Inspired by Grant: "Amazing, Beautiful"

It was a Tuesday in February and I was in Kentucky, driving through blinding rain to a funeral for a boy I had never met.  I had read stories about him and his battle with a genetic metabolic disorder.  They were at once heartwarming and heartbreaking, and so detailed and revealing that it wasn't until after the funeral that I remembered that I had, in fact, never met Grant in person.

I knew his parents, though.  Shawn and I were pretty good friends in college, although I hadn’t seen or talked with him for years.  He was involved in the college ministry through which I became a Christian.  He and two other guys formed a drama ministry, and invited me to join; we were the four musketeers for my sophomore year.

Shawn was a guy who said what he thought, expressed what he felt, and was who he was.  He was big—tall and large, but not overweight-looking—with brushed-back blondish brown hair and a loud, deep voice.  He was larger-than-life in many ways, with the mannerisms and disposition of a guy who had done some musical theater (which he had). His laugh would fill up a room, booming and bellowing, and sometimes even giggling.  I loved making him laugh.

Despite his presence and his history of performance, I never felt like I was talking to a character when I talked with Shawn.  He listened intently and actively, and he shared personal struggles in appropriate and empathetic ways.  He could carry a crowd, yes.  But he could also carry a conversation—even when that just meant listening with compassion.

Shawn could sing, act, speak in public, and play a handful of instruments; he was socially aware and communicated well in a variety of settings; he was book smart and culturally literate.  He was even decent looking and reasonably athletic.

(If he ever reads this, my guess is he will laugh at that last sentence and—with a big smile on his face—either mock-protest, “He’s got me all wrong—I am INCREDIBLE looking and AMAZINGLY athletic!”; or self-effacingly brush aside my description as “way too kind.”  Either way, I stand by it.)

Oh, by the way: Shawn is also one of the most intellectually brilliant people I have ever met.  He breezed through undergrad and went on to med school to become an anesthesiologist.

On his way, he married Emily.  Though I only knew her a little bit, she made a good impression.  She was intelligent, supportive, pretty, God-loving, and had enough spark to remind Shawn of whatever it was in his busy life that needed some of his attention.  It wasn’t too long before they started a family, bringing into the world a son, then a daughter, and then another son.

For all of Shawn’s gifts and abilities, he knew that depending on himself instead of God was as foolish for him as it was for anybody.  When he even sensed pride in his heart, he would confess his concerns at leaders’ meetings or during drama team practices.  He would ask for prayer, that he may learn to grow more dependent on God.

When people who seem to have it all together share their struggles, it can seem disingenuous. Not with Shawn, not to me.  He knew he was just a guy trying to follow his God.  If asking for the prayer support of others would help him do it, then of course that’s what he would do.

After Shawn and Emily moved away, I saw them sparingly.  I met their oldest son when he was a baby, but I had never met their daughter or younger son, Grant.

When I got word that Grant’s body could no longer keep up with his spirit, it was sad but expected.  For months I had planned, when the time came, to do my best to make it to the service.  But when the time came, “my best” didn’t seem like it was going to get me there.  “There” was the eastern edge of Kentucky, on a Tuesday in February.  It turns out when you’re looking ahead a few months, cutting away from family and responsibilities for a couple of days seems pretty simple.  When those “couple of days” were suddenly “tomorrow” and “the next day”?  Well, I sincerely began to wonder if offering meaningful support to my friends necessarily meant showing up to the service in person.

I spent much of the day on Sunday waffling with great earnestness.  I finally came up with a perfect compromise.  Green and pink were the suggested colors for the service—they were Grant’s favorites.  I decided I would take a photo of me and my family dressed in those colors.  Then I’d send the picture to Shawn and Emily, along with a card and a charitable donation, and I would communicate everything I wanted to share without me actually being there.  They would see that I was making a sincere effort (which I was) and perhaps they would even view it as an above-and-beyond effort.  And, God willing, they would be at least a little bit comforted in their loss.

I honestly regarded my idea as a genuine, win-win plan.  I even decided that I would take those next couple of days in St. Louis and make sure not to fritter them away.  I would be extra diligent around the house and spend good, quality time with my family.  For a few seconds, I was very pleased with my plan.

