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I was so excited when i saw this album in the huge thrift store stack.. only to find out that it doesn’t actually have her main HIT DON’T IT MAKE MY BROWN EYES BLUE.  I reluctantly listened to side A of her early country hits on WHERE I DREAM. boo “rethrift” I said. Then near the end of Side B.. what do we find? A cover of JOHNNY CASH’S I Still Miss Someone! awesome. It’s slow and dreamy. Here’s a video of her doing it live in 1981. This album is still a country rethrift but what a lovely memory of wanting to be like her and tribute to JC.   Crystal Gayle (born Brenda Gail Webb on January 9, 1951) is an American country music singer best known for her 1977 country-pop hit, “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue“. An award-winning singer, she accumulated 18 number one country hits during the 1970s and 1980s. She is also famous for her once nearly floor-length hair (currently knee-length) and was voted one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world in 1983. She is the younger sister of singer Loretta Lynn (16 years younger) and a distant cousin of singer Patty Loveless. Crystal Gayle has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, near Loretta Lynn’s star.

HAPPY JOHNNY CASH DAY

• Can You Be “Too Old” For Long Hair? (bellasugar.com)
• Did You Know These Country Singers Were Sisters? (dangerouslee.biz)

PATTY LOVELESS: She's Got a Jones for Classic Hurtin' Songs

This ain’t none of that drugstore cowboy crap that wipes clean with a damp cloth. This is hardcore hillbilly soul, friends and neighbours.

‘Hat acts’ may come and ‘hat acts’ may go but this stuff is timeless, like death and taxes, heartaches and hangovers.

Miz Patty don’t pull no punches when it comes to phrasing, stretching those syllables until you think they’re gonna snap.

Maybe that’s what gives this music its peculiar emotional tension.

I mean, sure, a modern day “hat act” like Kenny Chesney may be all tore up over his latest romance gone wrong but he sounds like he’ll recover in time for the next awards show.

Miz Patty wraps those sorghum and molasses vocals around the lyrics of this vintage George Jones hit like she ain’t ever gonna see a light at the end of the tunnel.

“Blue must be the color of the blues,” she wails.

You said it, sister.

"Color of the Blues" is taken from Miz Patty's album of classic country covers (pictured above)

Seasoned songwriting talent that she is – whose credits include her signature “Independence Day” (Martina McBride), as well as ”Let That Pony Run” (Pam Tillis), “You Don’t Even Know Who I Am” (Patty Loveless), and “The Chill of an Early Fall” (George Strait) among many others – Peters unerringly places song and story in the front and center.  With her soft smoky voice sounding as invigorating as ever, Peters sings in a pure straightforward manner, devoid of unnecessary vocal histrionics, yet expressive and authoritative.  Peters herself takes producer’s credit along with Doug Lancio and husband Barry Walsh, backing the songs with sparse, largely acoustic arrangements.  Though utilizing a less-is-more approach throughout, they also add special touches where appropriate, such as flourishes of harmonica in “The Matador,” eerie banjo plucking on “Paradise Found,” and subdued trumpet notes on “Camille.”  She even duets with Rodney Crowell on “Dark Angel,” with his distinctive touch bringing dynamic vocal interplay to the lyric.

For Peters, the album was born out of a time of tumult.  In the year 2010, Peters was affected by disasters such the Gulf oil spill and the Nashville flood, with that same year also bringing about her marriage to longtime collaborator Barry Walsh.  It is those experiences, both the joyful and the difficult, that provide inspiration for these eleven memorable songs that find Peters giving uninhibited vent to her thoughts and emotions, resulting in an album of notable insight and maturity.  The opening title track aptly sets the tone for the album, as the middle-aged female narrator looks back on the regrets and missed opportunities in her life, musing “Haven’t done as well as I thought I would/ I’m not dead yet, but I’m damaged goods/ And it’s getting late.”

