Long Live the King

No, not Elvis. Prince.
No, not my dog Prince. Prince the singer.

(Yes my dog is named Prince. Yes some people at the office, where he is a daily fixture, thought mon chien had passed away when the news of the pop star’s death surfaced.)

I was / am a massive Prince fan. In the summer of 1984 I drove my roommates nuts playing Purple Rain over and over in our tiny cabin astride the old Paignton House golf course at the now defunct Paignton House Resort on Lake Rousseau. Apparently my doves were crying.

This isn’t going to be another coming of age tribute to Prince. I won’t bore you with how he helped me get through my darkest times as a late teenager. Or how he spoke to me and me alone with his music. Or how seeing the movie Purple Rain made me feel like there was hope in this world for a short beige man.

Nor am I going to provide a commentary on his contribution to music as we know it today. How he both adopted others’ styles and also invented new genres. I won’t touch on his most amazing Super Bowl Halftime show or the criticism his selection originally faced. I won’t give you a history lesson on his weirdness, his namelessness, nor his Torontoness.

 

 

I also won’t lament on what a crummy year it has been losing both Prince and Bowie in the span of a few months. That goes without saying. I also won’t mention these things come in threes, thereby now hexing every iconic living musical artist to their potential demise.

Others have done all that in Spades.

Instead I am going to tell you a simple story.

I never got to see Prince live. Years ago I was invited and didn’t go. I can’t remember why. I think it was because I was busy watching a football game. My spouse went and she said he was amazing. She wasn’t really an appreciator of his artistry until that event.

Me? I expected I would see him someday. There was something about Prince that seemed invincible. He lived, or so I thought, so cleanly. He was so devout. He seemed to be normal, despite his weirdness. I always thought there would be a tomorrow, a next year, a next time. Then I could see him.

Prince’s death came out of the blue. You couldn’t say that about Michael Jackson. Or Elvis. Some people were shocked by Bowie’s demise, others had been hearing rumors or listening to internet suspicion. But Prince went out of the blue.

Now I have a regret. A regret that is stained by my procrastination. I wish I had seen him live. I wish I had seen him more than once. In death his lesson to me is simple. Don’t put things off that matter to you. Go hike that mountain. See that monument. Visit that distant relative. Check in on that old friend. Run that first marathon.

Even in death Prince is still sending me life lessons.