God, it turns out, was NOT very pleased with my plan.  It’s hard to explain, but almost immediately after I decided I was not going, He kind of started twisting my guts around inside of me.  Any stress I felt about going—packing, driving, planning, etc.—was quickly feeling like a walk in the park compared to the agony of NOT going.  It was part spiritual and part physical, this agony, and it wasn’t just a twinge of guilt, either.  It wasn’t really any kind of guilt at all—it was an intense unsettledness.

Almost as a way of teasing out the source of this unsettled feeling, I decided that I WAS going after all.  When I re-committed to making the trip, it was like when a loose bike chain clicks back into place.  It was right.  I was going.

During the most-of-the-night drive, I did a lot of thinking, crying, and praying.  I was glad that God wanted me to go, but I wasn’t sure why, since I figured Shawn and Emily had a deep support system in their church.  I imagined I’d get just a moment to express my sympathies while friends crowded around them.  I hoped that seeing me would be a pleasant enough surprise.  As far as I was concerned, if sharing a kind word for (literally) a minute or two might bring any measure of comfort, the inconvenience of a 2-day drive was a drop in the bucket.

I crept into the service a few moments before it started, sat in the back, and took it all in.  I learned that Grant kept an amazing spirit throughout his sickness, always keeping a sense of humor and a godly outlook. While bedridden, Grant would play the “A to Z” game, reciting characteristics of God, one per letter.  I learned that Grant was a fan of Elvis, and loved dancing and singing to his hits.  Grant’s sister shared some fond memories and stories.  And Shawn himself spoke, sharing the most profound Gospel presentation I have ever heard.  The church was packed with adults from all sorts of spiritual backgrounds, and almost as many children.  Shawn spoke with force and empathy.  Miraculously, his words were compassionate, uncompromising, and clear to everyone.  Non-churchgoers had nothing “go over their heads”; conversely, lifelong Christians did NOT feel that the message “lacked meat.”  Then we sang songs to God.

During the reception, I made my move, drifting into Shawn and Emily’s line of sight.  Emily saw me first and did a double take—I saw her mentally filing through her worlds, removing me from an old one, and placing me in this one.  I hugged her, and then I saw Shawn.  He was also surprised.  I offered my condolences and assured them that, in more ways than they could imagine, their efforts had honored Grant and glorified God.

They were appreciative, but seemed to sense that I was only stopping by.  “Are you going somewhere?” Shawn asked.  I explained that I had come to offer some encouragement, that I didn’t want to impose on them, and that I CERTAINLY didn’t want them to worry about entertaining a random old friend from the past.

Shawn took me aside.  He and his family had moved to this small Kentucky town when Grant was getting sick, and Shawn and Emily spent most of their waking hours at the hospital or caring for Grant at home.  He explained that their church had been incredibly supportive and had opened their hearts, arms, and homes to his family.  Their friendships were new and growing.  But what Shawn and Emily did NOT have with their new friends were long-term shared experiences.  Right then, at that moment, it was meaningful for Shawn and Emily to have someone they “went way back with.”  I remember thinking something like, “Oh.”  Pause.  “I see.”

An hour or so later, I was at Shawn and Emily’s house with a small gathering of friends and family members, including a couple of other long-term friends who had made the drive from St. Louis.  It was dark outside, and the mood in the house was surprisingly mellow.  We laughed and reminisced.  We ate vast amounts of food selected from the meals that had been delivered by Shawn and Emily’s church family—and we barely made a dent in the provisions.  I hung out a little bit with Grant’s brother and sister.  For Shawn and Emily, the celebration service might have marked something of a transition between types of grief—and this weird, surreal span of a couple of hours felt like a mellow lull.

There were, of course, moments of tears and sudden waves of sorrow, even within moments of lighter exchange.  Conversations and people flowed around the house; one moment Grant’s older brother was showing me a toy whip; a moment later, I was sitting with just Shawn and Emily, the three of us trying to untangle some of the sadness and confusion they were feeling.

During my drive, I had expected to offer an encouraging sentence or two to Shawn and Emily.  I had NOT expected to—an hour after the service—be sitting in a room of their house with just the two of them, as a friend and a de facto pastor.  Not that I minded.  In fact, though I felt sad and helpless, I also felt strangely blessed to be sharing this time with my friends on this evening.  They didn’t expect me to have any answers that would “make it all go away” and, of course, I didn’t.

