K is for Toby Keith—For Writing the Soundtrack of Us

Did you ever have a theme song? I did—for 12½ years. And before that, Don had one from 1993 until the day he died in 2012. Both were born out of Toby Keith’s prolific songwriting, which is why K belongs to him in this month‑long daily A to Z Challenge.

According to Rolling Stone, Keith wrote 45 Top‑20 Billboard hits, “many written entirely on his own,” and who knows how many more he might have pulled out of that magical place where songs come from if stomach cancer hadn’t taken him at age 62. If I could have been a songwriter, I’d want to write in that same slice‑of‑life, down‑to‑earth style. If you liked his brand of testosterone, you couldn’t help liking his honest portrayal of the type—a good‑old boy “looking for love in all the wrong places,” to borrow Johnny Lee’s iconic line from Urban Cowboy.

From Keith’s debut single, Should’ve Been a Cowboy, Don and I became hardcore fans. Anyone who knew Don wasn’t surprised that the song became his theme song. From the time he was a little boy, Don loved western clothes—Stetson hats, Frye boots, boot‑cut Levi’s, Pendleton shirts—none of which were common attire in West Michigan. One of the best gifts I ever made him was a hand‑tooled leather belt and gun holster, his pride and joy on his annual hunting trips to Colorado and Wyoming. When Should’ve Been a Cowboy went into the cassette player, even the dog knew it was time to stop what we were doing and sing along with Toby.

In 2008, Toby starred in Beer for My Horses, the only film he produced and co‑wrote. I wasn’t the only person crazy about the song by the same name from that movie. It was his longest-lasting number one hit—the 2003 version sung with Willie Nelson. Nelson was Don’s favorite country western singer and Keith was mine. But I loved that ong for another reason: it reminded me of one of my dad’s stories about a bar where men occasionally rode their horses inside and the horses got served a pail of beer. My grandfather worked in the coal mines, and my dad—still a kid—would meet him at the mine entrance, grab his tin lunch bucket and run it to the bar, get it filled with cool beer and meet his dad at home. It’s also the same bar where my dad, at ten years old, played piano for a quarter a night. (He was self-taught and played by ear.) Try letting a kid do that today. I’ve often wished I were a cartoonist so I could draw that scene: a grinning little boy at a piano, glancing over his shoulder as a horse comes through the swinging doors.

Keith’s song, I Wanna Talk About Me has a punchy rhythm that begs me to crank it up and sing along when it's on the radio, but that’s not why I adopted it as my theme song. It came out the year after Don’s massive stroke, and as any caregiver of a seriously disabled spouse knows, the first words out of everyone’s mouth are always, “How is he doing?” Don was right‑side paralyzed and had only a 25‑word vocabulary for 12½ years. When the song came out I was falling apart—taking him to therapy appointments four days a week, living in a one‑bedroom apartment while trying to sell our two non‑wheelchair‑friendly houses, incomes gone, the dog was spending too much time alone. And in the middle of all that, I was designing a wheelchair‑friendly house and working with a builder to bring it to life. I’d wanted to be an architect since before my teens, and in a strange twist of fate, Don’s stroke gave me a small taste of that dream.

The first time I heard I Wanna Talk About Me on the radio, I cried, “That’s what I need—someone to ask about me, me, me for a change!” Every time it came on after that, I’d turn the radio up and sing along while Don stared at me like I’d lost my mind. This week, driving home from the sleep lab, the song came on again. I hadn’t heard it in years. And just like that, the universe handed me my muse for the A to Z Challenge.

