Jenny read my blog post yesterday….the mushy one with the mushy song….and said, “That was one of the most maudlin songs ever written.”

Well…..yeah.

I knew it was maudlin.

But, dang…it was effective. She heard that song…..and SHE LOVED ME!!!

Or, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that maybe it was the other way around.

Maybe….she loved me first….and told me she liked the song because she loved me.

I get the feeling that when she cared about me that she let me believe that I had some kind of “game”.

I think that she let me believe that I was a pretty competent fellow.

I wonder how many women do that for their men?

Anyway….it’s not something that I can figure out this morning before I’ve had all of my coffee.

That song that I put on my blog yesterday is pretty maudlin.

That’s why this morning I felt like I better bring it back down to earth with a good John Prine song.

Everything in this song doesn’t apply to Jenny…or to me.

It’s just a song that I couldn’t have played on the radio….even if I’d had it back then….

“in spite of ourselves” John Prine and Iris Dement

Now HOW’S THAT FOR A SONG!!

That’s one I could have used to woo her, for sure.

“Woo”….that’s an interesting and gentle way to describe relationships.

I could “woo” my wife!

There’s a plan.

I started out the morning kind of funny, actually.

This has nothing to do with “wooing”….it’s just something funny that happened.

I put my hands down on the keyboard…..and I guess that I was drinking some coffee or something….no….I need two hands to type….I don’t know what I was doing….but, I must have put them down wrong or something and when I looked up, all my typing looked like this….

kom yjr p;f [;svr upii tr;s;;u jsf yp ;pp; gpt yjr [rp[;r ejp ,ohjy ,n ;pplomh gpt yjrp;f esud pg fpomh yjomh/////

tyv….er, etc.

I thought that I was doing right….but there was a shift somewhere that threw the whole shebang off just a little….and I couldn’t even read what I’d written when I was done.

I wouldn’t have even known that something was wrong if I didn’t have a computer screen to look at.

I would have known anything at all.

I think that the thing that really would have messed me up would be the thought that I knew what I was doing….so how could anything be wrong?

Funny.

I remember a driving lesson with my Dad.

He said, “The light is changing color up there.”

I knew it all….”Yeah, I see it.” I was as cool as I could be with my sister and our dog in the car, while I was learning to drive our old Fairlane station wagon.

Pretty soon, my Dad yelled, “STOP!!” so I slammed on the brakes and fishtailed for what seemed like a hundred yards between the cars that were already stopped on either side of me.

(It scared those “careful drivers” to see me slide past, tires smoking and squealing, wide-eyed…)

When we stopped, Dad caught his breath and asked, “Didn’t you see the light? The light I told you about?!”

Yeah….

It turned out that I was looking at the next light up ahead….the wrong light….not the one that said, “STOP NOW!!!”.

I was looking at the one that said, “Slow down….you’ve got this, new driver!!! GOOD JOB!!!”

What the heck was everybody so excited about, anyway?! We survived, didn’t we?

That was a maudlin song yesterday, wasn’t it?