Why ClumsyFly?

My AOL screen name has been ClumsyFly since before AOL screen names were common. It's an interesting comment on our technological society that I have friends who call me ClumsyFly. No one ever called me by my phone number or my home address. So anyway, someone asked me where I got the name yesterday. I got it from a Chris Rice song way long ago. As he explains on his website:

I was driving up to Lexington, Kentucky from Tennessee, and in my brain I was working on a song called “Deep Enough To Dream.” I was trying to come up with a creative way to get across the idea of drifting in and out of sleep. I imagined myself sitting on my parents’ screened-in porch in Maryland on a summer afternoon, and drifting off to dreamland. I was amused by the scene in my head of a fly buzzing around on the porch and bouncing up and down the screen, trying to get out, and the sound of it waking me out of my dozing. I suddenly had my idea for the song. I would drift in and out of a summer afternoon nap, and go back and forth between dreams of heaven and waking on a very normal, earthy porch, with the help of a ‘clumsy fly.’

“Awakened by a familiar sound
A clumsy fly is buzzing around
He bumps the screen and he tumbles down…
He gathers about his wits and pride
And tries again for the hundredth time
‘Cause freedom calls from the other side
And I smile and nod and slowly drift away…”