There are other Toby Keith songs I love, but these three will always have the power to take me back—to the years when I laughed, cried, and lived my life the best way I knew how. Funny, isn’t its, how a few old songs can still tap us on the shoulder and say, “Remember?” ©

 Photo: Don as a little boy 

Fun and Fastinating Days Mixed in with the Rest

The “Leaf Peeping” half-day trip sponsored by the senior hall finally took place and it started out at a brewery with lunch off their traditional Bavarian menu and it ended with us having homemade ice cream at a place with 300 Giant Bull Elk, reindeer, whitetail deer and Tibetan Yaks, raised to sell their breeding rights and babies. When the owner first started his “alternate animals” farm, he spent a month living with Eskimos and a month in Tibet to learn how to care for reindeer and Yaks. The color tour was all but forgotten as we rode through the 100 acre farm in a “stagecoach” while we got an interested and laugh-filled education about DNA proven blood lines, breeding, breaking up fights, birthing babies and keeping the animals fat and happy. We stopped at several places so we could hand feed adolescent Bull Elk and adult reindeer. The reindeer had soft, gentle lips as they ate. The guy said you could put your whole hand inside their mouths and they won’t bite. If you go in the spring, you can book tours timed so you can help bottle feed 40-50 babies. One of his Giant Bull Elks has won so many prizes that all his off springs are sold and pre-paid through 2020. 

This week I also had go back to the hearing center and the inside of my ear was pronounced completely cured of its infection. But getting there in the rain was not fun. It was the kind of rain where the cars in front of you seem to disappear in a foggy mist and the windshield wipers had to go at a rate of speed that makes you feel its hypnotic pull. You’ve gotta be careful about what’s playing on the radio when the wipers are going with the beat of the music: “That old Wacky Tobaccy, kick back and let it do what it do.” No, Toby Keith! I won’t “puff it in a pipe, twist it in a stem” or bake it in some brownies. I’m changing the radio station.  

Yesterday I was supposed to go to a cardio drumming class at the senior hall but it got delayed by three fire department guys who were running over their allotted time to teach a class on using an AED defibrillator. It actually looks pretty easy to use but I hope I never have to do it. There’s been a push in our area to get these machines in all public and private buildings and considering they cost well over a thousand each the project has been going well in the community. One tip I learned is if you are in a place where you have a choice in using a landline or a cell phone to call 911, using the landline because they can find you easier. If you don’t have your GPS turned on in your cell phone, their switchboard will show the address of the cell tower that picked up the call.

By the time the firemen were through our time for the cardio drumming class was cut back---so much so that a Gathering Girls friend and I played hookie and we went out for breakfast instead of working up a sweat. Even then we couldn’t linger long because I had to be back to the senior hall for the long awaited lecture about the Million Letters Campaign. It was a fascinating lecture that brought laughter and tears and more than a few “WOWs!” One of the ‘wow letters’ the speaker/curator showed us had a bullet hole through it and another was from the Revolutionary War. He also shared a little known fact that all the Native American “code talkers” used during WWII were so important to the war that each one was assigned a bodyguard to protect them and to also kill them if they were captured. 

During the Q&A period I raised my hand and I explained that I was pen pals with over fifty guys stationed in Vietnam and I still have a big box of letters plus carbon copies of the letters I sent to them. “Is there any value in donating the entire collection,” I asked, “or should I go through them and sort out some I think are interesting?” The curator, Andrew Carroll, of the Million Letters Campaign got rather excited and said they’d love to have a collection like that. “Would I include the copies of my letters too?” “Absolutely! That’s a unique collection,” he said. “Would you feel comfortable donating them?” I told him I want to read them one last time but, “Yes, I feel comfortable donating them.” And I will. So now I have a wintertime project lined up. 

He gave me his personal address afterward as well as the address to the Center for American War Letters at Chapman University in Orange, California. I’m both enthusiastic and finally at peace about my decision and about what the university is doing with this legacy project---to archive a quickly disappearing piece history that both honors our soldiers and makes the letters available for research material for writers, film makers and historians. It’s too late in my life to write the “penpals” book I envisioned coming from my box of letters---and to do it justice---but someone else might do it someday if they are archived at the center.

