Dog Days of Podcasting: Taps and The Trumpet of the Swan

Dog Days of Podcasting

I hate “Taps.” I hate the way the song makes me feel, and I hate that this lovely piece of music is forever linked with death. I even wrote a Sunday Brunch piece about it, as part of a tribute to a recently departed friend.

Today, though, I rambled about “Taps” in a new way – I associated it with the E. B. White children’s novel The Trumpet of the Swan.

You can listen my ramblings at SoundCloud or play it via the applet below.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/105466011″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Sunday Brunch: Heroes, Villains, and Loss – Excerpt

reflectionthroughabugle_by_markcoffey_via_istockphoto

Reflection Through a Bugle by Mark Coffee via iStockPhoto.com – Click to embiggen

Tomorrow is Memorial Day. Earlier this week, I found out that a good writing buddy lost his battle to cancer a few months ago. He was a veteran, and an amazing writer, and so I talked a lot about him.

Excerpt:

Fading light dims the sight,
And a star gems the sky, gleaming bright.
From afar drawing nigh — Falls the night.

Like many people, however, especially those of us with family, friends, or loved ones serving in the military, “Taps” has a more emotional context. It’s the bugle call you hear at funerals, and once you’ve heard it in that setting you never lost that connection. For me, the tears come, mostly for my grandfather, but for a string of others as well, from the very first note.

This weekend, Memorial Day Weekend, “Taps” is playing on an infinite loop in my head.

Why? Because I found out recently that a dear friend, a military veteran who survived a tour in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army, then a year in Kabul with the National Guard, lost his last battle, one with that insidious enemy we call “cancer,” in February.

His name was Mike Greene, but I knew him best by the handle he used on OpenDiary (an early blogging platform that existed before LiveJournal or Blogger): WarriorPoet.

You can read the entire post here: http://allthingsgirl.com/2013/05/sunday-brunch-heroes-villains-and-loss/.