Rest in peace, Kris Kristofferson.❤️

What a long day I had today, gang. And just as I had finished dinner, and had gone upstairs to collapse on my bed and get mentally re-grouped for another long day tomorrow, I discovered that one of the cats had peed on my bed!!! 😫

It had soaked through the bed spread, the comforter, both layers of sheets and the mattress cover…. I was so angry. And exhausted.

So, while I did three (!!) loads of laundry, I begrudgingly decided to go ahead and do yoga, to help myself calm down.

And then the minute my yoga was done, I saw the news that Kris Kristofferson had died.

Wow, gang. Another hero from my wee bonny teenaged girlhood! Gone.

So while I waited for the final load of laundry to finish up in the dryer, I sat downstairs in my kitchen and listened to the album, “The Silver Tongued Devil and I,” on my iPhone and I sang along to every song.

In the early days of being a singer-songwriter in NYC, I played all the usual folk clubs in the West Village and the one song of Kris Kristofferson’s that I often sang was “The Pilgrim Chapter 33”. And back then (1981-1982) I would sometimes dedicate the song to Keith Richards, because, back then, he could still be a notorious handful and everyone just assumed he would die at any moment. (And he has now outlived basically everybody.)

Anyway. My favorite Kris Kristofferson album was “The Silver Tongued Devil and I”. And the “Pilgrim” song came from that album.

Back when I was 15, I was committed to a mental hospital— for many, many reasons but the primary one was that I had attempted suicide.

While I was in the hospital, I fell in love with a girl named Kathy, my roommate. We had an intense relationship, which continued for many years after we’d both been released. She was my first girlfriend in every sense of the word — and when we got together, we always got into so much trouble that you’d think we had planned it that way! But seriously, trouble FOUND us!! All the time. It was insane.

However. One Friday night, when I was sleeping over at her house — I was still 15 and she was 16 and we were already tentative lovers. And we drank like fish and took a lot of drugs… well, on that particular Friday night, she GAVE me her copy of “The Silver Tongued Devil and I”!!

I was so moved by that because it was her favorite record and she wanted me to have it. And I still have it, almost 50 years later…

I thought about all this tonight, while I was singing along to the digital record, sitting in my kitchen, waiting for the dryer to be done. And I wondered how come I hadn’t written about Kathy yet, in some sort of memoir. She was a huge, huge deal in my early life. Really, just huge.

I guess I now have something else to put on the growing stack of things I need to write about… as soon as I can concentrate again.

I loved Kris Kristofferson, gang. He was a great Country songwriter, and so many of his songs had a profound effect on me when I was in my teens.

So I leave you tonight with this!! Enjoy it, gang. It’s still a song that means the world to me. From 1971, Kris Kristofferson, “The Pilgrim Chapter 33.” RIP.