This Is Country Music

It ain't hip to sing about tractors, trucks, little towns,
And mama, yeah that might be true.
But this is country music...And we do.
--Brad Paisely

Thirty years ago, I got tired of listening to pop radio. The songs were tired and trite and boring. I started turning the radio dial and I hit on a country radio station and stopped long enough to listen. I don't even remember what the song was but I do remember two things as I listened to the next song and the next and the next... You could sing along to these songs. And they were real.

It wasn't just one longing-for-love song after another (though heaven knows country music has enough of those). They were also songs about family and life and children and fun and hard work and values and patriotism and God and beauty and grit and everyday America. It was real.

So turn it on, turn it up, and sing a long.
This is real; this is your life in a song.
Yeah this is country music.

And I've never left. Some country performers inspire me more than others. Several I've seen in concert...John Denver, Reba McIntire, Highway 101, George Strait, Patty Loveless, Kathy Mattea, Dwight Yokum, Kenny Chesney, Billy Dean, Randy Travis, Luke Bryan, Billy Currington, Tim McGraw, Sugarland. But I love the real things they sing about. So what is "real"?

If you ask people what the "American Dream" is, you'll get a wide variety of answers depending on who you ask. I know people who strive for large homes, lots of belongings, and annual vacations to resort destinations each year. They want to drive nice cars, send their kids to the best colleges, and buy whatever suits their fancy. The problem is...too often, they almost always want whatever is next on the horizon and are never quite satisfied.

If you talk to someone who is new to this country, the American Dream is having the freedom to walk down the street and speak their mind without fear of arrest. Having a place to live, a job, and hope of a public education for their children is the American Dream.

And you get everything in between.

Country Music folks will tell you the American Dream is about the family farm, patriotism, mamas and babies, and a whole host of other things that come with the price of hard work and no guarantee. That, and a little bit of whiskey and horses and Jesus.

At work, someone saw all the NFL memorabilia I have on the back of my office door and they asked if I was a season ticket holder. I told her no, that if I had that kind of money, I would be donating it to charity, not spending it on things like NFL tickets. That took her off-guard. Not that you can't reward yourself once in a while, but an extravagant lifestyle shouldn't be an end, in and of itself. If it is, it's time to come down to earth and get real. It's important to define your values and keep them forefront. Then life doesn't just happen to you, you live it intentionally.

That's what Country Music speaks to: values and the realities of the day to day. And it's why it sparks so many memories, thoughts, and ideas every time I listen to it. How could it not inspire me to write?

So turn it on, turn it up, and sing a long.
This is real; this is your life in a song.
Just like a road that takes you home.
Yeah this is right where you belong.
This is country music.

Chain of Love

He was driving home one evening,
In his beat up Pontiac
When an old lady flagged him down,
Her Mercedes had a flat
He could see that she was frightened,
Standing out there in the snow
'Til he said I'm here to help you ma'am,
By the way...my name is Joe

She said I'm from St. Louis,
And I'm only passing through
I must have seen a hundred cars go by,
This is awful nice of you
When he changed the tire,
And closed her trunk
And was about to drive away,
She said how much do I owe you
Here's what he had to say

You don't owe me a thing, I've been there too
Someone once helped me out,
Just the way I'm helping you
If you really want to pay me back,
Here's what you do
Don't let the chain of love end with you

Well a few miles down the road,
The lady saw a small cafe
She went in to grab a bite to eat,
And then be on her way
But she couldn't help but notice,
How the waitress smiled so sweet
And how she must've been eight months along,
And dead on her feet

And though she didn't know her story,
And she probably never will
When the waitress went to get her change,
From a hundred dollar bill
The lady slipped right out the door,
And on a napkin left a note
There were tears in the waitress's eyes,
When she read what she wrote

You don't owe me a thing,
I've been there too
Someone once helped me out,
Just the way I'm helping you
If you really want to pay me back,
Here's what you do
Don't let the chain of love end with you

That night when she got home from work,
The waitress climbed into bed
She was thinkin' about the money,
And what the lady's note had said
As her husband lay there sleeping,
She whispered soft and low
Everything's gonna be alright.
I love you... Joe.