Thus begins Peters’ fascinating musical exploration of human frailties, ripe with symbolism and poetic imagery, but not to the point of being impenetrable.  Tracks like “Paradise Found,” “Woman On the Wheel,” and “Natural Disaster” utilize accessible, plainspoken metaphors to portray pleasure as well as pain and emotional turmoil.  Peters alone writes nine of the album’s tracks, and collaborates with co-writers on an additional two.  “St. Francis,” a co-write with Tom Russell, with whom Peters collaborated on the fantastic 2009 duets album One to the Heart, One to the Head, uses the story of St. Francis of Assisi to address the thinking that this world doesn’t matter, and that there’s no need to respect and protect it, with the song having been inspired by the Gulf oil spill.  The excellent singer-songwriter Kim Richey can be heard providing harmony vocals on the track.  “Camille” is a writing collaboration between Peters and her awesomely talented “Wine, Women, and Song” cohorts Matraca Berg and Suzy Bogguss.  It delves into the character of a woman who attempts to numb emotional pain through indulgence in pleasure, only to carry a heavy burden of guilt and shame as a result.

Though moral issues and dilemmas are often addressed in her songwriting, Peters wisely steers clear of adopting a judgmental tone, instead inspiring thought.  This is evident in the lines such as “But who are we without the thrill, without the damage, without the kill” in “The Matador.”  On a similar note, she presents a realistically flawed heroine in “Five Minutes,” in which her character sips a glass of wine, or takes a brief drag on a cigarette to escape the burden of her past as she sees its repercussions affecting her children.  Peters never takes platform on issues, but rather, she presents topics in a way that raises a question, hones in on a certain truth, or simply causes the listener to see things from a different perspective.  Needless to say, it takes several listens to deeply grasp the song meanings – I can’t even count the number of times I listened through this album in writing this review.

A very deep album with profound, layered lyrics that grow even deeper with repeated listening, Hello Cruel World is a deftly constructed, deeply satisfying collection that effectively builds on Gretchen Peters’ already-formidable artistic legacy.  It is undoubtedly one of the best and most significant records we’ll get out of the year 2012.

GRETCHEN’S SCORE:  9
(Scores are given on a scale of 1 to 10)

Top Tracks:  “Hello Cruel World,” “The Matador,” “Dark Angel,” ”Five Minutes”

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Anyone who has known me for more than a hot second, or who has read the “Info” page of my Facebook profile, is probably aware that, like Oprah Winfrey, my all-time favorite quote by someone else is from the iconic American writer Maya Angelou: “The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

I’ve also seen it written, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them,” but the gist is still the same: Stop! Look, listen and learn. I also like “People don’t change, they just get older,” words of wisdom, courtesy of Luke Spencer on General Hospital, but that wouldn’t even be in the running for my second-favorite quote.

For the longest time, I thought No. 2 must be something Oscar Wilde said — or wrote.

Perhaps this bon mot:“Popularity is the crown laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.” Ninety-five percent of the time, it is true. Nothing against the mainstream, which occasionally embraces some excellent stuff, but try as hard as I might, I’ll never understand the popularity of LMFAO.

Or maybe this one:“I can resist anything but temptation.” I’ve been in love with this little aphorism since my mother bought me a sweat shirt with those very words printed across the front when I was a kid, long before I’d ever heard of Oscar Wilde or Lady Windermere’s Fan, the play from which it came. It was fitting then and remains so today. I don’t know if my mother knew what she was getting into back then: She was raising a future Wilde disciple with a love of words, a lust for life, a flair for melodrama, and a weakness for soulful eyes and a killer smile.

Then, of course, there are famous last words of dying U.S. Presidents.

1. “The nourishment was palatable.” — Millard Fillmore One’s last supper should be an unforgettable one.

2. “I have a terrific headache.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt As a life-long sufferer of tense nervous headaches, I’ve always imagined that my final utterance will go something along those lines.

