3 Chords & the Truth: Tempus fugits at Christmastime

It's Christmas season once again, and another year that has slipped through our grasping fingers.

Because it's the holidays, we do the festive thing. Because it's another year that has passed by, leaving us -- yet again -- wondering where time has gone while our attention was elsewhere, we also think of all that was, yet is no more.

On 3 Chords & the Truth this week, we're doing a bit of the ho-ho-holidays. Behind the musical scenes, I'm wondering how six-plus decades could pass so quickly. So much I thought would be forever when I was young isn't anymore.

TAKE THE Dalton Theater in North Baton Rouge. It was a little neighborhood movie house we'd always drive by whenever we went to see my Uncle August. A middling landmark of my Louisiana youth, it was, standing there at Dalton Street and North Acadian Thruway.

First it closed sometime in the1970s, then it decayed. Then the city condemned it. Then, in 2000, the city tore it down. The progression of Uncle August -- who died, age 65, of cancer in 1982 -- was not dissimilar.

I think of that stuff at Christmastime. My parents' generation of the family is all gone. So are a lot of the things and places I grew up with. We shall not go there this week on the Big Show. I suspect you, if you're of a certain age, don't need my help in that regard this time of year.

It's there, lurking, in the corners of our minds. It stares back at you in the bathroom mirror every morning. C'est la vie.

Street View, Google Maps

No, this week, 3 Chords & the Truth, as always, is about the music -- pop, rock, big band, jazz, soul, standards, easy listening, country and all the rest. It's all mashed up in the food-for-the-soul processor of the mind and spit back out onto the Internet in sets that make musical sense. Well, I think they make musical sense; such is freeform radio, even when it's in cyberspace.

If my thoughts turn melancholy when the bitter wind sweeps across the Plains and the mercury digs a hole for itself, the Big Show does what it always does. It entertains and, one hopes, enlightens a bit. That doesn't change, even though everything else does.

Even though everybody else does . . . and you, too.

That's where we are as Christmas 2022 draws nigh after two previous, warped COVID Christmases removed so many things -- and people -- from the here and now and tossed them unceremoniously into the once was.

There's so much that, in Louisiana-speak, ain't dere no more. But the thing is this; the music always will be. Dance while you can, because the tempus is fugiting, and its run at the Dalton has been extended indefinitely.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.