Big Wheels Keep on Turning

"Music is the art which is most nigh to ... memory."

-- Oscar Wilde

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I do a lot of driving. I'm really not complaining about this; most of the driving is within a 200-mile radius, and I'm home basically every night.

Tonight is an exception. I'm in Louisville for a conference. Being a bit of an introvert by nature, I opted not to attend the social event going on downstairs (although I was briefly tempted by the fact that they're offering karaoke -- I might be an introvert, but I relish the opportunity to drop some "Levon" on an unsuspecting audience). Instead, I picked up dinner and decided to use the downtime to write another blog.

Driving and music go hand in hand. There might be an occasional moment when I like some silence while I'm on the road, but those moments are rare. Most of the time, I prefer to be listening to something.

Some of the drives that stand out as memorable in my mind are memorable precisely because of the music. And that's what I'd like to write about this evening. I'd also love to hear about some of yours, if you feel like sharing.

So here goes, in chronological order:

* Bowling Green to Harlan, 2004. To close out my first basketball season as a sports editor, I had driven down to cover Rockcastle County in the Girls Sweet 16. The Lady Rockets lost in the first round, and I found myself driving home ... in mid-March ... with temperatures in the low 90s.

The weather alone would have made for an amazing drive, but I also had some additional help in the form of a couple of CDs: Bruce Springsteen's Greatest Hits (my introduction to The Boss as a fledgling fan) and In the Name of Love: Artists United for Africa, a U2 tribute album by several primarily Christian artists. I distinctly remember being on the Cumberland Parkway with the windows rolled down and Bruce's "Better Days" blaring through the speakers -- it was a feeling of pure elation.

* Home to Myrtle Beach, 2006. From the time my wife and I got married in 1999, she tried to get me to go to the beach with her. I'm ashamed to say I wasn't interested. Having been to Daytona a couple of times in high school, my response was, "I've already seen the ocean." Finally, after six and a half years of wedded bliss, she convinced me to go.

I was satisfied with the decision before we even got there. I was working nights at the newspaper at the time, so I worked until 2:30 a.m. the day we planned to leave, and we hopped in the car and hit the road when I got home. We stopped for breakfast at a Waffle House in North Carolina (this is now a set-in-stone tradition when we go to Myrtle Beach) and continued on our way. I was driving the first leg while Steph dozed in the passenger seat.

Not long before, I had made myself a copy of David Crowder's A Collision (or 3+4=7). The album was, in my opinion, the crowning achievement of Crowder's career, the turning point at which he ceased to be just another worship leader and became one of the few true artists in Christian music. I remember passing from North Carolina into South Carolina on I-26 shortly after sunrise, sipping a cup of Waffle House coffee as Crowder and the band flowed seamlessly from the power ballad "Come Awake" to a hoedown courtesy of the Hank Williams classic "I Saw The Light."

* Louisville to Harlan, 2009. Three years ago, I was a first-time attendee of the same conference I'm at right now. With my boss's permission, I left early the second day so I could get back for my full-time job at the newspaper that night. I stopped by my dad's house in Lawrenceburg for a quick visit, then took the backroads all the way to Mount Vernon.

It was another fantastic weather day -- sunny, in the lower 80s, a perfect day to roll down the windows in my old Nissan 240SX. My music of choice that day was a compilation I made years ago. I named it "Old School Country," although "old school" can be a bit subjective. Completely oblivious to any stares I might have received, I sang along with every guilty pleasure, from Hal Ketchum's "Small Town Saturday Night" to George Jones' "Bartender's Blues" to the Oak Ridge Boys' "Elvira" to Don Williams' "I Believe in You." Nothing earth-shattering or profound about this one; just a lot of fun -- and isn't that all we want from music sometimes?

* Home to Paintsville, 2012. A couple of months ago, I had to make an impromptu trip up US 23 to deliver documents to some owners who wanted my company to manage their properties. My work truck doesn't have a means of connecting my iPhone or iPod to the sound system, so I'm usually stuck with CDs or the radio. A few days earlier, I had put some different CDs in the truck, as I was tired of the ones I already had in there.

One of them ended up being an excellent fit for this particular trip. Quite unintentionally, I found myself listening to Dwight Yoakam's Last Chance for a Thousand Years, a greatest-hits collection, as I drove through his hometown of Prestonsburg. I've always been fascinated by Dwight Yoakam. He's equal parts hillbilly twang and cutting-edge cool. Who else could pull off Queen and Buck Owens?