3. “Thomas Jefferson still survives.” – John Adams Even on his deathbed, the second U.S. President couldn’t banish from his head thoughts of his Presidential successor and longtime political rival, who, unbeknownst to him, had died earlier that same day, July 4, 1826. Why hasn’t a film been made about this particular rivalry, one of the most colorful in the history of U.S. politics, which puts the various tussles of the snooze-worthy 2012 U.S. Presidential election to shame?

Sometimes I imagine it must be from a song. Maybe something from Morrissey, the man responsible for turning me on to Oscar Wilde in the mid-’80s. But a full appreciation of Morrissey deserves its own post. More than likely it would be something like“What makes you grow old is replacing hope with regret” from “Too Many Memories” by Patty Loveless, which has been in heavy rotation in my head for years. So true!

But when you get right down to it, my second favorite quote is probably something Tilda Swinton, in a moment of absolute clarity and stunning insight, once said. I first read it years ago, probably around the time she was collecting Oscar buzz (which, sadly, would lead to naught, for 2001′s The Deep End). I’m grateful to The Film Experience, my favorite movie blog, for recently refreshing my memory of it.

“You can never ever know what someone else is really thinking. What they’re going to tell you or what they’re going to show you may not be everything, you know? There’s always a reason to go looking. “

She was discussing her craft, her inspiration, but I think it applies to everyday life as well. We never know what’s really going on in the dark recesses of another person’s mind. A smile can hide so many things, none of them worth smiling about. And a show of indifference can be just that, a show. Maybe it’s my suspicious nature talking out of turn again, but I’ve always felt that most people have something to hide, a secret they don’t want anyone else to know. (Interestingly, Marlena Evans said the same thing on Days of Our Lives last week.)

Cryptic as that pronouncement might sound, it need not be negative. People don’t always put all of their cards on the table. What you see isn’t always what you get, despite what Tina Turner and Britney Spears have both sung. What people show you might not be who they are at all. Just because you haven’t heard from the one you love, doesn’t mean he, or she, isn’t thinking about you. Someone once told me that if you are thinking about someone, they’re probably thinking about you, too. Just because an ex-lover, or ex-spouse, appears to have moved on, doesn’t mean he, or she, has gotten any farther than you have.

I love Maya Angelou’s quote because it cautions against playing the fool, and it does so in the most eloquent, straightforward way. But in life, there are no certainties, no complete reality that is visible to the naked eye, which is the idea at the root of what Swinton said. So yes, when people show you who they are, believe them. But always remember, there’s usually more to the story. Living is at least 50 percent acting, and people, like life, are mysteries. When dealing with both, there’s always a reason, as Swinton suggested, “to go looking,” a purpose for digging deeper and deeper.

What’s at the bottom may not be pretty, but in life, as in acting, traveling and writing, the journey matters as much as the final destination.

And it was on this day in 1912 (100 years ago) The Scout Association is incorporated throughout the British Commonwealth by Royal charter, in 1972  Rose Heilbron becomes the first female judge to sit at the Old Bailey in London, England, United Kingdom, in 1998 during the Wilaya of Relizane massacres in Algeria over 170 are killed in three remote villages, in 2004 Spirit, a NASA Mars rover, lands successfully on Mars at 04:35 UTC and in 2010 the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building is officially opened.

Some birthday you may want to remember on this day are Jacob Grimm, German philologist and folklorist (one of the Brothers Grimm) (1785-1863),  Louis Braille, French teacher of the blind and inventor of braille (1809-1852), Floyd Patterson, American boxer (1935-2006), Patty Loveless, American singer (1957), Michael Stipe, American singer (R.E.M.) (1960) and David Millar, British cyclist (1977).

Need a reason to raise a glass of bubbly on this day? Why not look into the celebration of Day of the Fallen against the Colonial Repression (Angola), Day of the Martyrs (Democratic Republic of the Congo) or perhaps Independence Day, celebrating the independence of Myanmar from the United Kingdom in 1948?

For more information on historic events on this day, please go here.

NoiseTrade is a great source for discovering new music from unsigned bands. Of course you have to be prepared to listen through a lot of average music but hang around for a while and you’re bound to discover something great.

