A song for my friend Jay “Coyote” Jacoby … and the old Western Maryland saying behind it
My grandmother had a way of reading the obituaries. She’d sit with the paper, and when somebody passed, she’d just say it plain: “Another library burnt down.” That was the whole line. She didn’t fully explain it … she kind of left it to us young kids to figure out. It was only later, when I got older and asked her, that the meaning filled in for me. A person is a whole collection … stories, knowledge, photographs, all of it. And when they go, the whole library goes up at once.
That little phrase has lived in me my entire life. So when my friend Jay Jacoby passed this spring, that’s the first place my mind went. Another library gone.
To most people, Jay was a lot of things. To me he was my big brother. My business advisor and coach. My Zen teacher. The one I’d call when I was frustrated, and the one I’d call when something good happened.
He had a line he put at the bottom of every email, and he wrote it just like this: Why whisper… when you can “HOWL”! I’ll be honest with you: for years I thought it was a little much … Then he was gone, and that line became one of the most important things anyone ever gave me. Now I feel like it’s mine to carry, so it doesn’t fade.
Right before I wrote this song, Jay’s sister gave me his book … his actual morning book, the one he read every day, marked up all the way through in his own hand, with a feather of his tucked alongside it. So there’s a line in the song about carrying his pages and reading them out loud. That one isn’t poetry. I had his pages right there on the table when I wrote it. I still do.
The song isn’t really a sad song, and that matters. The first verse is the fire. But the whole thing turns on a simple idea, and it’s pure Jay: a story told out loud doesn’t burn. Once it’s been told, it’s loose in the world … it lives in whoever heard it, and it rides on down the line. You beat the library burning by telling the stories. Good and loud.
It ends like this:
There’s a howl on the wind where a whisper’d have gone, that’s how you know there’s a library gone.
The rest of it is meant to be heard, not read. So press play.
A note on the making of it: I had help writing this song. I used an AI to kick lines around with … the way you’d sit up late with a friend who’s good with words, trying this phrasing and that one until something rang true. But every call in this song is mine. My grandmother, the howl, Jay, the pages … that’s all me. The heart of it didn’t come from a machine. It came from a man named Jay, and from a grandmother in Western Maryland, and the tool just helped me find the right words for things I already felt.
A story told out loud doesn’t burn. So here’s me, telling it.
P.S. Jay was there from day one (July 2020) … the vision, the build, the tech I couldn’t untangle at midnight. He was the man behind the curtain at First Coast Life. Fitting, since he’s the one who finally got me out in front of it.
Why whisper when you can howl … for Coyote
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Glenn is the founder and publisher of First Coast Life. He is also a wonderful storyteller. Born on the 4th of July, he spends his spare time taking his camera and exploring everything beautiful this region offers with his rescue dog Callie by his side. He loves meeting new people and capturing the many beautiful moments and amazing local stories that showcase the true spirit of the area.
