"The Impossible Dream"

With my advanced wisdom, I recognize that this song is merely in a less-than-great key for me, in this version. Lower or higher might be okay. Meanwhile, I have been distracted with all the associations that this song has for me right now, none of them anything much to do with the text. (This song also begins the next section: 'Inspiring Songs From Stage and Screen'.)

Firstly, I'm right off twelve days at Pennsic, which, as an SCA event, is all about the Dream: living the Medieval days that should have been, could still be (without the plague, with better hygiene). It is, indeed, an impossible dream, but the striving is what it's all about. Different folks at Pennsic have different versions of this Dream: Perfect Garb, Knighthood, Laurel decorations, aspirations to Royalty, Wisdom in the Ways of Old. I'm not sure that my family had any of those aspirations, but we had a great time. The best Pennsic ever. To allude to O-So-Many Stories: Pennsic is also the place to feel comparatively thin, pretty, and well adjusted. Ah!

Secondly, though it didn't come out this year quite so blatantly, a couple members of my Pennsic camp are strangely obsessed with 'Man of La Mancha'. They know all the words, all the parts. I can't think of anything from this musical without thinking of them singing it, slightly intoxicated.

Lastly, and by no means leastly, when I was sixteen, spending the best part of my summer at the Philmont Scout Camp in New Mexico, my friend Veronica and I adjusted the words to this song slightly to reflect our trip. I also can't think of this song without singing these words:

To dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable bear,
To climb with incredible torture, to breathe the unbreatheable air,
To right the unrightable trail, to climb through the grime and the hot,
To try, though your feet are too weary, to reach the unreachable top:
That is my quest: to get to the top! No matter how hopeless, I shall never stop!
To fight to keep up, without question or pause: to be willing to reach for the clouds for a heavenly cause.
And I know, if I'll only be true to this glorious quest, that my heart will lie peaceful and calm, when I fall off Everest.
And the world will be better for this: that one scout, scratched and covered with scars,
Still strove, with her last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable top!

Bonus folk song: My favorite song heard at Pennsic was heard on a CD, sue me. The group was Great Big Sea, which I highly recommend, and the song is 'Come and I Will Sing You (The Twelve Apostles)'. If I could find the version of this song in Arabic, with someone to teach me to sing it properly, I would be very happy indeed.