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17 august 2000

i see dead country singers

So I'm on my last leg home at about 1:00 a.m., and I flip on the radio to get rid of the lonley highway feeling. Listening to CD's has been great for the past, oh, twelve hours; but it would be nice to hear a real-live, real-time human. I press the seek button, but to no avail. Looks like I've entered the no-man's land of FM radio, and all I can get from Fredericksburg to Richmond is --- you guessed it --- the country station.

Country music. Beer. Wimmen. Trucks.

But I'm desperate for human companionship, even if it is only audible. Even if it is backed up by a steel guitar, and spends too much time brooding in a bar. I hunker down for the twang-fest on an eerily empty I-95, as Garth Brooks warbles me home. Followed by SheDaisy, followed by Dwight Yokum (who I can sort of tolerate because he totally stole the show in Sling Blade). Twenty minutes pass, and I have not yet expunged my dinner. This is not as horrible as I thought it would be.

See, when I was a kid, my parents listened to a mishmash of everything. Musically, they weren't crazy devotees of any particular music, but were rather up for anything. Mostly jitterbug-type stuff from their high school days and, of course, country music. Merle Haggard. Conway Twitty. And one of my dad's favorites (my spine quivers), Boxcar Willie. As a child, I had absolutely NO appreciation for this stuff. With the exceptions of Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, and Patsy Cline (whom I still enjoy), the sound of country music absolutely made my skin creep. Most of the time, it still does. It's not the lyrics, though. Much of the time, country lyrics are not only more clever than pop, but more relevant to a larger segment of the "regular guy" population.

As I've grown older, I think it's kind of a shame that I can't dig country music more. Especially on nights like this, where it's all I've got available to me. Let's face it, country stations have the world's most powerful bandwidth. Rural, schmural --- country FM will find you whether you like it or not. Screw radiation treatment; stand in front of a country station if you want to kill a tumor. I don't know why we spend so much money looking for signs of intelligent life in the universe. Chances are they've already heard Tear in my Beer enough times to know that they don't want to talk to us. "Hey, NASA! Quit calling!"

Brooks and Dunn begin to line-dance out of my car speakers. Late and lonely or no, I can't take this anymore. I can't reach my CD case for a refreshing shot of Devo, Barenaked Ladies, or even Motorhead. Drat it.

So I turn off the stereo and listen to my tires hum against the highway. It's now 2:00 a.m. I begin to harmonize to the sound, quietly at first, then more loudly since there's no one to hear or see me. Within moments, the tires and I are cranking full-blast Johnny Cash in the light of I-95's full moon. The audience goes wild. I see a vision of my parents in the front row, slowly turning up the dial on their old silver stereo. They dance, knowing that one day their elder daughter will remember listening to the Man in Black. She will remember his words on a dark highway, walking the line between yesterday and this moment, puzzling over the possibility of a boy named Sue, and smiling.

It is a good way to find my way home.