Digital Cowboy

Lipstick letter
‘cross the mirror this morning
Said, ‘Goodbye, Baby.’
She left with no warning.

Like a thief in the night
She ran away with my heart.

Can’t believe my eyes
Must be a bad dream
She always said
We had a good thing
Never once let on
We were fallin’ apart.

That ain’t no way to go.
Girl, it just ain’t right.
Don’t you think I deserve
To hear you say, ‘Goodbye?’
That ain’t no way to go.
Was it all a lie?
After all this time
That ain’t no way to go.

Gettin’ nowhere
I’m tired of thinking.
Guess I’ll do a little
Wishful drinkin’.

Train whistle blowin’
Down the track.

Lonesome sound says
She ain’t comin’ back.
Such a cold blow
From outta the dark.

That song describes my experience exactly. The funny thing is that, in my case, she didn’t just run away with my heart. She also ran away with a lot of stuff that didn’t belong to her, including that CD. It was one of my favorite CDs for years before I even met her and she never much cared for it. When I went looking for that song, I discovered the CD was gone. Then I went looking for Trace Adkins’ Dreamin’ Out Loud so I could listen to “Every Light in the House” and “A Bad Way of Saying Goodbye.” Take a guess. Also gone. Then I went looking for… Well, you get the picture. About a dozen in all.

Despite the fact that she had spent hours ripping and burning CDs to prepare for this trip, she took the originals of every CD I had with a bad goodbye song on it. Most of them were favorites of mine for other reasons.

With children involved, you don’t exactly fight for custody of compact discs.

Interestingly, she also took my portable CD player because the car I bought her only had a cassette stereo. (I knew about the player – I gave her that to take. The missing CDs I didn’t discover until much, much later because she took the discs and the liner notes and replaced the cases in my meticulously ordered rack of hundreds.) She returned the CD player without me ever even mentioning it. When it came back, unrequested, it had a CD in it. One of mine? No.

It was Reba McEntire’s Read My Mind which contains the song “I Wish That I Could Tell You”. If you care at all about this story, click for the lyrics and see if you agree that it wasn’t an accident. It was clearly a priority message and I refused delivery. (If you don’t care, why are you still reading?)

But I got an iPod and a gift card for the iTunes music store for Christmas. So, I’ve at least got my Brooks & Dunn album back now.

For those prone to worry, don’t. As I type this my iPod is also getting loaded with hours of preaching and praise & worship music. I’m a very versatile guy.