-- Clay Walker

I can't write about this song without printing the whole song in its entirety because of the story. It's a sweet song that reminds us what goes around comes around. And that's the way it should be. But it also came to mind after looking through pictures of my uncles online...and my mother. And the "Joe" story she used to tell me about her brothers. How her brother Barron had them convinced that if you went to the corner store and said "Hello, Hello, My name is Joe, Give me something free!" The store owner would. I don't know that they ever had the nerve to try it, but this was the big sibling joke they always tried to convince each other to do.

Another joke she told about frequently was the time Ronnie's friend would always stop by on his way home from the grocer and set his bag on their wide newel post while he visited. Then come flying down the stairs because he'd stayed too late, grab the bag, and run out the door. So one time Barron tied the bag to the newel post. When Ronnie's friend came running to grab the bag, it didn't go far. In fact, it broke open with the force of being grabbed on the run, and went spilling in all directions. The boys thought it was hilarious. The friend, not so much....

Or the time they got my mother to hold one hand to a shorted metal lamp, and the other hand to the metal railing down their front steps. She was not amused when she got the strong jolt of electricity.

So this is where I get my sense of humor from... My cousins hiding my Mother's Easter Egg next to a dead bird in the garden just to startle her. My cousins trying to convince my brother to jump down the clothes chute or accidentally on purpose fall in the creek. Or throw me in the swimming pool - lawn chair and all. My uncle making up crazy nicknames for us all. Because it's part of the chain of love that is this family.

Tattoos on This Town

It sure left its mark on us
We sure left our mark on it
We let the world know we were here
With everything we did
We laid a lot of memories down
Like tattoos on this town
- Jason Aldean

Last week I drove past 8244 12th Ave S in Bloomington. It's the earliest home I have memories of and the house was pretty much as I remembered it. It's where the highchair tray fell on Suellen and cut her lip open. It's where I watched Casey Jones on TV. It's where our dog had her puppies in our wading pool. It's where my cousins Mark and David came over to play all the time. It's where I spent the Christmas my dad built the doll house for us. But that was a lifetime ago...

Sometimes I feel like I have so many "lifetimes ago".

It was a lifetime ago that I lived every spare moment outdoors around the Minneapolis chain of lakes...biking, swimming, boating, jogging, skating, sledding. It was a lifetime ago that I lived for marching band, and all the high school football and basketball games we played at - and the goofing off afterward with an amazing group of friends. It was a lifetime ago that I worked at Camp Tamarac, something that set me on paths I never could have imagined. It was a lifetime ago that I biked cross-country, lived for rock climbing, and hitchhiked to California.

There ain't a corner of this hallowed ground
That we ain't laughed or cried on
It's where we loved, lived and learned real stuff
It's everything we're made of

It was a lifetime ago I held my babies in my arms and nursed them and slept with them and carried them everywhere. It was a lifetime ago I homeschooled my girls. It was a lifetime ago that I became a La Leche League Leader so I could help other moms and then went on to serve on their international board. It was a lifetime ago that I went back to teaching and then decided to go back to school for my Masters.

Everything I do, I seem to do with such intensity. Maybe that's why moving on from one thing to the next makes each one seem like a separate lifetime. Someday, I want to write full time. And then it will seem like a lifetime ago that I started a school. This has been the most intense thing I have ever done. Sometimes my family complains I am distracted about things but it is hard for me to shut down when 300 families have placed their children in my care. When it becomes routine and boring and mundane, it will be time for me to move on.

Everywhere there we are
It hits me right in my heart

The most important tattoos though, are around my left ankle...

Sarah Theresa Laura

I Know Where Love Lives

There's a house on the edge of town It's a little old, it's a little run down Full of laughter and tears and toys Crazy things only love enjoys
- Hal Ketchum

I would love to be able to describe my Mom. I can't begin to do justice to the person she was to me and how much I loved her. I had trouble even defining some of the ways she influenced me, because they are so engrained in who I am. It's too enormous. This is the best I could do....

1. Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and you cry alone. I probably heard this from my mother more than any of her other sayings. My mother was always laughing. I can't begin to count the number of times she would dissolve in giggles to the point tears would run down her face. She came from a family of practical jokers; teasing was good-natured, and kindly and no one ever doubted that they loved you. She was silly and fun and taught me to value friends and family who made me laugh.