Instead of offering answers, I asked questions—questions about Grant, the grieving process, the impact of everything on the kids, and how Shawn and Emily had related to God and to each other since Grant got sick.  As they talked, I listened, and let my mind distill some of what I had been observing.

Eventually, I tried to articulate some of those observations, if for no other reason than to give my friends one more view of the reality they were trying to digest.  Maybe I was like the guy in the upper deck at a baseball game, while Shawn and Emily were deep in the third base dugout.  They were completely engrossed in all that was transpiring on the field before them—indeed, fully involved and invested in every action.  But maybe my spot in the stadium allowed me to see a small corner of the field down the left field line, a spot just out of sight from the third base dugout.  Or, maybe they could just use a different angle to confirm what they had seen.

I observed, for example, that a sanctuary full of people had been given the opportunity to experience the power of God firsthand and to hear a completely Spirit-led rendition of the Gospel.  Because Grant lived his life so full of faith and joy, his earthly death provided an occasion to genuinely and boldly proclaim the truth of the One for whom he lived.  Grant—quite directly—ministered to more people in his 8 years than many Christians do in their whole lives.

I observed that the depth of Grant’s faith far superseded the age of his body.  Like a sauce prepared by a skilled chef, Grant’s faith seemed “reduced”—a lot of flavor (depth of faith) had been packed into a little space (8 years).

I observed that Grant, even after his death, would be an effective missionary for God.  His life—and his family’s reaction to his death—would impact scores, then hundreds of people, many whom he had never met.  I pointed out that I was one of those people.

And I pointed out a truth that may have been both the most difficult to grasp and the most liberating: that the pain we were feeling was no longer on behalf of Grant.   Rather, it was because we missed him.  That was fine, of course.  That’s what mourning is, and God expects and even commands us to mourn.  But Grant himself was all done with pain.  As the apostle Paul wrote from prison, “For to me, living means living for Christ, and dying is even better.  But if I live, I can do more fruitful work for Christ.  So I really don’t know which is better.  I’m torn between two desires: I long to go and be with Christ, which would be far better for me.  But for your sakes, it is better that I continue to live” (Philippians 1:21-24, NLT).  The knowledge that Grant has been suddenly liberated may itself gradually liberate us.

We prayed, cried, and hugged.  It had been a full night, and I finally said good-bye.

On the drive home, and then in the months that followed, I reprocessed so many of the details from the evening.  I wanted to extend the sentiment of the evening into the future with some creative impression of what transpired.  I shaped some memories into lines and verses.  I would be driving somewhere or lying in bed or mowing the lawn, and an image would pop into my head.  I’d make a note of it.

But my impressions lacked continuity.  Whatever it was that I was writing was halfway done—maybe more, maybe less—but I’d get distracted and stuck.  When you spend an hour to hammer out a single phrase in a line of a poem that may not ever even be read by another human being—well, it’s sometimes hard to make the effort.

Fortunately, someone else made the effort.  A few months ago, I noticed on Facebook that Shawn made a note about going to a book signing.  I got the impression that he was the signer, and I was curious.  A couple of online searches later, I discovered that Elena, Grant’s sister, was actually the signer.  Apparently, she had written a book about her brother, called “Grant and His Great God.”

I bought it.  You can, too.  It’s good.  It was inspiring and challenging.  Challenging not just in its content, but because while I couldn’t quite finish a short commemorative lyric regarding Grant and his faith, Grant’s sister started, finished, and published an entire book.

So I had a long talk with myself.  I said to myself, “Look, we’ve had our ups and downs, and I know you don’t always like what I have to say.  But don’t you think that MAYBE you could block off some time to shape some of those images and such into something like a finished product?  You know, like soon?”

I had a good point.  I became more diligent.  It still took me another couple of months, but at least the progress was steady.  Who can know if the delay in finishing this lyric was providential or a product of my flawed human condition?  Maybe it was both.  Regardless, God seems to have provided Grant’s family with a lot of support and encouragement since Grant’s passing, even apart from my efforts.  Go figure.  It’s my prayer that these words may serve as an additional conduit for God’s grace and glory.

In the meantime, I sit here grateful for Grant’s life.  I am grateful that God had me attend the service on the far side of Kentucky.  I am grateful for Grant’s family, and for his sister’s book.  So if nothing else, these words are a thank-you note to Shawn, Emily, Jackson, Elena, and Grant.  And, of course, to God.

