There’s a certain kind of memory that plays like a reel of silent film in the backrooms of the mind, flickering old ochre colors and sepia sunshine across the walls of one’s heart. For me, every time I step out on the dew-soaked fields behind my little house here in Helmond, I hear echoes of distant highways and smokey jukeboxes somewhere back in America. Sometimes these echoes sound just like the verses from Tom T. Hall’s haunting 1973 gem, **“Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine.”** Now, you might be thinking this song was a huge sensation, but outside of a few country-core hearts it was a gentle, personal thing—a song that, in its quiet way, never quite set the charts ablaze, but lingers with a more lasting kind of fame.
It was 1973 when Tom T. Hall sat down and wrote, in his plainspoken poetry, something so deeply true it felt like it was written just for an old soul like me—though back then, I was barely a man. The chorus goes:
> “Old dogs care about you even when you make mistakes.
> God bless little children while they’re still too young to hate.
> When he moved