However it is increasingly being used by established artists to generate interest in their back catalogue prior to releasing a new album. Gretchen Peters has adopted this marketing approach with aplomb releasing a 15 track retrospective from her 7 album career as a pay-what-you-wish download.

Gretchen has been on the Ironbath’s radar for years since she is a favourite of legendary British DJ, Bob Harris OBE. However she has found more commercial success from others recording her songs. Martina McBride won her a Grammy nomination with ‘Independence Day’ but her songs have also been covered by Neil Diamond, Patty Loveless, Etta James & Faith Hill.

The Ironbath saw Gretchen Peters a couple of years ago at the Cambridge Folk Festival. She told a great story about ‘Independence Day’. I can’t quite remember the details but it went something like this: Apparently once a song has been published you don’t get to decide how it can be used, but you earn royalties. The Republican’s used the song heavily during the last election, against her wishes. So she transferred the rights so every time they played it the Republican party had to donate money to a Pro-life charity.

Gretchen is launching a new album ‘Hello Cruel World’ at the end of January and Direct Current have a preview track that features Gretchen dueting with Rodney Crowell on ‘Dark Angel’. The Ironbath thinks it sounds great and is looking forward to the album release.

The origin of the text is even more obscure. Adapted from “Adeste Fideles”, which was probably written by 14th century Cistercian monks, the most plausible guess is that the author was one of Wade’s fellow Catholic Jacobites. The version we sing today was included in Murray’s Hymnal of 1852.

So it makes perfect sense that heard it performed on Sunday in a version from 2003 by a modern country singer, the always excellent Patty Lawless.

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The truth: You can’t.

That’s not something I learned from watching romantic comedies starring Jennifer Aniston or Sex and the City. It’s a cold hard fact of life. It’s not just about how long you were together (“Time makes lovers feel like they’ve got something real,” Boy George once sang, but that’s just romantic naivete), it’s intensity of feeling, too. The more you care about someone, the harder it is not to.

That goes double for the ones who break your heart by cheating or stealing, or the ones who break up with you before you can dump them.

A friend of mine recently broke up with his boyfriend of two years after discovering that the BF had spent the majority of their time together getting it on with boys on the side while promising that my friend was the one and only. (However you feel about monogamy and whether humans are monogamous by nature, if you and your partner promise sexual fidelity to each other, then to each other you should be true.)

As my friend told me all about his ex’s sexcapades (which I’d warned him about months earlier — I’ve been around long enough to know a cheater when I hear about one), I kept thinking how great he looked. He was actually kind of glowing. If I didn’t know better, or that he’d just finished a month-long detox, I might have thought he was pregnant. There was no evidence of crying. He obviously hadn’t been skimping on the workouts. If looking good is the best revenge, then my friend certainly had gotten his.

But as I listened to him — really listened — I could see through both the glowing skin, the lack of tears, and the “I will survive” monologues. My friend was hurting. I loved that he was bravely carrying on, going out with friends, planning his future and not lying down and taking the mental beating that his ex had doled out.

At the same time, I was worried for him. I told him that it’s great that he’s doing okay, and he shouldn’t let what his ex did to him run him into the ground and completely define his life, but it’s just as important not to rush the process of grieving. Another friend of mine split up with her husband more than two years ago. Although she’s since moved on romantically with a really great guy, she still has moments when she stumbles down into the depths over her failed marriage.

“You must be so sick of hearing me go on and on about this, she says.” (Honestly, I’m not.) “I don’t know why I still let it get to me so much.” (Honestly, I do.) “There’s no statute of limitations on crying over the end of a relationship or marriage,” I once told her, urging her not to fight her feelings, or give in to them by curling up in a ball and going completely under, but rather to just learn to accept them and live with them. It’s her party, she should cry if she wants to. (Personally, I prefer to go for a run, but to each his or her own.)