-THP

     Amazing, Beautiful

VERSE 1:

I’m driving down this hill but I can’t see the road; the rain is falling faster, falling faster than these blades can sweep

The sky, like life, is gray, a blend of hope and fear and other things I’d see if I had more than 3-plus hours sleep

PRE-CHORUS 1:

Then a scene on the horizon like a magnet draws my eyes in,
it’s a beacon breaking through the clouds like water through a dam

And by faith my soul is certain that there peeking through the curtain
is the one who died a boy whose faith was worthy of a man

CHORUS:

Amazing, beautiful, compassionate, delightful, everlasting,

Finally Grant sees the A to Z’s of his Father face to face

Dancing like the King of Rock led joyf’ly by the King of Kings

Then laughing and collapsing in the Spirit’s calm embrace

VERSE 2:

The building glows--just like a lamp beneath a cloak--through mist and fog to guide the ev’ning mourners clad in pink and green.

Inside we sing out praises to our God with heavy souls and finite minds that wonder “Why?” and “What does it all mean?”

PRE-CHORUS 2:

Then a father weak and grieving rises, arms outstretched, believing

that the question most worth asking isn’t “What?” or “Why?” but “Who?”

And the answer that he clings to is the Savior that he sings to

who assures that faithful hearts, when broken, He will make like new

CHORUS

BRIDGE:

All these stories, songs, and scriptures, conversations, prayers, and pictures—

instead of sharing time with Grant it’s these things that we share.

But then, through them, God’s bestowing all the things that where Grant’s going

he won’t need—like faith and hope—but that we will until we're there.

CHORUS

"Huh?"--Eighties Edition

When I was kid, if we wanted to look up song lyrics on the internet, we first had to invent the internet--which we totally would have done had it not been for the 10 feet of snow we had to walk through to get to the internet supply store.

So what was a lad to do if he heard a song on the radio and couldn't quite make out the words?

As late as college, I sent a dollar and a SASE to a band asking for a lyrics sheet, as per their advice printed in the liner notes.  I still have that lyrics sheet in a file upstairs, next to the "abacuses & sundials" bin.

Most artists didn't offer the SASE option, so one could only hope that the lyrics might be printed in the liner notes of the cassette tape packaging.  Not wanting to buy a copy of, say, "Too-Rye-Ay" by Dexy's Midnight Runners in the HOPE that it MIGHT have the lyrics printed to the one song I cared about, I had a couple of options at my disposal.

One option was taking a road trip to the used record store located on the mean streets of St. Louis city.  There, I could look for used (re: non-cellophane wrapped) copies of albums with mysterious lyrics.  All I needed was the Yellow Pages and a St. Louis City street map.  Soon enough, I learned of a store called "The Record Exchange".

Would I have to drive for almost 30 minutes from my west county, suburban home to get there?  Yes.  Was I likely to be the victim of a drive-by shooting while visiting this business?  Absolutely--I mean, the address was on Hampton for goodness' sake, a street we'd pass on the way to Busch Stadium in downtown, which is where I once saw someone peeing in a park!  Was it a school night?  Yes.  But sacrifices had to be made.

I made several of these trips, and was never once shot.  I'd walk in with a list of songs the lyrics to which I hoped to discover.  I soon learned that vinyl records were often more likely to have the lyrics printed on their sleeves than cassette tapes were.  Folding was probably expensive.

Some trips were more successful than others.  One notable failure came when I spied a "Dexy's Midnight Runner's" album, excitedly pulled it open, only to discover that it was NOT the album with "Come on Eileen" on it.  "Are you freaking kidding me?  Why do they have ANOTHER album, and why did anyone in St. Louis ever buy it?"

Oh well.  In the absence of definitive, objective lyrical clarification, an awkward high schooler with few friends and no known access to drugs, booze, or sex had another option: Buy or record a copy of the song in question, and listen to the lyrics over and over and over.  Play.  Pause.  Rewind.  Play.  Pause.  Rewind.  Move the sliding volume things on the stereo to try to isolate the lyrics.  Hypothesize.  Test.  Re-hypothesize.  Discuss.

