What a year 2011 has been.
I reached 2012 several days ago, too, if you measure time by the mile. I was driving through the city of Oakland in the pristine morning when I noticed the odometer.
And there it was, 2012 in 2011. The full odometer reading was 201200. What can it mean when the car you drive enters the next year early? Better than a clock that always reads 12:30.
Which brings us to the edge of our next year, 2012. I drove the San Francisco Bay Area this morning looking for something that would close the old year, and I found something which seems to do that.
I was visiting a shopping center in Oakland this morning and saw a familiar license plate on an unfamiliar car. It pulled into the lot maybe a minute after I did. The license plate was JHNDNVR, which means John Denver.
Born Henry John Deutchendorf Jr, John Denver was a singer and songwriter who achieved his greatest success in the 1970s and 1980s, though he was active for several decades until his death in a plane crash in 1997. He started with the Mitchell Trio, but eventually went out on his own.
Denver became very popular with a string of successful songs, such as "Leavin' On A Jet Plane," and "Take Me Home, Country Roads." I remember buying his greatest hits album first, so I was a little late in discovering his music. He had four number one song hits and three number one albums. His television specials were very successful, one of them won an Emmy. Denver's Christmas special on ABC drew 60 million viewers, which may have been the record at ABC until then.
What made John Denver special was the way he reached beyond the normal range of singer/songwriter. He was the first singer I saw who embraced the connection we have with the earth and its resources, and that environmental concern shows up in his music. He also worked to connect with people who had not enjoyed good relations with Americans during the Cold War. Denver performed on tours in the Soviet Union/Russia and in China. If not the first, he was among the first to go there. He co-founded The Hunger Project with Werner Erhard. He had a lot of interests, and music was only one of them.
That said, what's this photograph about?
You're looking at a photograph on my camera that I shot this morning. Somebody in the Bay Area is a fan of John Denver, and her license plate is JHNDNVR. I've seen it over the years on a couple of cars, and this morning I saw it on a new car. Got to meet the owner, too. I described her previous cars and their locations over the years where I photographed them. She remembered those parking spots clearly and told me where she worked nearby.
It was a nice short meeting, and she invited me to update my JHNDNVR photo inventory. She warned me, though, the plastic covering on her plates would make them hard to capture in the camera, and she was right. I took a few photos, but the ones I took a couple of years ago were better.
Behind the JHNDNVR photo is the Wikipedia entry for John Denver. Looked at it when I returned home. And what did Wikipedia say about John Denver that helps close out the year for me?
Today isn't just the last day of the year. It's also the birthday of John Denver.
© Max Clarke 2011, all rights reserved.
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