Music To My Ears

"The kind of humor I like is the thing that makes me laugh for five seconds and think for ten minutes."
-William Davis

There is a well-known American singer that my mother is very fond of. As with a good deal of things that she likes, she encouraged me to take an interest too. My mother discovered the singer last year and, during one particular overseas telephone conversation, she told me that she had heard a very sad story about his life. It seemed that the songwriter had gone away to war, only to return and discover that both his home and his car had been repossessed in his absence.
"It's very sad," cried Mater in defence of the poor, broken man. "He went away, and look at him now."
Something sounded both familiar and odd to me; after a brief listen to the album that my mother had lent me, we determined that it was not, in fact, in any newspaper that she had heard the sorrowful tale- rather, it was embedded in one of the songs. It had not really happened to him at all and she had quite forgotten her source. Oh, how we laughed when I told Mater of her daftness.
Now I cannot listen to that album without a wry smile.