I brought the box up from the basement today and one of the first letters I pulled out to re-read from Vietnam, went like this: “If you were here, I would recite your last letter out loud. Your words are pressed in my memory like the purple violets my mother kept in her Bible. I read the letter so many times because the serenity of the woods you described was so real that I felt as if I was there with you. The quietness of home is one of the things I desperately miss. The sounds of being in a war zone are sounds I don’t think I’ll ever be able to erase from my mind. Incoming and outgoing mortars, men dying, and the bullets as they hit metal, dirt and human flesh are sounds unlike anything I have heard before. Last year I thought death was something only people with gray hair had to think about. Now I’m over here, and I can’t seem to think about anything else. If it weren’t for your letters, I don’t think I could make it. They are like a rope that keeps pulling me back to the world. The world where I was once a carefree boy who spent Sunday afternoons playing in my grandpa’s woods.” Reading this sent a chill up my spine knowing that, oh yes, there is a "penpals" book waiting to be written from that box. ©

Center for American War Letters, Legacy Project

Andrew Carroll’s twelve books based on War Letters

 Toby Keith and Willie Nelson, Wacky Tobaccy

"I Will Always Love You" and Celebration Cakes

The dog’s fifth birthday is a few days after the first anniversary of Don’s death but I’m thinking about celebrating it early so I’ll have something positive to do on the 18^th instead of remembering Don’s last day on earth. Don was big into celebrating doggie birthdays. When we first started dating he had neighbors with six kids between them and both couples became good friends of ours, still are to this day. Anyway, those little kids were the guests at a couple of birthday parties that Don threw for the poodle I had at the time. He’d buy ice cream cakes from Basken-Robbins, balloons and gifts for Sarah to open and he’d enlist the parents to take pictures of their wide-eyed kids and the guest of honor. The kids went home wanting to know why their dogs never got parties. It was quite the talk at their elementary school.

There have been other celebrations that went to the dogs since those days but Levi has never had a birthday party. We made sure his birthdays included a trip to the pet store, though. Then we’d go to Starbucks where the people at the drive-up window always ask if our dog would like some whipped cream in a cup. Is Big Bird yellow? It didn’t take many trips to Starbucks for Levi to figure out that a treat from their window is a cut above the dog biscuits they give out at the bank.

How do other widows mark the first anniversary of their husband’s passing? Many  women go to the cemetery, I’m sure, but its January which in my state means the cemetery is closed for the winter---same with the road leading down to the beach where part of Don’s ashes reside. The nature trail is open but I don’t walk in the winter on snow-covered trails. It’s against the old people’s oath I took about not doing things that could potentially break my bones slipping on ice. Still, it feels like I should be doing something. I can’t cry in my beer, I don’t drink it. Hey, does that mean I can’t hang out with Toby Keith? Have you ever noticed how many songs he writes about beer, bars and drinking? Does that Oklahoma boy need a recovery program? Since I got side-tracked here by Toby let me just say I wish I could write country western songs. There’s a huge niche that needs filling. I mean, where are the old people songs about aging widows with too much time on their hands, fighting osteoporosis and finding comfortable shoes being better than Godiva chocolate martinis?

Back on topic: I’ve always been an insecure hostess stemming from the fact that I could qualify to be on the reality show Worst Cook in America. But I’m very proud of how one party I threw turned out. It was on the fifth anniversary of Don’s stroke and I billed it as his “Thank God I’m Alive” party. It was such a wonderful gift to give to my social butterfly of a husband and it was a way to acknowledge all we’d been through to get to that point---the long stroke recovery in the hospital and rehab, selling two houses and two businesses, downsizing in every way possible including having two auctions, then designing and building a new house. The guest list started out at sixty but nearly a dozen more people had heard about the party and invited themselves. Everyone was so happy that day, so filled with joy and laughter. It was a real turning point in our lives---victims turned survivors. I suspect that rebuilding my life after Don’s death will be the same way. At some point in the future it will dawn on me that I’ve turned off Victim Road and I’ll once again be walking on Survivor Street with my head held high in the sun.

