    I remember being schooled in the practice of giving thanks, an activity established and enforced almost exclusively by adults and practiced almost exclusively by children, whose understanding of the tradition expressed itself largely in the repetition of the phrase “Thank you,” in all of its variants, during Advent and Christmas and sometimes birthdays. Extending the celebration beyond these occasions often came off as insincerity, not because it was, but mainly because children seldom have enough life experience to understand well enough to be genuinely sincere. Knowing the value of a gift or an action is largely dependent upon experiencing the having and having-not which,
    like all experiences, impacts in either direction. Gining and losing teach impact of similar morivations in separate ways.
    When I bought my first guitar in New York City, I was more excited than the day I bought my Silvertone electric three years later in Stuttgart. The first was a plywood thing with strings like a cheese cutter and tone akin to a tin can, but I played it every day’s free minutes. I continued to play it even after I bought the electric just because it was the magic one. It filled the empty guitar spot. It built the bleeding leather fingertips that later turned to rock and roll, finger-picking, and slide guitar. I still had it as late as my thirties, and it still played slide beautifully. I’ll probably get another one. I sold the Silvertone many, many years ago, replaced with a Gibson. I was thankful for the Gibson, as for the one that replaced it, the one that replaced each replacement. The value was in the new, the not-have, the “upgrade.” but it would be hard for me to remember the whole list through the years. The plywood special wasn’t replaced thankfully until last year’s d’Angelico.
    When I think of thanks now, I think of People, not so much Things. Mostly I think of musicians without whom I’d have been less me…Mike & Vicky Houston, J. Scott, Vicky Acklin, Bill McSpadden, Phillipe, Bob Boyd, Mal, Leo, Steve Ward, Windy, Bob Moers,
    Lynn, Marko, Crow, Bob M, Rodney, Dan and hizzownself PR Grunion, Nick Brown and Kit & Frank.. There’s many more, of course, but these are those I couldn’t do without.
    Biggest thankew is that Mama is still with us. The little green-eyed bird woman still drives herself, still makes the best Southern Cookin’ anywhere, and still has that smile none of us can resist. Throughout my life my Mama stood behind my songs, my wildness, bad attitudes and habits, rants and rages and dark back-pages, crazy voodoo and Doctor Juju, So what does this all add up to? Thanks to all both named and not who stuck with me through cold and hot. I only wish they all could stay just one more night
and one more day. Play, play, play.

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