[Editor’s Note: Today CGO features my friend, Dustin Kidd, as our guest writer. See his biographical material below.]

 
Album Review: All the Road Running by Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris (Mercury Records)

 A little more than a year ago I found myself driving with a friend across the deserts and mountains of the Southwest, from LA to Colorado Springs, for a teaching workshop—of all things. My traveling companion was an old friend, but boy! – did we figure out new ways of getting on each other’s nerves. The sorest issue was the radio volume, which I liked to turn way up, so I could hear it over the wind. But my friend found the combination too loud and made me choose between the radio and the windows.   

I chose the windows. But I would have opted for AC and the CD player if I’d had this new album by Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris called All the Road Running. In fact, the track “Right Now” would have suited us just right: “Miles between us, here we are, side by side in a stranded car right now.” 
S ome albums are made for the dance floor, others for the arena hall. This album was made for the road trip. But not just any road trip—only those that involve old friends, who’ve road tripped before, heading down new roads. Like the guys from Sideways. This album is full of car seat reminiscences about lost loves and long lives. It is haunted by deaths and by regret, as when the crooners ponder on the album’s title track, “If it’s all for nothing, all the road running’s been in vain.”

But this album is also full of life continued. Every hint of past tense is balanced by a reminder of the present. Lost loves are replaced with new ones. The old glory days of romance are still in progress. Read more

Strongest Dad in the World

(see the You Tube video link at the bottom of this article)

From Sports Illustrated, By Rick Reilly

I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to pay
for their text messaging.

But compared with Dick Hoyt, I stink.Read more