The whole reason I’m thinking about that ‘give thanks’ party now is to remind myself that it doesn’t matter one whit what I do or don’t do to acknowledge the first anniversary of Don’s death coming up on the 18^th. I gave him my best while he was here to appreciate it. The depth of my grief and love aren't measured by how well I decorate a grave site or throw rose petals in Lake Michigan or spread wild flower seeds along the nature trail where Don’s ashes reside. Whatever I do now to mark the day is for me…and I think I’ll take the dog shopping then stop by Starbucks for coffee and a cup of cream. I may even go to the florist to buy myself a single white orchid which during bereavement expresses “I will always love you.” The x-florist in me can’t ignore those twenty years of my life and the symbolism of flowers. A single flower on my counter top will remind me that all growing things---including humans--evidently peak in their beauty then wither and die leaving behind their seeds for the cycle of life to begin anew. ©
 

Cupcakes for Don's Party

I Left My Heart on Blueberry Hill

If you’re ever going to drop a full pint of blueberries on the floor it helps if you do it within hours of mopping the kitchen floor. That’s what I did today and they rolled every where within an ten foot radius. The dog heard the box hit the linoleum, came running and carefully picked one berry up at a time and carried them to the living room to eat them on the carpet. I would have closed him in another room while I gathered up the fruit but I couldn’t take a step without squashing berries underneath my Crocs. I was trapped.

While I was picking up the berries it brought back some great childhood memories. In those days we spent the summers at a cottage and this time of the year the surrogate grandfather to all the kids on our road would go out early in the mornings to pick wild blueberries on State land. He would come back with five gallon pails of berries and the women and girls on the road would gather at picnic tables in our front yard to sort and clean the berries. Later on in the day the smell of freshly baked blueberry pies or cobbler would fill the air. As the blueberry season went on some of those berries made their way in to batches jam or came back to town to put in the freezer. Maybe it’s just my memory playing tricks on me but those wild blueberries were more flavorful than the factory farm berries produced today.

When Don and I first started dating one of his favorite songs was Fats Domino’s I Left My Heart on Blueberry Hill. It was the very first song he ever sang to me. Now you might be thinking he was copying Richie Cunningham (aka Ron Howard) from the Happy Days sitcom because he would often sing, “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill” when he’d see a pretty girl he either dated or wanted to date. But Don sang it to me four years before Happy Days made its first appearance on TV. Over the years Don accumulated a copy of Fats Domino’s version of the song in every media that came along---45 records, 8 track tapes, cassette tapes, and CDs. When I sold his classic Vette with an 8 track player in it I included his 8 track collection in the deal and, yes, ‘blue berry hill’ was on one of the tapes.

“I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill, on Blueberry Hill when I found you.” Did I mention that one of the first times Don and I made love was on a summer night and this song was playing on a portable radio? We were at the local lookout hill---a beautiful cityscape view at night, but we managed to pick up a good case of poison ivy in the process. Some of the things we foolishly do when we’re young sure can make you shake your head in amazement when you’re old, can’t they.

I often think I’d like to buy an i-Pod to download the music that has become the theme songs of my life. One of my fears of the future is about going to a nursing home and having to listen to someone else’s idea of what old people want to hear. I envision having a nurse’s aid who’ll flip the radio to the ‘50s Classics’ station every day and that would drive me crazy. I’d have songs from my youth on my i-Pod that have meaning to me, of course, like I Left my Heart on Blueberry Hill and Happy Trails to You but I’d also download stuff like Toby’s Keith’s I Want to Talk About Me and I Should Have Been a Cowboy, Michael Buble’s Sway, Grandpa Elliott’s Stand by Me, Joe Cocker's You can Leave Your Hat on, and Natasha Bedingfield’s Take me Away. The only thing stopping me from getting an i-Pod is I’m not tech savvy enough to know if they’re in danger of joining 45 records and 8 tracks on the obsolete shelf soon after I buy one. I hate when that happens! i-Pod? Or i-phone or i-Pad with music apps? I wish that decision was as easy as sorting blueberries on a lazy summer afternoon. .©