Watercolor Voyager

[good4somethingbum]

Watercolor Voyager ©2016 Robert George BMI

Ev’ry coupla months I’d get a phone call
And I’d hit the local arts n crafts store
Then I’d take a morning drive upstate
They were always thorough when they’d search me
Then they’d give my Granpa what I brought him
And we’d visit on the phone,
Then I’d leave him all alone
And I’d walk back through those iron gates

And my Granpa’s life was grim
No one else would visit him
But he loved to draw and paint
And a nice old guard explained

“He’s a watercolor voyager
There’s no place he won’t explore
From a Himalayan mountaintop
To a warm Italian shore
From a jazzman and his trumpet in a Memphis doorway
To a winter sunrise sledding on the snows of Norway
Yeah, he’s seen it all in his mind
He’s a watercolor voyager
And he can’t be confined”

I remember when that old guard told me
Paint was like a drink of raindrops
That would soothe him in that endless hell
And from morning until lights out
It was like those shining landscapes
Somehow kept him free,
And were all that he could see
In the only windows in his cell

Cos for years he’d always claimed
That somehow he’d been framed
Then the peace he found in art
Framed the pictures in his heart

He’s a watercolor voyager
There’s no place he won’t explore
From a Himalayan mountaintop
To a warm Italian shore
Sunset silhouettes of camel trains outside Damascus
His view of the Northern Lights was brighter than Alaska’s
Yeah, he’s seen it all in his mind
He’s a watercolor voyager
And he can’t be confined

One day a package from that guard arrived
The last thing Granpa painted when he was alive
A Midwest farm with windmills, crops and cows
Somethin’ tells me that’s where he is now

He’s a watercolor voyager
There’s no place he won’t explore
From a Himalayan mountaintop
To a warm Italian shore
Moonlight floating up the Mississip to Lake Itasca
Lonely scarecrow waiting on its maker in Nebraska
Yeah, he’s saw it all in his mind
He’s a watercolor voyager
And he can’t be confined