My two friends represent two sides of getting over love. One seems to be rushing through the stages of grief, skipping a few of them entirely. The other one keeps slipping back into them. Getting over a guy is like coming out of the closet. We all have to do it on our own schedule. I think it’s probably more dangerous mentally to rush grief than it is to wallow in it because not properly dealing with your emotions practically guarantees that they will manifest later on in some inappropriate time, place and fashion.

I’m still working through my own feelings about the recent end of an affair. Some days I feel like I’m getting over it. Some days it’s harder to see the silver lining. (And if last night’s dreams are any indication, it’s not over until it’s over.) But every day, I get out of bed, I write, I work out, I take care of myself. I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t take a bit more effort than usual, but it must be paying off. I hear I’m looking great, which I don’t think of as being the best revenge (thankfully, in my case, there’s nothing to avenge), but I hope those compliments keep coming.

As I think of my friend with the cheating ex, I kind of wish he’d allowed himself to be more vulnerable with me, to express sadness as well as anger over what happened. But I’m glad he wasn’t letting himself go. Just because we feel like crap doesn’t mean we have to look like it, too. It might not help you get over a guy in 10 days, but in my experience, the better you look, the better you feel. And even if it’s not the best revenge, you’ll be more likely to find someone who can help you temporarily — and perhaps, eventually, permanently — ease the pain.

No revenge necessary — and isn’t that the best revenge?

Five great songs about life after love (and no, “I Will Survive,” which I’ve always despised, isn’t one of them):

Patty Loveless “A Thousand Times a Day” Denial never sounded so lovely.

Shania Twain “Nah!” I’ve always wanted to sing this to a guy.

Phyllis Hyman “When You Get Right Down to It” I always love it when I get to sing this to myself.

Lauryn Hill and Mary J. Blige “I Used to Love Him” Two divas in tip-top musical and emotional shape.

“Believe” Cher Because it’s all about life after love — when still in love and when falling out of it.

Four the Record experiments with a diversity of sounds, styles, and influences.  How appropriate, then, that the album opens with “All Kinds of Kinds” – a song that celebrates diversity.  The lyrics paint colorful visual images of a wedding beneath a circus tent between an acrobat and a human cannonball, of a marriage between a pharmacist and a cross-dressing congressman, while the third verse taps into the narrators desire to explore her own unique identity.  Lambert goes in an unexpected direction with the standout track “Fine Tune,” which builds on a metaphor of an “engine of a heart that would not start ’til you showed up with a master-key.”  The track finds Lambert singing over a heavy beat backed with bluesy electric guitars, which ends up sounding pretty cool, though it could do with out the excessive vocal processing.  It only loosely qualifies as “country music,” and its sound will likely prove polarizing, but the off-beat styling makes it one of the album’s most unusual and interesting tracks. (Plus the coolest thing since hearing Faith Hill sing “centrifugal motion” has got to be Miranda singing “defibrillator”)

Lambert shares writing credits on half of the album’s tracks, but there are times when she falls shy of her usual songwriting standards.  Lead single “Baggage Claim,” co-written with Luke Laird and Natalie Hembry, draws on a previously unused metaphor, only to stretch the metaphor until it nearly breaks.  To her credit, however, Lambert draws on some strong sources of outside material, with perhaps the best case being her version of David Rawlings and Gillian Welch’s “Look at Miss Ohio.”  Brandi Carlile’s “Same Old You,” is a smart, self-realizing composition that shows traces of Loretta Lynn influence, and that wouldn’t sound out-of-place on Lambert fantastic Pistol Annies album.  On the other hand, her co-write with fellow Annie Angaleena Presley is surprisingly one-dimensional, and almost sounds like a song that just wasn’t quite good enough to make it onto the Pistol Annies album.

Perhaps the album’s most disappointing track is “Better In the Long Run” – the obligatory duet with hubby Blake Shelton, which suffers from an over-the-top performance on Shelton’s part, as well as an extremely boring central hook.  It sounds like something that songwriter Ashley Monroe must have written on an off-day.  The results are quite disheartening, considering the inherently lofty potential of a duet between vocalists of Shelton and Lambert’s caliber (which their past collaborations often came much closer to fulfilling).

