John Prine

The evening’s dinner offered me a model of Johnstonian conviviality: food and conversation around common tables, then an extended after-dinner sitting around listening to guys playing their guitars. They were singing what I would later learn to John Prine songs. That the songs were ones I’d not heard before gave them a power over me they’d certainly not have had otherwise: for all I could tell, the guys performing, who had the outdoors look, moustaches and denim jackets, and had girls hanging by their sides, were singing their own songs. Psychologically, if not at the level of common sense, that’s how I must have interpreted the performance. Johnston was the possibility that I could sing my own songs, as it were, and get the girls. I was especially fixated on one particular blond-haired girl during the evening. Maybe I hoped she’d be there waiting for me on my first day of school at Johnston. At any rate, that passion was as evanescent as they all were then. She is unrecognizable in the light of present memory. It's possible I never saw her again. On the other hand, she may have been someone I saw all the time when I came to Johnston, but re-cast in the very different light of the place as my own home.