Bye Bye Miss American Pie...

Last night I indulged myself once again and engaged in my annual ritual of watching Bill Murray live through Groundhog Day again.  And again.  And again... Well, you get the idea.  How ironic that the day he's forced to live through again and again is the day before a day many of us would prefer never to have seen at all:  The Day The Music Died.  I was 18 when the plane carrying, among others, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper met the earth in a corn field near Clear Lake, Iowa.  For me and many of my contemporaries, it was the first deeply personal brush with death and the public mourning that goes with a celebrity death.  For that reason, the date - February 3, 1959 - became a demarkation line between childhood and adulthood.

As more than one op/ed writer has noted, the real irony is that the music never died at all.  And it never will.  Thanks to Don McLean's iconic American Pie, it seems to me that people will pause on this day for decades into the future as news anchors and deejays remind us each year on this date that it is the umpteenth anniversary of that fatal day when American teens shared a painful coming of age, because of the bad news on their doorstep.  We miss those good old boys...