I first heard Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game” when my son was in his early teens, more than two decades ago now, and beginning to demonstrate desiring to spend less and less of his free time with his sentimental old man. As I always put it, I felt as if I had—what seemed like overnight—gone from being Number 1 to Number 101 with the sole purpose of driving him around town to meet up with his one hundred friends who had somehow managed to sneak ahead of me in line and take my place. This was, of course, all quite natural and healthy on his part, which I certainly understood, at least on an intellectual level, but that by no means stopped Mitchell’s poetry from causing more than a few privately shed tears to flow from this adoring father’s early-middle-aged eyes. A half-dozen or so years later, I would burn the tear-jerker to a CD-ROM and gift it to my son for his twentieth birthday—”So the years spin by, and now the boy is twenty.” He’s now thirty-seven, and Mitchell’s words still cause me to pause every time I hear them: “And the seasons, they go round and round, and the painted ponies go up and down. We’re captive on the carousel of time. . . .”