Blessings to all who served and to their families on this Memorial Day.
Someone posted this story on Facebook the other day. I may be the last person in the world to have read/heard about it. Even my husband knew the story. But in case there's anyone else who missed it, this is the story of the song I Drive Your Truck.
The instant I heard this song, I knew it was a blog I needed to post today.
I've always been a country music fan, and this song would beckon to me even if I didn't know the history.
I think what gets me is that it points to the very personal ways we deal with grief.
I hope you'll go to the National Review Online site and read the entire story, but in short,
In the article, Lee Habeeb writes this:
It was the moment when Paul Monti talked about his son’s truck, and why he still has it, and still drives it.
“What can I tell you? It’s him,” Jared’s father explained, nearly choking on his words. “It’s got his DNA all over it. I love driving it because it reminds me of him, though I don’t need the truck to remind me of him. I think about him every hour of every day.”
Lee wasn't the only one who heard the interview.
I wasn’t the only one in a car crying that day. It turns out that a Nashville songwriter named Connie Harrington was in her car, too, listening to the very same story. Moved to tears, she pulled over to the side of the road, scribbling notes as the story proceeded.
She wrote down detail upon detail, everything she could remember. When she got back home, Harrington couldn’t get that story of the soldier’s father and his son’s truck out of her mind. So she did what writers do, and turned the words of that grieving father into a song. With the help of two co-writers, the finished product found its way to singer Lee Brice, who recorded the song called, aptly, “I Drive Your Truck.”
So on this Memorial Day, as we remember all who served, I remember also, those left behind, those suffering the kind of grief Paul Monti described. Thank you.
