Bobryanmusic.com: The Tracks

All the Good Things

(Bob Ryan)

Hate to admit it, but I'm one who can so easily see what's missing from my life, or what I don't have that I think I should have, or how things might ought to have been. But everything from the Bible to AA seems to agree that a grateful attitude of heart is something precious and even life-giving. Life is hard for 99.9% of those who walk down here on the surface. But for most of us, I think, when we look back over our lives, it is the sweet menories that remain. Here are some of mine.

A jukebox fills the corner of a little roadside tavern
In the night, along a highway in the heart of Oklahoma.
Patsy Cline is singing ‘Walking After Midnight,’
I am at the barstool while my grandma sings to me and counts the change.

I can still remember, walking with my mother
Down beside a river, where the leaves were green and yellow.
Fireflies at sundown, the scent of pine and cedar,
Charcoal burning in the early autumn, drifting through the window.

Thank you for the good things, all the bright, new mornings,
Starlight evenings, gazing at eternity.
Everyone knows sorrow, tears and toil and trouble.
But thank you for this life and all the good things you gave to me.

I used to sit on grandpa’s lap, and steer his old blue Buick
Bouncing down that scroungy road with red clay dust clouds flying
On a sky-blue afternoon, in the heat of summer,
With Elvis on the radio, all shook up and rocking.

Thank you for the good things, all the bright, new mornings,
Starlight evenings, gazing at eternity.
Everyone knows sorrow, tears and toil and trouble.
But thank you for this life and all the good things you gave to me.

Holding my first real guitar, a distant freight train moaning,
And the Mississippi rolling to the Gulf of Mexico.
Jesus on the mainline, to my spirit calling,
Summer showers falling down upon me, all those years ago.