2. The meaning of finesse. Mom played the card game Bridge. She belonged to several Bridge groups and even taught it at various community ed programs. I think she would have lived and breathed Bridge if she could have. I was the only one of her kids who picked up the game...sort of. But it was in learning Bridge I learned the term and the art of finesse. It's a life skill everyone should know.

3. A love of games. She was up for playing anything - board games, card games. word games, anything. She taught me to both play for the fun of it, and probably honed my competitive side as well.

4. How to listen. My mother was born deaf and so had to learn to lip-read. To "hear" what people were saying, she had to stop what she was doing, look at them, and give them her undivided attention. That's a far different and deeper form of listening than we give most people in this busy world of ours.

5. To sew, knit, and crochet. I was in 4th grade when she taught me to use her sewing machine. And not much older when I learned to cook. My mother didn't learn these things until she was in college, majoring in Home Economics. She grew up with a maid in the house and never had to do these things. She said she didn't want her daughters to "waste" their college education on these things. I'm sad that she felt she wasted her college years, but proud at what my siblings and I have done with our education.

6. If the mountain won't come to Mohammed, Mohammed will come to the mountain. She taught me I wasn't the center of the universe. The world wasn't going to come to my doorstep. If I wanted something, I'd better go after it. Learn how to meet other people on their terms when it's necessary.

7. The dinner hour. She would lament that we kids would finish our meal and want to be off and doing things after 20 minutes; that the dinner hour wasn't lasting an hour. But what was important was that we always sat down together as a family. Every night. We talked about our day, knew what was going on in each others' lives, and learned the art of conversation.

8. An appetite for reading. Probably because she didn't get information from audio sources as readily as others, she was a voracious reader. And through watching her read, and being read to, I grew up with the notion that reading was important. And have passed that on to my children.

9. Traditions. My mother was big on the little things that made up traditions from year to year. Like reading us "The Night Before Christmas" every Dec 24th when we were little, or always bringing "camping cake" when we went to the dome. It gave us a sense of things to look forward to and find myself doing the same for my girls.

10. How to make each of her children feel completely loved. I always felt like Susie was her favorite - I think we all did. But I never felt any the less loved because of it.  I always felt her love for me was so complete and so total. I only hope that I will be remembered by my children like my siblings and I remember her.

I know where love lives
She's sitting on the back step in the evening air
With sea green eyes and her chestnut hair
You keep your mansions of gold, buddy, I don't care
Cause I know where love lives

Fishin' In The Dark

Lazy yellow moon coming up tonight
Shining through the trees
Crickets are singing and lightning bugs
Are floatin' on the breeze...
- Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

Of all the places I know, the best place of all to see lightning bugs is at the Farm. The Farm. My Aunt Mary's Farm outside of New Richmond, Wisconsin. It isn't a diary farm like most of Wisconsin, or even a hobby farm. It's just 40 acres of trees. Aunt Mary's dad bought it from two Norwegian brothers who couldn't pay their taxes, so he had a place to hunt. Mary spent a lot of time there growing up when there were epidemics going through the Twin Cities and her dad thought it best to get his wife and two kids away from it all. The farm house looked like it had been built by two old farmer brothers...a small kitchen with a pump in the sink instead of running water, a small living room, two small bedrooms that had been tacked on in back, and an even smaller bathroom. There was a nice enclosed porch off the back, and a low, sloped roof over it all.

When I was a young girl, my family used to go up there with our Boe cousins to cut down our own Christmas tree. We'd get there and it would be a big laughing argument who had to go chip all the drowned mice out of the frozen-over toilet in the bathroom. Because, of course, there was no heat inside until someone fired up the gas heater in the living room. So we'd all tromp off in the woods, cut down our trees, go back inside and eat sandwiches with cocoa, and then head home. Once in a very great while, we went up for the day in the summer, but what I mostly remember about the old farm house, is the winters.

When my Aunt Mary inherited the place, she tore down the old farm house, put in an in-ground pool where the house had once stood, and then brought in a pre-fab three-bedroom home. She added a deck and a three-season porch. She cleared a lawn around the pool, and it became a really nice place to be. The reason I never spent much time up there in the summer is because my parents always had it for a week each summer but it was their time away from us kids for a while and we kids were farmed out to other relatives. But once I had kids, my folks wanted to spend that time with their granddaughters, and they started inviting me to join them for their week at the Farm. And so ever since my girls can remember, it's been a part of their summers.

