"If You Would Not Have Fallen..."

Then I would not have found you...
Angel Flyin' Too Close To the Ground.

And I patched up your broken wings
and hung around awhile...
Tried to keep your spirits up
and your Fever down.

I knew someday...
that you would fly away...
For Love's the Greatest Healer to be Found!

So leave me if you need to...
I will still remember...
Angel Flyin' Too Close to the Ground.

(Leave me if you need to...
I will still remember...
Angel Flyin' Too Close to the Ground.)

My favorite Willie Nelson tune.

Maureen Dowd met him on the Honeysuckle Rose recently, taking him up on an offhand invite he made about her bad (legal) pot trip in Denver, where a little bit of edible m.j. went a long way.

Willie told her:

“Honestly, I don’t do edibles. I’d rather do it the old-fashioned way, because I don’t enjoy the high that the body gets."
...
“Everybody’s got to kill their own snakes, as they say. I found out that pot is the best thing for me because I needed something to slow me down a little bit.”

He was such a mean drunk, he said, that if he’d kept drinking heavily, “there’s no telling how many people I would have killed by now.”

--------------------------
* Pancho and Lefty.
That's my second-favorite Willie Nelson tune:

Livin' on the road my friend...
was gonna keep you free and clean.
But now you wear your skin like iron;
Your breath is hard as kerosene.

You weren't your mama's only boy,
but her favorite one it seems...
She began to cry
when you said good-bye
and sank into your dreams...

Poncho was a Bandit Boy.
His horse was fast as polished steel.
He wore his gun outside his pants
for all the honest world to feel.

Poncho met his match, you know
On the deserts down in Mexico.
Nobody heard his dyin' words...
Ah, but that's the way it goes...

(All the Federales say...
They could have had him any day.
They only let hang around...
out of kindness I suppose.)

Lefty he can't sing the blues
all night long like he used to do.
The dust that Poncho bit down south,
ended up in Lefty's mouth.

The day they laid poor Poncho low...
Lefty split for Ohio.
Where he got the bread to go...
there ain't nobody knows. (?)

(All the Federales say...
They could have had him any day.
They only let him slip away...
out of kindness I suppose.)

The boys tell how ol' Poncho fell...
And Lefty's livin' in cheap hotels.
The desert's quiet; Cleveland's cold.
And so the story ends we're told...

Poncho needs your prayers, it's true.
But save a few for Lefty too.
He only did what he had to...
and now, he's growin' old.**

(All the Federales say...
They could have had him any day.
They only let him slip away...
out of kindness I suppose.)

** Maureen ends the column wondering if the president ought to re-unite the old Choom Gang, maybe conference on the White House roof, like they surely used to do rolling around in the car with the window cracked... "How did we get here and where are we going again, and do we really have to kill so many people to get what we're after?"

But I'm putting words in their mouths.
Here's how she phrased it:

Given all the horrors in the world now, I said, maybe President Obama needs to chill out by reuniting the Choom Gang.

“I would think,” Nelson said, laughing, “he would sneak off somewhere.”

Excellent column about some worthwhile people.