Because when one of the old guys starts singing I can understand the lyrics and the lyrics are the song as far as I am concerned. Like this one by Conway Twitty. He tells it like it is. https://youtu.be/XOLsaTRrWCs. No banging on a an electric guitar. No screaming out words that are not in the English language. Just down to earth words about pain, love, cheating, prison, trucks, momma and old dogs and children and watermelon wine. Like the one I linked up above. That one is "She needs someone to hold her when she cries," And I wish I had a dollar for every time that song ran through my head. Oh, not now, but back in the days of worthless men and binge drinking.
I know it is hard to picture me as ever having been young and even harder to picture me in a mini skirt out on a dance floor with men actually waiting to be the next one to spin me around the floor. Sadly, I had a small problem with alcohol back in those days and my evening usually ended up with me on the floor praying to that porcelain god known as the toilet bowl. It was at that point of the evening that the boys ideas of romance were out the window. Whoever had brought me understood that they were to take me home. Whether it was a female friend or my date of the evening, it was their job to deliver me back to where they found me. That followed another rule my mother had taught me, "You leave with the one who brung you!" Yep. Mothers words are embed in my brain clear down to my feet! She was the wisest woman I knew then and she still reaches down on occasion and pulls me up short of some mess I am about ready to get myself into.
What Mother has to do with country music and beer drinking songs, I do not know. I just know she has been gone for many years and she still pops in from time to time to give me those knuckles on top of my head! Did your mother ever do that to you? That crack from those boney knuckles always stopped me in my tracks no matter what I was doing. I am sure I did that to my kids also and for that I beg their forgiveness. Or do I? Maybe not. I have raised some damn good kids. They all have the basics down pat. They are honest, hard working, dependable, independent, and devoted to their mother! They check in from time to time and are not clingy. As far as I know, they have never been in jail and if they were it was not for very long.
So I do not know how I got from the virtues of country music to raising kids, but I suppose my mind just took one of its turns that it is famous for, but I think there is a lesson in here some where. Shortly after Kenneth and I got together (We lived in sin one year. Wanted to see if we could get along before we tied the knot and had to get a divorce.) he came home and said he had just heard "Our song". The one he came up with was "Close enough to perfect for me." https://youtu.be/UVivkbmu3To . When I heard that song I knew that this was a marriage made in heaven. If he could accept me as I was, where I was, then we would make it. And we did.
Kenneth has been gone 17 years. It seems like yesterday. I rather doubt that there is another man alive who can accept me just as I am and where I am in my journey through this thing called "life."
So I am just going to treasure every day and do what I can to make someone happy some where. Doesn't seem like there is much else to do.