Lying on our backs and counting the stars
Where the green grass grows

And it's where I spent time with my Mom. More uninterrupted, relaxed, enjoyable time with my Mom than anywhere else I can think of. We would sit for hours by the pool playing games like Upwords and Scrabble. We'd watch the girls and talk about them and be so proud of them. We'd reminisce and gossip and tell stories and get the giggles. And sometimes just sit and enjoy the silence of each others' company. But I just loved being in her presence with nothing pressing to do, no interruptions, just feeling loved. And when Mom passed on, I somehow inherited my Mom's week at the Farm...and my girls continue to come.

Staying the whole night through
Feels so good to be with you

Sometimes I have the chance to go up to the Farm a bit earlier than everyone else, or stay later after they've all gone home. Or sometimes I just stay up late at night after everyone's gone to bed, and I go sit out on the three-season porch in the dark and watch the back yard all lit up with a zillion lightning bugs floating around the back yard. And I'm at peace. I feel my Mom's presence so strongly there. It is a special place to be.

Teenage Daughters

I ain't complainin' but I'm tired,
So I'm just sayin' what I think
And if we're being honest,
Then honestly I think I need a drink
My baby's growin' up,
She think's she's fallin' all in love and that I hate her
At seventeen, she's just like me when I was seventeen
So I don't blame her

-- Martina McBride

I was at a parenting conference once, where the speaker was specifically addressing parents of teenagers. She held her hands in front of her, one above the other, palms facing, and about a foot apart. She told the audience, "This is how the parenting relationship starts out...with the parent up here." She wiggled the fingers of her upper hand. "And the child down here." She wiggled the fingers of her lower hand. She went on... "The parent does everything for the child. Takes care of the child, feeds the child, teaches the child, disciplines the child. But by the time the child is an adult, you want to end up like this...." She switched her hands to a position where, instead of an above/below position, they were side-by-side, palms facing, about a foot apart. "You want to be equals, on par with each other. And you want to have a good relationship. But...." She went back to the above/below position. "In parenting, you don't just gradually shift the relationship gently to that of equals." She slowly and gracefully moved her hands back to the side-by-side position. "Instead...." She put her hands back to the above/below position. "With teenagers it's more of a rocky back and forth..." Her hands jerked back and forth, back and forth, as if they couldn't decide whether to be above/below or side-by-side. "....until they finally become adults."

She went on from there, to talk about expectations our society puts on teenagers, how that's changed over generations, how various institutions such as schools and churches figure into that, and so on. And our job as parents is to decide what values we place on things, what we want to convey to our kids, and what battles we want to fight. And in the end, what do we want? To be right all the time? To instill certain values? To be friends with our adult children? To set our children on a certain career path? Something else?

Remember when we use to be everything they ever need
We had them believing we were cool
It's like it happened over night
We're always wrong, they're always right
We used to be the ones breakin' the rules

Personally? It's not my goal to be best friends with my children, I'm not their age and I think it's inappropriate when parents try to interact with their children on the same level as their age peers. But I do want my children to enjoy spending time with their family, doing things as a family. As adults, they can choose how they spend their time. I'd rather they choose to spend time with their parents because they enjoy doing so, not because they feel they should.

And as they were growing up, I tried to choose my battles and decide what was really important and what wasn't. I think being a teenager is a time to try out different personas and figure out what you're comfortable with and who you want to be. I remember a conversation in the teacher's lounge one day at work. One of my colleagues was extremely distressed because her daughter wanted to dye her hair blue. After listening to her complain about this for a while, I finally asked her what was really going to be hurt by it. Well nothing, but she just felt it was wrong and would lead to other bad things. I told her that my daughter had purple hair, but otherwise was doing fine. She got good grades at school, had a job, wasn't doing drugs, or getting in trouble with the law, and if purple hair was the worst I had to worry about as a parent, we were in pretty good shape. She said she hadn't looked at it like that.

She rolls her eyes when I'm funny
But she's sweet when she wants money and her freedom
Oh my God, she's got a car, swears they wont go far
And I wish I believed 'em

On the other hand, we tried really hard to teach our girls to talk things through with us like adults. And to work through situations like adults. Sometimes we call these things "life lessons". The girls don't particularly like them, but they've gotten to the point that they recognize them for what they are. Like the time one of my Baby Girl's friends got in a car accident when her parents were out of the country and she didn't know who else to call so she called me. I could have taken care of the whole situation for her, but that's not the way I was used to doing things with my girls. Instead I sat her friend down and explained to her how to talk through the accident with her insurance company - and then let her make the calls.

