From the Top by Michael Perry Page A

on and no one had come to take away our deer rifles, so we unplugged the Crock Pots and went home.
    But these days I take a New Year whenever I can get it. Sometimes you need a New Year when you see the electric bill. Sometimes you need a New Year when the health insurance premium comes due, or when your pet goat dies, or when the hail defenestrates your greenhouse. Sometimes you need the one you love to grant you a New Year after you inadvertently mow off her flower garden.
    And New Year’s resolutions? I make them every night. I resolve to be more patient, I resolve to be more frugal, I resolve not to gorge myself on jalapeño cheddar corn curlies right before bedtime. I resolve to resolve to demonstrate greater resolve.
    These resolutions rarely take. But hallelujah, because you know what? Tomorrow is New Year’s Day. Again.

A SENSE OF PITCH
    Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, the Indigo Girls, Brandi Carlile, Bill Monroe, Rickie Lee Jones, John Hiatt, Trampled by Turtles, Joan Osborne, Lyle Lovett, Emmylou Harris, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Bela Fleck, Nickel Creek … Right down to its own Blue Canvas Orchestra and singers, the Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua tent has gift-wrapped and presented hundreds of musical acts to its visitors over the years. It’s only natural, then, that the scent of canvas often leads me to consider the power of music and those who make it.
HAPPY MOURNING MUSIC
    Some of the music played in the Big Top Chautauqua tent is new, some is vintage. I wrote this monologue for a show featuring the Temptations.
    Welcome back to Tent Show Radio, folks, from the backstage dressing room with the one lonely little lightbulb burnin’ …
    I’m back here reflecting on the hits of the Temptations and how music has the power to evoke long-gone days. A few weeks back the tent hosted the group Great Big Sea, and when they did a cover of Slade’s “Run, Runaway,” it caught me completely off guard and whipped me back in a trice to a weed patch behind a machine shop on a ranch in Wyoming, where the air smelled of sage and turpentine and I was listening to the song on a Walkman while I stripped poles for a corral. Even more than the power of evocation, however, I’m fascinated by how we use that power. Back in my feckless bachelor days, there was this pop song called “Drops of Jupiter.” It was a beautifully overproduced musical tidbit. In my teens I would have wallowed in it. In my late twenties I would have sneered at it. In my mid-thirties—having been told by a friend that there are no guilty pleasures, only pleasures—I simply enjoyed it. The first time I heard it I grinned and turned it up. There were strings and longing and a sweeping chorus, and just as I thought, The only thing missing here is some na-nas, the na-nas kicked in.
    Right about the time this song hit, I got a new girlfriend. Wherever I was when I heard the song, I’d think of her. Then, when things eventually went unignorably south, I really couldn’t bear to hear “Drops of Jupiter” anymore. I’d punch the radio button desperately hoping for some George Jones. There was a stretch of the usual pale-hearted navel-gazing. But then one day a year or so on down the line, I was running errands and “Drops of Jupiter” came on the radio, and I liked it again. I listened to the whole thing straight through with nary a liver-twinge, and when it ended I remember thinking, Put me in again, coach.
    Shortly after my second daughter was born, I lost my dear friend Tim. We were the same age, and the news was a shock. When we first met I used to listen to his vinyl Pink Floyd collection while I wrote, and over the years he had taken me to live shows in England that completely redirected my musical life. I in turn introduced him to Marty Stuart, Steve Earle, Dwight Yoakam, and Waylon Jennings. You really haven’t lived until you’ve seen a