It took me just over 30 years to be able to listen to the song again. It touched me as a kid, pained me as a young adult, and moved me with memories later in life.

“Puff, the Magic Dragon,” a song performed by Peter, Paul and Mary, was based on a poem about the loss of innocence by Leonard Lipton. Even as a kid, playing the song in my head as I rode my Schwinn bike, I sensed that things change as one grows up. The song made me sad in an innocent way. Just over a decade after the song came out, the reality of its message smacked me. Brian died.

Brian lived across the street from me. He moved into the neighborhood from New York when we were about nine. He drowned when we were 19, one night falling off a barge that he worked on while it traveled down the Mississippi River. “A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys,” the song reminds us.

It wasn’t until I was in my early 50s that I could listen to it again. To this day, it pains me to hear it. Between the years that Brian died and when I could  listen again to the folk classic, my mom and dad died, as did my paternal grandmother.

Beyond the melancholy of the song resides the truth that people are not dragons. Puff surrendered. ”Without his lifelong friend, Puff could not be brave,” the song states near the end of the song.  There are times in life that we want to retire to a cave like Puff did, but unlike dragons, we can muster up the courage and strength to carry on. Indeed, we must.