They're beautiful, wild and free
Everything we wish we could be
But they're still crazy
Oh you know, they make us crazy

I know things weren't always smooth sailing for our girls and there were places we made mistakes. But I know they had it easier than a lot of teens. I remember my sister-in-law spending a few summers with us as a teenager, being treated like an adult while she was here, and having a relatively easy time of things. She was acting responsibly about things, probably largely in part because she was being treated like an adult and wanted to live up to that. But then when she went home, her mom went back to making all sorts of rules, treating her like a kid, and she said she felt like, "What's the use?"

I end up having this conversation with parents of my students quite a bit. I talk with them about helping their children with "life skills". They can jump in and mediate the immediate problem, or they can give their child the life skills to be able to handle it themselves. For example, a student who's having trouble on the playground...and the parent wants to get involved and have the adults settle it. And I talk to them instead about giving their child the "words to use" so they will know how to handle these situations that will arise over and over again because knowing how to stick up for yourself is an important life skill. And it's hard for parents to let go enough to do that. But in the end, parenting is about letting go. And most of the battles that occur in the teenage years occur when parents can't let go.

When my oldest was graduating from high school, the teacher who spoke at her graduation spoke about the "Lassie" TV shows in which the boy finds a stray dog and wants to keep it, and the dad says no, you have to let it go. So the boy takes it back to where he found it and tells it to go away, but the dog doesn't go. So the boy throws a stick at it. But the dog still doesn't go. So the boy throws another stick and yells, "Go away! I hate you!" And so it is with parenting. Sometimes, the parent has to yell so the child will go away.

Or maybe the child has to yell so the parent will let go...

Or maybe in the wisest of situations, the child and parent realize it's about walking side-by-side. It's about the parent giving the teenager the respect and room to make adult choices. It's about the teenager acting safely and responsibly so the parent knows it's okay to let go.

Me and Bobby McGee

Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train
And I's feeling nearly as faded as my jeans.
Bobby thumbed a diesel down just before it rained,
It rode us all the way to New Orleans...

-- Janis Joplin

This song is in a category all it's own in so many ways. You can't not recognize it when it comes on the radio. Or sing along. Or understand the era it represents. And for me, it also brings back the memory of learning to play the guitar.

It was at the downtown Minneapolis Schmidt Music store with a long-haired hippie instructor who passed around a nail clipper and told all the girls to cut their fingernails (horrors!) And if we decided to buy the guitar we were using, we could apply the $68 cost of the lessons toward the purchase price of the guitar. I still have that guitar and, on occasion, I still play it.

The instructor passed out a piece of paper with the song "Me and Bobby McGee", showed us how to finger the G and D7 chords and dragged us through the song, insisting our fingers change position on cue even though we were fumbling through it.

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose

I'd never heard of Bobby McGee. Or Janis Joplin. But I fell in love with the song and those words. To this day I sing them to myself, most often while I'm driving.

And feeling good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues,
You know feeling good was good enough for me,
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.

Actually, I sing it a lot when I'm driving. And I can hear her voice. And I can still picture those guitar lessons some 35 years ago. I love the thought of being so free you have nothing left to lose...

From the Kentucky coal mines to the California sun,
Hey, Bobby shared the secrets of my soul.
Through all kinds of weather, through everything we done,
Hey Bobby baby kept me from the cold.

Shouldn't we all be so lucky to have someone we are that close to?

One day up near Salinas,I let him slip away,
He's looking for that home and I hope he finds it,
But I'd trade all of my tomorrows for just one yesterday
To be holding Bobby's body next to mine.

I love the sweet wistfulness of this song. We've all been there. And we all have things we would be willing to trade one of our tomorrows for, just to have one more yesterday. Usually, it's another day with the ones we love the most and miss the most. So to close our eyes and be able to let the music take us there instead is why this song resonates...

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose,
Nothing, that's all that Bobby left me, yeah,
But feeling good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues.
Hey, feeling good was good enough for me, hmm hmm,
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.