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How the Chapins Changed the World.
(Copyright, 2020)
“I believe in a God that gives hugs, “ Harry Chapin declared to his friend, colleague and former Catholic priest Bill Ayres. Harry acted that way, too — bounding unrestrained into any room, stretching his arms as wide as they could go — as if he could wrap them around enough people to pull them into the “circle” he created in song for his brother Tom’s television show, “Make A Wish.”
Chapin’s life was, at it’s core, a love story — a complicated, triangulated, convoluted, undisputed, multi-generational, non-denominational, big-brotherish, earth-motherish, Bohemian-maniacal, Yankee Puritanical, serendipitous, so ridiculous love story that it could just as well have been fiction, or the subject of one of Harry’s own story songs. But, it was a love story as real as life, with roots as deep as roots can reach, and lots of reminders that it happened, and was not just imagined.
It’s story that dates back decades, into generations and centuries, back in time before there was a country to be part of, or proud of, but not before there were some things that mattered so much, everything would be risked. It began, as many love stories do, with some headstrong romantic infatuated with the notion that, somewhere, there was a better life than the one he or she was living, and that something — anything — needed to be done to bring…
