Dan Fogelberg

When I travel, I take our newer car, the 2012 Suzuki, because it has a CD player. Our older Honda Civic has a cassette player, but it eats cassettes instead of playing them. I usually bring ten or 12 CDs with me to play while I'm driving.

Two of the CDs I take often are by Dan Fogelberg: "Greatest Hits' from 1982, and "Twin Sons of Different Mothers" with Tim Weisberg, from 1978. I have other albums of his on vinyl.

Normally, I detest cheap sentiment. But I still cry at "Same Old Lang Syne" about running into an old girlfriend at a convenience store on New Year's Eve (and the scandal that he said "Met my old lover at the grocery store.." when gay men at the time called their partners their "lover."). And "Longer," probably the most unabashed love song in history, makes me sigh and get teary. For Rosh Hashana 2008, Pam and Mindy, a couple at BCC, the temple where I met Joe, made a wedding video, showing all the people married and engaged from our temple (including themselves) and set to Fogelberg and Weisberg's cover of Judy Collins' "Since You Asked." Joe and I were engaged at the time and appear in the video. I watch that at least monthly. I can't get a link up that works (darn technology!) but if you go to YouTube and look up "BCC Wedding Montage- No on 8" you can see it.

Maybe it's because I sing high tenor like him, and taught myself to play "Longer" on the piano and sing along. Working on that made me appreciate Fogelberg's talent.

Then there is the sleazy story of how, after a bad week trying to teach a class in Tallahassee for Social Security in 1980, a handsome young man at the gay bar in town took me home because, with my full dark beard , he thought I looked like Dan Fogelberg.

Dan Fogelberg was born in 1951, almost two years after I was born. He died of prostate cancer in December 2007, at the age of fifty-six. Another lesson in not envying people because you perceive them to be more talented, more successful or better looking.

Probably better not to think about why Dan Fogelberg's music moves me. I wouldn't want to think I'm a romantic at heart.