Mirrors, Trains, Rain, and Country Songs

Walking in the rain this morning, I was forced to wait for a slow-moving train and felt as if I were in the middle of a country song. For those unfamiliar with this genre, country songs are usually urban in setting and include rain, heartbreak, trains, guns, drinking, mama, and a cheatin' lover who turns the dog against you. I stood watching the train roll by and thinking about a woman I've never met.

She calls herself Moonbeam McQueen. I've been following her funny, heart-breaking, brilliantly-written blog since 2006, as it has documented the end of a relationship, the acquisition of a dog, the birth of a grandchild, several thankless and demanding jobs, illness, hope, and a new roommate she calls Amadeus. He's a bass player who performs in barrooms and has a kind heart, and back when she moved into a shared apartment with him, I predicted he might end up being the love of her life--and bingo! I was right. They got married a few months ago.

She has an irrepressible spirit, and she likes to go fishing. Like me, she's a working class woman with southern roots who has had a hard-scrabble life with nary a pot to piss in. Now she's trying her hand at self-publishing and has produced her first book, a collection of her "light verse" called Peculiar Rhymes and Intimate Observations. It's available as everything but a paper book. It's an e-book, a pdf, an audio book, and several other things--for the price of a cup of coffee.

One of her poems pretty much covers how I feel about my Blip friends:

Invisible Friends

I love you though I've never met you,
I adore you though you're out in space,
You're gorgeous to me, though I'll never see
The expression upon your dear face.
We talk through electric connection,
We speak through a laptop device,
It's stranger than hell,
That I know you so well,
But I think that it's all rather nice.

She writes about music, about women surviving menopause, about kids and dogs, dead poets and dead-end jobs. She even writes light verse about her father's suicide, but she does it so well that I'm sure he'd have loved it himself. Here's another one I like, a take-off on Emily Dickinson.

Redirect

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
I said, "Sorry Death- wrong address,
It's the guy in apartment 3."

So here's a blip for Moonbeam McQueen. And here's a country song for us both to go out on.

Edit: decided to convert it to mono while I still have the choice to change it, and I think I like the mono better.