In This Big Old World

Saved this one for today—the first day of spring. “Big Old World” is a children’s’ song that Scot wrote in 1981, shortly after we got back from Europe. We had stopped in on our way home, to visit our friends in the beautiful Ocean State of Rhode Island. Rhode Island is a small state, just 55 miles long. Everything in the state is on a small scale. Our friends took us to “The Great Swamp,” which consisted of about an acre and a half of land, with a walkway around it.

I am a Western gal. I was born on the prairie (Denver, Colorado). My family moved to Scottsdale, Arizona when I was fourteen, so went to high school out in the desert. When I was nineteen, I moved to San Francisco, where I Ivied for the next twenty years. The East was a strange and foreign place to me, full of people who’d never left home (unlike the West, where we’d all left home). The accent was familiar. I had a lot of friends who were from New York, but at the time, we were all newly baptized Californians.

Our friend Tim McFate had (somehow?) been made the caretaker (?) of this old New England woolens family, summer/hunting lodge. There were five bedrooms, a loft for the orchestra to set up in the living room, and a fireplace big enough to drive a forklift into. We ended up spending the summer, helping Tim care take (?).

I love the sweetness of this song, and the sureness of its message. Surely, on this beautiful first day of spring, we see that every little thing, indeed, has its place somehow--in this big old world. On this track, Scot is playing all the parts. The organ part is actually the Hammond B-3 we had in our living room. I remember the day Scot cut this track. I was standing outside admiring my tulups when a bird flew down. It stood there and cocked its head, listening to Scot lay down this track. I draw special attention to Scot's snare work on this song.

The artwork is an example of an important lesson I've learned in this life--that it does indeed take all kinds to make this world go round.