Listening to "Fast as You" as I cruised through Prestonsburg got me thinking about the brown road signs that are posted along US 23, the Country Music Highway, celebrating the artists who have gone on to make eastern Kentucky so proud -- people like Yoakam, Patty Loveless, and the biggest star of them all, Loretta Lynn.

It's so easy to focus on the negative things about our area. Across the country, if you say Appalachia, so many people think of poverty or Oxycontin. And these things are part of our past and present; there's no denying it. But right alongside that -- and even surpassing it -- we have a rich legacy. Of music. Of natural beauty. Of hard work and pride. These things might not always be as evident now, but I'm not ready to give up on it just yet -- and you can partly thank Dwight Yoakam for that.

So tomorrow afternoon, I'll hop in the truck and hurry home to my ladies. The weather's supposed to be nice, as far as I can tell. I have a few CDs I'm eager to listen to.

Maybe I'll make another memory.

Signs

"They'll know us by the billboards that we make,

Just turning God's words to cheap cliches."

- Derek Webb

T-Shirts (What We Should Be Known For)

My job requires that I drive. A lot.

Doing a heavy amount of driving in America means you're bound to see a lot of church signs. Doing a heavy amount of driving in rural America increases this exponentially.

I've seen all the classics:

"Stop, drop and roll won't work in hell."

"God answers all knee-mail."

"Try our Sundays; they're better than Dairy Queen."

"You think it's hot here?"

"Get off Facebook and into the Good Book."

I could go on and on. In fact, the good folks over at The God Article have a whole section devoted to photos of cringe-worthy (or snicker-worthy) church signs. Some of them are harmless enough -- although, to borrow a thought from an article Chris Rice wrote in Relevant magazine several years ago, we should be very careful about reducing our messages about God to a simple sentence on a sign.

Some, however, are dangerous.

While driving up US 25 between Pineville and Barbourville last week, I passed a church with the following posted on its sign:

"The next life is more important than this one."

I suppose the intention, as with many church signs, was to frighten or intimidate people into "getting saved." I could use the rest of this space arguing that any decision made under such duress would almost certainly not last (think of Jesus' parable about the seeds that fell on shallow ground and didn't have deep roots).

But let's dig a little deeper.

First, intentionally or not, the statement is only half an affirmation of the afterlife. The other half is a nullification, or at least a minimization, of the value of this life.

It's not unusual to hear preachers refer to the Bible as a "roadmap" to heaven. (I wonder why it's always a roadmap, never just a map. I don't go to Roadmapquest.com or pull up Google Roadmaps when I need directions. But I digress.) The truth is, if we're judging by biblical content, this life is pretty doggone important; the Bible has surprisingly little to say about heaven or hell, but much to say about how God means for us to live here on earth:

Things like taking responsible care of the planet. Things like treating one another with kindness and patience. Things like loving our enemies.

These are things that will be irrelevant when we're in "the next life," the one that the church sign said was so much more important. And these are things that change the world we live in now.

Which leads to my second point. Ignoring or devaluing this life in favor of "the next" one is ... well ... selfish.

I'm reminded of my favorite episode of Seinfeld. In "The Burning," Elaine discovers that Puddy is a Christian. Eventually, they get into an argument, which leads to this classic dialogue: 

Elaine: "David, I'm going to hell! The worst place in the world! With devils and those caves and the ragged clothing ... and the heat -- my God, the heat! I mean, what do you think about all that?"

Puddy: "Gonna be rough."

Elaine: "Ugh, you should be trying to save me!"

Puddy: "Don't boss me! This is why you're going to hell."

Elaine: "I am not going to hell, and if you think I am going to hell, you should care that I'm going to hell, even though I am not."

Puddy: "You stole my Jesus fish, didn't you?"

Elaine: "Yeah, that's right!"

I guess I took the scenic route to my point, but here it is: A faith that encourages us to care primarily about what happens after we die will almost certainly be a faith that has little bearing on the world around us.

I would much prefer to focus on this life -- on being the man I was created to be in the here and now -- and let heaven take care of itself.

I'm reminded of one of my favorite Donald Miller quotes, one I frequently think about when I start to wonder whether my beliefs about the afterlife are correct. In Blue Like Jazz, Miller writes:

“At the end of the day, when I am lying in bed and I know the chances of any of our theology being exactly right are a million to one, I need to know that God has things figured out, that if my math is wrong we are still going to be okay. And wonder is that feeling we get when we let go of our silly answers, our mapped out rules that we want God to follow. I don't think there is any better worship than wonder.”

So let's commit ourselves to changing the world, in small ways and large. And let's enjoy the wonder.