Oh, yeah: discuss.  I actually sometimes had a partner in these investigations, my friend Keith.  Keith, like me, has very little musical talent but writes lyrics and poems.  Together, we're like a couple of Bernie Taupins, perhaps shaping ourselves to be such in the hours we spent discerning and dissecting lyrics to some of our favorite 80's songs.

Below are some brief clips to some of the songs that I/we tried to figure out.  Feel free to try your hand--ur, ear--at lyrical discernment.  Below each one, I'll share what was once my best guess, followed by the actual line, so you should be able to scroll down without giving the answer away.

Enjoy, and good luck.

-THP

1.  "Down Under," Men at Work

My Best Guess: "He just smiled and gave me a bit-of-my sandwich."
The Problem with my Best Guess: Why would the the guy give the singer of bite of the singer's own sandwich?
The Actual Line: "He just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich."
Looking Back:  Hard to blame a guy for having no idea what "Vegemite" was.  I didn't learn until after my sophomore year of college when a bunch of us went to Australia for a short term missions trip, which is where we all first learned about the existence of Vegemite, which was immediately followed by one of us saying, "THAT'S what he's saying in the song 'Down Under'!" and everyone else saying, "Ooooohhhhhhhh--THAT makes sense!"  What makes less sense is why anyone would ever, ever in a million, billion years choose to eat Vegemite, but that's for another post.

2.  "Pink Houses," John Mellencamp

My Best Guess: "And he looks at her and says, 'Hey, darlin', I can remember when you could starve a plow."

The Problem with My Best Guess:  In my defense, I was pretty sure "starve a plow" didn't make any sense.  I also STILL think it sounds like "starve a plow," even knowing what the actual line is.

The Actual Line: "And he looks at her and says, 'Hey, darlin', I can remember when you could stop a clock."

Looking Back:  Had I heard "stop a clock" instead of "starve a plow", I would have had the same nagging "that can't be right" feeling.  Turns out, "she has a face that could stop a clock" is an actual phrase.  Wiki Answers tell us "This means that she was so beautiful, that she even made the clock stop." Wiki continues: "It is also used by some mean so ugly, that she could stop a clock."  I would guess the speaker is going with the first definition, but methinks many ladies are a little ambivalent about being told that they "used to be pretty enough to stop a clock--you know, in the past." 

3.  "New Moon on Monday," Duran Duran

My Best Guess: "Shea, could you picture a Liz or mixture with your decks on the evening tide?"
The Problem with My Best Guess: A bit cryptic.
The Actual Line: "Shake up the picture the lizard mixture with your dance on the eventide."
Looking Back: Oh, OK.

4.  "Think I'm in Love," Eddie Money

My Best Guess: "Think I'm in love, and my life shook it off."
The Problem with My Best Guess: I actually like it.  His mind THINKS he's in love, but his day-to-day life would not allow for love, so his life "shook off" the thoughts of his mind.
The Actual Line: "Think I'm in love, and my life's lookin' up."
Looking Back: Seriously?  Your "life is looking up"?  I see how you play: Save the really vivid images for the chorus.  You sweet talker, you.  "Hey, baby, I just wanted to let you know that things are, you know, good and such.  And you're really, really neat.  I'm just sayin' what I think."

5.  "And We Danced," The Hooters

My Best Guess:  (it's a 2 parter) "As the band began to play our tune and we danced" / "The others speak, she's walkin' my way"
The Problem with My Best Guess: None, really.
The Actual Line: "As the band began to play out of tune and we danced" / "The endless beat, she's walkin' my way"
Looking Back: Keith and I debated this one a lot.  The chorus had yet another hard-to-discern line: "we were liars in love".  All in all, still love this song.

6.  "Come on Eileen," Dexy's Midnight Runners

My Best Guess: "These people 'round here blah-blah-blah blah-blah blah blah blah-blah blah-blah-blah blah-blah blah blah bla-AH / But not us (no never!) / No, not us (no never!) / We are far too young and clever."
The Problem with My Best Guess: It feels incomplete.
The Actual Line: "These people 'round here wear beaten down eyes sunk in smoke dried faces so resigned to what their fate is / But not us (no never!) / No, not us (no never!) / We are far too young and clever."
Looking Back: It's actually a great line and a great lyric all around.  As one who tries to cram a lot of syllables into a short amount of space, Dexy's Midnight Runners will always shine as a beacon of hope that such a technique CAN be effective--even if it fully comprehended without the use of sound equipment available to the intelligence agencies of only 3 or 4 countries in the world.

