This Is My State

Driving home from Louisville on Thursday morning, I took a scenic detour through Elizabethtown.

As I was passing through, I thought about the very real fact that there are so many places like this in Kentucky. Those classic old-town streets that echo the Americana of yore.

It was places like this where I grew up, before the very town that I loved began to destroy itself. It's places like this that far too many people will never experience.

Being her, and knowing that one of my favorite directors made his last film here ( Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown ) lended a sense of passion to my trip. Not just because this is my state, a place where my memories run deep, but the music that came with it.

My father, whom instilled within me a sense of not only home, but of community and friendship, and whos story of his own death mirrors many of the aspects of Crowe's film, was close in my mind as I passed through the comfortable streets of downtown.

If there is one song featured in the soundtrack of that film, and all are so present in my mind, that typified the final moments of my father'f life, his wake, and my thoughts that followed, it would have to be the lyrical majesty of Berny Taupin an the musical/vocal genius of Elton John in the track "My Father's Gun".