Tuesday, February 28, 2006

The Rule of 3?

My wife taught me about "The Rule of 3," which states that when celebrities pass away, they do so in trios. It smacks of purely urban legend superstition, but you couldn't prove that by this past weekend.

Darren McGavin, Dennis Weaver, and Don Knotts all passed away very nearly within 24 hours of each other.

Whenever I think about death, my mind goes back to my college days, when I roomed with a guy named Gary Driskell. Like myself, he was a musician and songwriter, and we wrote songs together and played concerts together and put a band together ... umm, together.

The reason I think about Gary is due to a snatch of lyric he once wrote, which turned out to be one of the most profound things I've ever read and I've never forgotten it.

But people just walk on and live in disillusion
Satisfied with their confusion
Leaving death as their conclusion to life

I guess they just don't comprehend the situation
Death was meant to be elation
And life is but a revelation of love

After graduation, I wound up moving back to Michigan while Gary married his childhood sweetheart and moved to Nashville, where he eventually found work as a songwriter for Word Publishing. He won a Dove Award in 1991 for "Another Time, Another Place" and has written songs for Wayne Watson, Sandy Patti, Larnelle Harris and others.

Well, I'm not sure how I got here after starting to talk about dead celebrities, but that's a blog stream of consciousness moment for you, I guess.

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