Kenny and Me

I have my first sports post that I’m working on and thought would be posted today, but one of my reasons for having a blog about anything and everything is so that I can write about what I feel like writing about. The discipline I’m trying to get a handle on is “writing, just writing” and not (yet, anyway) “writing under the constraints of a particular topic”. Today, so sayeth the mysterious whims of my feelings, “sports” is not the topic. Kenny Rogers is.

Kenny was my first rock star idol, my first man-crush, and my first musical and lyrical inspiration. My mom had about a dozen cassette tapes that lived in our red station wagon: Glen Campbell, the Carpenters, Bobby Goldsboro, Engelbert Humperdink, John Denver, and Kenny Rogers. There was one tape each for the others, but Kenny had 4 or 5.

Kids always think what their parents think or do is cool, or at least the root of all other cultural evolution. So even though I knew other people didn’t listen to Kenny as much as my mom did, I figured the whole world knew his music well, seeing as almost half of my mom’s cassette tapes were of his music.

So it wasn’t unusual for me to reference Kenny Rogers’ songs to friends and teachers, fully expecting them to “get the reference.” One of these references took place during 5th grade Catholic public school of religion. We met Monday nights, and my class was notoriously the smallest in the school. On a good night, there were 4 of us, none of whom wanted to be there. This made for some painful, painful conversations. Our teacher was awkward but obviously earnest, but even the not-so-cool of us (uh, that might have been just me, now that I think about it) knew that she wasn’t “cool,” so none of us felt real inclined to help out when she would ask the class a question and pause for seconds, then minutes, waiting for someone to show the faintest sign of even faux-interest.

Sometimes I would talk, though. And one time, I don’t remember the question, but the answer I gave was, “It’s like the Kenny Rogers song. It goes ‘If you can lie a little bit / you can lie a little bit more / once you get away with it / it becomes a little easier than it did before.’” Looking straight at me, she cocked her head slightly, like when a dog thinks it hears a noise. Then she nodded, also slightly. Then she said, “When you share I am always struck by how deeply you think about things.” Aside from the then-excruciating awkwardness of the moment, I remember thinking, “It’s partly me, but partly Kenny.”

My friends also got infusions of pure Kenny-ness throughout my grade school years. I remember shooting pool in our living room, asking David, “Hey, have you heard the new Kenny Rogers album?” “New” meant “My mom just got it”. But his answer of “No” was all I needed. “No” meant “No, but I would like to, of course, because, gosh, it’s Kenny Rogers!” I popped it in the cassette player, introducing it with, “It’s got ‘Islands in the Stream,” but that’s not the only good song.”

Strangely, even though my mom is the one who introduced me to Kenny Rogers, I often felt like I needed to convince her of his greatness. Once in a bookstore, I stumbled upon a book of Billboard hits. Afterwards, on the way home, I told my mom, “Kenny Rogers has a lot of hits. And they’re on the top 40, which is like the list of popular songs. ‘Islands in the Stream’ went all the way to number 1. ‘This Woman,” which isn’t even my favorite song, made it to number 23. And he has a singing part on ‘We Are the World.’” My mom said something like, “Well, he’s pretty popular.” Even though I am still not sure what I was looking for, that seemed a little unsatisfying. I’m not sure why.

I remember walking out of the movie “Six Pack” that my mom had taken us to see in the theaters. In the parking lot, I said to my mom, “Did you cry?” She said, “No.” I was floored. “How could you not?” I thought. And after seeing the made-for-TV-movie adaptation of “Coward of the County,” I remember giving my mom the briefing the next day: “The part in the song where he says, ‘You could have heard a pin drop when Tommy stopped and locked the door’. Well, you totally could have. They really captured that in the movie.” If part of a mom’s job is to keep her kid from thinking that he’s as cuckoo as he probably is, then my mom did great, even if she didn’t always seem to want to talk about the awesomeness of Kenny Rogers as much as I did.

Kenny was a profound lyricist. The stories he told were so succinct yet so vivid. I could picture “Lucille” in the bar being confronted by her husband. I hurt for the poor old (creepy!) man who fell in love with the stripper in “Scarlet Fever.” “The Gambler”? Need I say more than just the title?

