I don’t know much about the folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, except to know that they were part of the counterculture of the 1960s and they recorded Puff the Magic Dragon.  My dad loved “oldies,” and it’s the genre with which our household was the most familiar as I was growing up.

When I was in the fourth grade or so, I remember being given an opportunity to do some kind of independent study project at school, and for the subject I chose the song.  My memory for the project is extremely hazy, but I think I created a dragon of some type and I know I made some crafty representation of the lyrics of the song.  I don’t think I learned too much doing that project, but it was fun enough.

Puff’s a lovely tune with a sad anti-Peter-Pan trajectory – a boy grows up and leaves behind the stuff and friends of childhood.  I also know that some have offered an allegorical interpretation having to do with marijuana.  The lyrics “a dragon lives forever, but not so little boys” popped into my head this morning, and I then remembered the song.  In my head it’s a Technicolor wonder, but the most popular cut on Youtube is this live sing-a-long version that, frankly, I find a tad bit creepy:

Thanks for reading.

Ryan