The Ballad 0f Bill

I wrote this 4 years ago for Bill Earls on his birthday, and have been threatening to record it ever since. So here it is.. good thing he is patient.

For those of you who don't know Bill, he is an easy lay-up for the songsmith. He's is a writer and a poet, a teacher, a sheep farmer, gardener, he plays rugby, climbs rock walls, runs trails and rides a mountain bike. He loves his single malt. He has the travel bug and a gigantic bucket list of places he has already been and must go to again. All of this has cemented his place as the coolest grandpa in Connecticut.. possibly cooler than Cash Lane Slim. But the secret to his power is the love of a good woman.
And so.. everything you are about to hear is true. The minstrel may have made some mildly artistic re-interpretations of his story, for the sake of rhyme. And he is, at this moment in France.. celebrating his birthday with his one true love. So I'll leave you with this, from his own journal of their trip. Happy Birthday, Bill~

"May 24, 2016; Strasbourg

My birthday today, my 75th year to Heaven as Dylan Thomas would have said, (I turn 74 today, but beginning my 75th year is what he meant; I won’t observe that more milestoney birthday for another 365 days, please God) though Thomas didn’t make it past his 40th as I remember (on the other hand, he wrote “Do Not Go Gentle” and “Fern Hill,” and I ain’t done anything near that good.) Observed my natal day last year on the Danube, this year the Rhine/Ill Rivers – Austria/Hungary aboard a Viking ship a year ago, Strasbourg this birthday. And the same weather both years – heavy mist, borderline rain (again) and last year, our ship, The Viking Ve, churned upriver into a flooded Danube, slowly enough that we didn’t make a single stop on time. Didn’t want that again: to be on someone else’s schedule, so this year we are making our own – and maybe furgling that, too…but it is us doing it. (And last year we had a free breakfast, unlimited coffee…and English-speaking companions at every meal…and I don’t want that either, except the free maybe.) Today I am in L’Orient Express, a bierstub, and the barkeep and patrons are chatting in rapid-fire French; the rain-slick, cobblestoned/pedestrianized street outside busy with folk in foul weather gear; one well-dressed tougher-than-me patron at a table outside with his shotglass-sized coffee (I ordered an American-sized “grande” with my 6” croissant and sort of miss The Marketplace in downtown Guilford where coffee comes in a 12-ounce mug and refills are free (don’t miss it enough that I want to be there right now; I am fine where I am. ) And I will tack this graph onto the front of yesterday’s letter, finish my coffee here and head back to the hotel where my lady should be stirring and the hotel folk will bring me coffee in a thermal pitcher.) But this is a real French café…and it’s worth walking a quarter mile in the rain for. (And last year, in spite of arriving in Bratislava three hours late and missing the town because of a planned tour, I walked off the ship at supper - skipping complimentary Chateaubriand steak/serious dessert choices and English-speaking dinner companions – to pay for my birthday meal at a local restaurant where I had to point at the menu and the waiter spoke Serbo-Croatian (I think). No regrets."