And his insight into life and love was spot on. As a 12-year-old, even I knew that, indeed, it IS “your mind that tricks you into leaving every time” and it IS “your heart that talks you into staying where you are.” See, “love WILL turn you around.” Every time.

Even the lyrics I misheard were profound and evocative. When I heard “take my hand, let’s walk through the store” instead of “take my hand, let’s walk through love’s door,” I pictured Kenny and some girl half-skipping, half-floating through a store, hand-in-hand, not caring if the setting was not typically considered a romantic one because, dog gone it, they were in love. Elsewhere, Kenny proclaimed: “I know this may sound funny / But mommy don’t mean nothin’ to me / I won’t make my music for mommy / No I’m gonna make my music for me.” I realize now that he’s saying “money” and not “mommy,” but at the time, this song was challenging. Back and forth I went in my head: “Why diss your mommy like that?” “Well, it’s not that he doesn’t like his mommy, it’s just that he wants to make it clear that his musical motives come from within.” It was an odd way of saying that, to be sure, but very provocative.

If Kenny’s words inspired my soul, his music inspired my voice. Public or private, it made no difference to me. If Kenny was playing, I was singing. During one of our family’s winter treks to Colorado to visit to family, I was buried in the back of the station wagon as I liked to be. The back, backwards facing seat was folded down, and I was just laid flat, sideways, behind the luggage, inside my sleeping bag, legos and professional wrestling magazines within reach, and Kenny Rogers Christmas music coming through the back speakers. Was there a happier moment in my childhood? Hard to say. It was night, but not late, late night, so whether or not my brother and sister were asleep in the middle seat was hard to say. But when the chorus of “Kentucky Homemade Christmas” kicked in, it didn’t matter. I had to sing, and sing I did. The mile markers said “Kansas” but my heart and voice were in Kentucky with Kenny. When the song ended, it dawned on me that perhaps I was singing pretty loud. Like REALLY loud. I decided to test it by trying to recreate the precise volume with which I was singing, but instead of singing, calling “Mom” to my mom, who was driving. If she could hear me, well, then I was singing pretty loud. I wasn’t sure what I would do with this information, but I wanted to know. “Mom,” I called. “Yes,” she replied. “Crap,” I thought. “Uh, are were almost there?” I didn’t actually care, because I liked the car time, but “Oh, nothing” would have seemed a bit conspicuous. “No,” she replied. “OK.”

Then there was the time I tried to record my own singing ONTO and INTO Kenny’s track on one of his albums, with the goal of creating a “Kenny and Robbie” duet. My ambition outweighed my music recording expertise as I carefully paused the cassette right before “Buried Treasure.” I then placed the cassette in the seldom-used “RECORD” deck of the dual-deck player. Then I pressed “RECORD”. What I hoped would happen is that the song would play so that I could hear it and sing to it, but that the system would simultaneously record MY vocals into the track. There were a LOT of things wrong with this plan, but the only fear I had was that my mom would later listen to the tape and hear too much of my vocals and not enough of Kenny’s. “If that happens,” I thought, “I’ll just have to ‘fess up and accept my punishment, whatever it may be.” I pressed RECORD and, as though pre-ordained to provide Webster with an example beside the entry for “anti-climactic,” nothing happened. No music played. Nothing recorded (apparently you need a microphone for that). My disappointment that nothing good and beautiful happened was offset with my relief that nothing bad happened, and I kept this secret little recording effort to myself.

For as traumatic as it was for me when I discovered that Kenny didn’t actually write nearly all of his songs, my memory of uncovering this information is a bit fuzzy. I may have blocked it out. I THINK it was from a simple and innocent question I asked to my mom: “Mom, what are the names in parenthesis after each song that’s listed on the Kenny Rogers record?” “Those are the names of the people who write the songs.”

Those words shook my world, for this possibility had never even entered my consciousness. It would have been like telling a caveman that the world was round. I was crushed. I felt stupid and deceived. I cried. This profound, insightful man with a voice so full of feeling and depth… He doesn’t write his songs! What in the world is the big deal about him then?!

