Yesterday evening, I was exercising at the gym—something having to do with deltoids—when the random shuffle on my iPod dealt up this sixteenth-century gem:

How long has it been since I first seen Old Rivers?
Why, I can’t remember when he weren’t around
Well, that old man did a heap of work
Spent his whole life walking plowed ground

I almost dropped an eight-hundred-pound barbell on my head before I remembered that I had downloaded that track ages ago as a joke and it wasn’t just Bono getting on in years. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard it, but “Old Rivers” isn’t quite a song. There’s music in the background, and that kind of classic Hollywood harmonizing that sounds like a well-heeled chorus of werewolves, but the words are actually recited by Walter Brennan, who at no point in his life was ever younger than ninety-six.

He had a one-room shack not far from us
And we was about as poor as him
He had one old mule he called Midnight
And I’d tag along after them

Well, it goes on from there. Old Rivers dies at the end, in case you’re on pins and needles. (Walter Brennan may have died before wandering into the recording studio.) The only reason I mention this is because my beloved iPod, Mustard, suddenly stopped working after it played this little ditty. You might suspect that he went on strike, shutting down until he was allowed to play that album of Saturday morning cartoon songs I usually listen to while working out, but no . . . I actually couldn’t get him to turn off! Mustard loves Walter Brennan! Now I know what Murphy Brown felt like when she discovered that her baby was a Fanilow.