‘Flash Back Thursdays’ and ‘Wordless Wednesdays’ are
bloggers’ tricks for taking a break from writing a post. Since my box of ideas
was as empty as holes in Swiss cheese I thought, why not try that! So this morning I got lost in my
old Planet Aphasia blog and in my first few years of this blog looking for
something I could repost to save some time and effort. It took me so long to read
and discard one post after another that I could have written Moby Dick….at least its syllabus. Not
finding anything that fit my current frame of mind but a few puff pieces about how well “this little widow” is doing trying to make omelets out
of the broken eggs in her Basket of Life Events, I turned to Facebook to
distract me from my widow-ran-out-words problem and maybe find something to solve my gotta-write-something dilemma.
The first thing I saw was a meme quoting J. Iron Word that
was posted by a great-niece. It said, “The problem is you see yourself every
day. So you don’t realize just how amazing you are.” I had no idea who J. Iron
Word is so I googled him and along the way I landed on a photo of Jeremy Irons
instead. He was all polished up looking like the successful English actor he is
and I thought, if I had that face to look
at in the mirror I’d be in love with myself. It didn’t take long to
discover that poet J. Iron Word and Jeremy Irons are not one and the same, so back to
Facebook I went. This time what caught my attention was a meme posted by
another great-niece: “They don’t serve champagne at pity parties,” a quote by Cara
Alwell Leyba. I’m sorry, life-coach Cara, but that simply isn’t true. I’ve read enough pity
party posts written by widows to know that drinking too much sometimes come
with the territory. Champagne doesn’t care if it’s invited to a celebration or
a wake. Sparkling wine is sparkling wine if you’re grabbing what’s in the
house to drown your sorrows. (If you're doing that, stop it! It doesn't help.)
It occurred to me that when I was the age of my two
great-nieces I was getting my philosophical thoughts from reading Dr. Seuss to children. “Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no
one alive who is Youer than You.” But after fact checking myself I discovered that’s
not exactly true. When I was their age I was studying the late, greats Socrates---“An
unexamined life is not worth living.”----and Aristotle, “Love is composed of a single
soul inhabiting two bodies.” Crap! Of all the quotes by Aristotle, why did I
have to run into that one right out of the gate? Pass the champagne, in case a
pity party breaks out as I digest those words.
It’s no secret that I love Country Western music, more
precisely I love how the artists who write in that genre are able to tell stories
using so few words. This afternoon I took myself out to lunch and on the way
home I heard Lee Brice singing I Drive
Your Truck. It’s about grieving someone and how driving that person’s truck
makes the narrator feel closer to the deceased. I don’t remember ever hearing the song before
and at first I wasn’t really listening to the lyrics and by the time I tuned into them I mistakenly thought they were about a man missing his wife. I’ve had pickup
trucks on the brain recently---missing the one I used to drive---and it never
occurred to me that a man would be singing about another man, his brother as it
turned out:
“I leave that radio playing that same ole country station
where ya left it. Yeah, man I crank it up. And you’d probably punch my arm
right now, if you saw this tear rollin’ down on my face. Hey, man I’m tryin’ to
be tough. And momma asked me this morning if I’d been by your grave but that
flag and stone ain’t where I feel you anyway…..I find a field, I tear it up, ‘til
all the pain’s a cloud of dust. Yeah, sometimes I drive your truck.”
The minute I got home I googled the song and I learned
that it was co-written by three people and it was inspired by an interview of a
Gold Star father who mentioned he drove his son’s truck to feel closer to him. From
that one simple sentence a whole, award winning song immersed, a song that touches
people where we live. And it’s easy to understand how driving a vehicle that belonged to another can make you feel closer. Many things that my husband loved
make me feel that way…like his fleece-lined, rubber rain coat that I wear from time to
time. It’s several sizes too big but when I’m folded inside it, protected from
the elements, it doesn’t matter if others might mistake me for a bag lady. I
feel his presence inside that coat. And I felt his presence inside his beloved 1978
Silver Anniversary Corvette before I sold it, a heart-breaking transaction of
epic proportions. “Of epic proportions”---I can’t believe I’m going to end two
blogs in a row with that phrase. I guess I really am running out of words. ©
"These days when I'm missing you so much, I drive your truck."
 |
| Jeremy Irons |