I searched the liner notes of his albums, hoping that the genuineness of at least a couple of my favorites could be salvaged. One by one, they crumbled to dust before my eyes. “The Gambler.” “Coward of the County.” “We’ve Got Tonight.” Not a single significant-to-me song was saved. Kenny wrote or co-wrote only a couple of songs per album, and they all happened to be the ones I had previously categorized as “not his best stuff.” Of course, it WAS his best stuff. That was the problem.

Without revealing how wounded I was, I tried to glean from my mom some additional insight into this fraud. Apparently, a lot of singers didn’t write their own songs. This was normal behavior, accepted by most. The world was round—I was the only one who didn’t know it.

As I moved from grade school, to junior high, to high school, I moved beyond Kenny Rogers. I could listen to Kenny fine without reliving my painful experience all over again, but I didn’t go out of my way to listen to him. I was a top 40 radio guy for the mid-80’s until I started making money mowing lawns and reffing soccer, and had enough money to buy cassettes of my own by bands and artists that wrote their own songs, like Rick Springfield, Journey, and—of course—Bruce Springsteen.

Into late high school, I got real excited about Bruce releasing “Human Touch” and “Lucky Town” at the same time, and I loved them both. (As an aside: a lot of critics would single out “Human Touch” as Bruce’s single WORST album; it just happened to be the first one of his that I knew inside and out.) From there, I worked my way backwards through the Springsteen discography, discovering that, in fact, it WAS possible for one person to create hundreds of different images and worlds and characters, conveying emotions both extreme and nuanced, joyous and tortured, complete with a gravely, weathered voice and layered instrumentation.

Kenny became an afterthought, and the whole singer/NON-songwriter thing became something I rarely gave much thought to. Until the second semester of my sophomore year of college. I was taking an English class. That’s as specific as I can remember what the class even was. Nor do I remember the teacher’s name. She was probably an old hippy, and was still passionate about the things that hippies stood for, and she let that passion show up in the way she led discussions. Aside from caring—deeply, even—about writing, we didn’t seem to have much in common. Then one day, as class was winding down, she was trying to make some important point about writing as quickly as she could. I don’t remember the point—I was only kind of listening—until she said, “…it’s like when you find out that someone doesn’t write their own songs, and you feel this sense of betrayal…”

Whoa. I had tried to share whatever it was I felt about Kenny Rogers with others, and my story had always been greeted by looks of “I want to understand because I kind of like you.” But here someone got it. She said it, without me asking about it. It’s a little sad that I never got my legs under me enough in high school or even college to be confident in something as simple as “what I got out of a song,” but this did affirm something very important to me.

I had spent many a night in high school and college driving around, listening to songs on the radio. Those songs were recorded hundreds of miles away in places I had never been with equipment I didn’t even know existed. But they were written with something in mind: a feeling, a point, a dream… And—to me, at that time—the fact that they were sung with that “something” in mind was important. The penning and the expression were two sides of the same coin, or two moving points on the same symbol for “infinity,” or complimentary charges of a set of jumper cables clamped onto my soul. Connecting with both the words and the expression of those words—even when I was by myself, in a car, at night—connected me to something real if unexplainable. Someone else, another human with feelings and longings, could see something true—be it beautiful or terrifying—and write and sing about it as if to say directly to me, “I see something that you see or feel, and this is how I express it...”

The expression of this common truth may be better than I could have expressed it myself, or at least different in a wonderful way.

It may give details to something I had only sensed in fleeting moments, like a rainbow I could only see in my peripheral vision and that faded every time I turned to look straight on. Was it even there? Yes, it was.

I met a guy once in college who told me, “The first time I listened to ‘Bobbie Jean’ [Springsteen song on ‘Born in the U.S.A.] I cried.” “So did I,” I told him. But I honestly cannot tell you why I needed to know that the singer of the song also wrote the song in order for me to have that reaction. For me, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts in a mystical way. My English teacher’s passing illustration of something I don’t even remember… well, it was meaningful to me. There was something OK about the way I ingested music and words, creation and expression. Maybe desiring an inseparable connection between the creation and expression was a legitimate way to be wired. Not better or worse than other ways, but equally OK.


I had an epilogue of sorts lined up for this post, but I ended up going in a direction I hadn’t planned. And this is already more of an essay than a post. Endings have never been my strong suit. Can I ask you to pretend this post has a long fade out, like a song you’re listening to in the car, at night, on a lonely road?

-THP