Production choices are generally beneficial, with a few exceptions.  Lead single “Baggage Claim” boats infectious acoustic strumming and hand claps, which serve to elevate its rather clunky lyrics.  The bitter “Mama’s Broken Heart” is a stronger lyric, but the chorus rocks out so hard that you’ll be diving for the knob to lower the volume, though the lightly percussive intro works well.  Fortunately, there are plenty of moments in which strong lyrics meet good protection, thus making for some notable album highlights.  On Miranda’s self-written “Dear Diamond,” a light contemporary arrangement underscores her deeply emotional performance, which is bolstered by vocal harmonies of the ever-excellent Patty Loveless, while a light acoustic arrangement perfectly frames the bouncy melody of “Same Old You.”

Though the album has its share of missteps, its best and most interesting tracks are enough to reaffirm the fact that Lambert is not content to settle into a creative rut of half-hearted repetition.  It’s clear that her work continues to be characterized by restless creativity, and though Four the Record is not Miranda’s all-time best album, it’s more than interesting enough to have us waiting with bated breath to see what she’ll do with record number five.

MIRANDA’S SCORE:  7
(Scores are given on a scale of 1 to 10)

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Back in the ’90s, when Saturday Night Live was still occasionally funny, Christopher Walken did a skit called “Trivial Psychic”.  He shook a co-worker’s hand, his body would jerk, his big bug eyes would get bigger and buggier, dramatic music would play, and the camera would swoop in.  He asked the lady several questions, each of which would bring a worried “Yes” answer from her, as well as more camera swoops, bug eyes, and music.  “You have a daughter?”  “Yes.”  “She’s at home with the housekeeper?”  “Yes.”  Then he’d tell her:  “The housekeeper just waxed the kitchen floor.”  “Yes?”  “Your daughter’s gonna run in it.”  “Yes?”  (The woman no doubt thinks there’s a broken bone, at minimum.)  “The housekeeper’s annoyed; she’ll have to do that part of the kitchen over.”  This goes on a little more, then the announcer comes out with “Ed Glosser, Trivial Psychic.”

That’s what I’ve considered myself at times, because, although I think that people can read my every thought at times, my psychic abilities are usually limited to thinking about a song, then it plays on the radio, or a couple of dreams about really trivial occurrences that then came true.

In the summer of 1990, shortly before I met my ex-wife, I took up with a girl who I had known for years, who had been out of town for a while, and began a fairly lame 3-week relationship with her.  Since I was liking the companionship, and hoping for more, if you get my gist, I suppose it made sense that I dreamed, a couple days into the 3-week thing, that a specific higher-up in my company would ask me to go install one of our products on the road, and I would tell him, no, because I just met a woman and wanted to spend some time with her.  The very next day that exact thing happened.  (Sorta weenie-ish, I know, but it was rural Illinois, not Vegas, where they were going to send me, for cryin’ out loud.)

There were times of slightly-more-than-trivial psychic feelings during my relationship/marriage to the other woman, usually involving the sky being a different color (I swear) as I left work, followed by me being yelled at by her about something that, well, seemed pretty trivial to me actually.  (There’s several things that I don’t miss about marriage–that one at least.)

Fast-forward to fall 2003.  We didn’t travel much during my marriage, but in the ’80s, with or without a girlfriend, I’d use my vacation time to travel, always west, to see places I’d never seen except in media, books, etc.  So, in ’03, after a dry spell after my marriage broke up, I decided to go east instead.  I’m partial to rock/pop music, a handful of showtunes, jazz, or folk, and what little good country there is.  So I got a ticket for the mecca of country music, the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, and for a Patty Loveless concert about 4 hours from there in Georgia.  I also planned to see the Smoky Mountains, and go downtown in Nashville, listen to bands, fall in love with some gal there, and move to Tennessee or something.

