The Girl and the Cat: Singing People with Songs in Them

This little Collection of Poems and Songs represents 50 years of the writer's work and "reflective style of living" from age 15 to 65, all but one previously unpublished. The partial product of a small-town childhood and a Midwest education during the post-war 40's, the politically apathetic but musically revolutionary Rock-n-Roll 50's, and the Socially Revolutionary 60's, with influences as diverse as Mother Goose, Ayn Rand, Buddy Holly, Robert Heinlein, A.A. Milne, Woody Guthrie, Robert Frost, Thoreau, Poe, Bob Dylan, Lewis Carroll, and Walt Kelly's "POGO", among others, known or not, this work covers a wide range of styles from "doggerel" to blank verse to lullabies, and a range of subjects and ideas from observations of nature and people to love-poems, homages, satirical parodies, and meditations on life and death and beyond. Herein you may find silliness and satire, grief and grievances, political commentary, or retrospectives of crossed paths with girls, animals, lakes and mountains, presidents, children, friends and strangers, even ants--not all of them, perhaps, what they first seem to appear, but all special and memorable enough to stand out, or as they do here, stand alone. By the author's own admission, "Certainly there have been ideas, moments, even people missed or forgotten along the way and no doubt much remains to be noted and commented on, but the places I go and the people I 'meet' just continue to 'sing' to me. Many "grab" me immediately, while some "sneak up on me" and surprise me later." Will Rogers was famous for saying, "I never met a man I didn't like!" For Paul, the "operative word" there is "MET" that is: "Discovered"--or came to know and understand--or "saw through" to the "Song" within. "That", he says, "Is how people "sing" to Me--every time I stop to listen--and to Care--as if each were truly unique and each one genuinely mattered!." Meanwhile, "the beat goes on" and the Music never stops. And so, He says, " I'll just keep listening