My car had other plans, though.  It basically died in Nashville during rush hour, just as I was heading to my motel.  It didn’t die completely, just started chugging out blue smoke.  Lots of blue smoke.  Something called the “rear main seal”, which had been leaking oil, let loose a lot more, and really started to lose oil fast.  So I rented a car to get to the 2 shows, skipped the mountains and the bars, and headed home to do some car-shopping at home.

It took me two full days to get home; I drove back roads instead of the interstate, because the car smoked way less at 50 or so miles an hour than it did at interstate speed.  I’d hit the nearest Walmart in the morning and buy a case of oil.  I wouldn’t even check it during the day, just stop every hour-and-a-half or so and add 2 quarts.  Then at night at the motel, I’d bring it up to full.

I don’t know if you’ve ever driven alone much, but, I’m here to tell you, you don’t have to be crazy to start talking to yourself if you’ve been driving long distances.  Whether it’s “Mmm, there’s some cows”, or “I wonder if there’s a meth lab in that barn” or “I wonder if there’s a hot lonely farm wife in that place”, you’re gonna be talking to yourself.  So, I don’t know if I said this thing out loud or just thought it very vividly, but, just outside “Turnipseed, Minnesota”, I saw a semi-truck and trailer from “Mays Trucking” parked by the side of the road, as I turned from one state highway to another, and said, or thought, to myself, “That trucking company will have something to do with my love life.”  I know that I didn’t go “back in time” in my mind later and make this up, because I clearly remember (again, either) saying out loud or thinking vividly, “Oh, I’m sure I’ll fall in love with some big, burly female truck driver (who could throw me across the bed as easily as I could throw a loaf of bread into a shopping cart).”

I made it home without further mechanical problems, did some car-buying, and forgot about the whole “Mays Trucking” thing.  Then, one month later, I was set up on a date with a new co-worker of an old friend of mine, had a 3-week romance with her, got dumped so she could go back to her old boyfriend, got a call 3 weeks after that:  “He’s not being nice; wanna go have a beer?”  “Sure (and, you know, the sky was a weird color that night, as I was heading into my trailer after work), let’s have a beer.”

The next day she wouldn’t return my calls, but about 3 weeks after that, I got a call from the matchmaker friend:  “She (we’ll call her Emmylou) is pregnant, and they’re getting married.”  “How nice”, I replied.  As time went on, I started doing a little math in my head, gave “Emmylou” a call, and convinced her that we should have a DNA test.  (We’ll call my daughter Alice)  Looking back, we could have saved the money; not only is my little “Alice” not butt-ugly, like the other “gentleman”, but she is terribly shy like I was as a kid, and at least as uncoordinated as I have always been.  She is indeed my little sweetie.

Anyway, to make a long story short, although her mother had very little to do with my romantic life (just another trivial romance, if you will), until I find a woman to grow older with, my little “Alice Mays”, daughter of “Emmylou Mays”, and granddaughter of “John Mays”, one of the co-owners of “Mays Trucking” of “Turnipseed, Minnesota” (until he drank himself to death), well, little “Alice” is most definitely the love of my life.

———————————————————————–

Postlogue:

I couldn’t swear in a court of law that the name on that truck was their family name, because it was such a ridiculous thought (about that trucking company having something to do with my love life) that I just dismissed it immediately.  But it was a small town, my daughter’s mom is from there, her family owned a trucking line there.  And, I know traveling alone is freaky, but since I was a loser in between romances, and wanted to get out of town, I went.  There’s no guy in the world I can stand to spend more than a couple hours drinking or hunting or working or fishing with, and I didn’t think any of my friends would loan me their wives, so I traveled alone.  Plus I planned to get discovered by a talent agent in Nashville, and discovered by a rich woman in Nashville.

I know this one is long; but it is my 100th post, if you can believe WordPress, and describes what is, so far, the defining series of events in my life, so I guess the world of wordpress can indulge me.  And, do you know how hard it is to make up a name for a trucking company?  You name it, it’s a truck line.

Thanks a lot for reading.