The Power of a Song

My sister texted me one evening to say she was watching a tribute to country singer Kenny Rogers on television and singing along. Her husband was surprised she knew all the words. I wasn’t surprised at all.

I immediately thought of his song  Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town and began texting her some of the lyrics.  Written by Mel Tillis, I was just three years old when the song was released by Kenny Rogers in 1969.  I later absorbed it through my grandmother’s record playing.

No one was playing Raffi for us in those days, and so by eight years old I was belting out Kenny’s words about “Ruby” and how she shouldn’t take her love to town. There was something dark and vaguely familiar in the song and I felt it in my little girl bones. The body doesn’t lie, not even to kids. Especially not to kids.

Now that my sister made me think of it again, it played in my head for days. It’s a song that still moves me.

Kenny Rogers is singing about being a war veteran with debilitating injuries.

“It wasn't me that started
That old crazy Asian war
But I was proud to go
And do my patriotic chore”

Even sadder than sending young men- boys, really – off to their deaths or lifelong trauma, is that society somehow convinced them to feel proud to do it.

A paralyzed war veteran on death’s doorstep, he is pleading for his wife to stay home with him when he knows she is headed out to find a lover.

Of course, I hadn’t analyzed any of this as a kid.

Except that on some level, I’d known that my mother had taken her love to town. Or more specifically, to Fort Devens, the U.S. Army post that was half an hour from our home.  In fact, it was the very year that this song was recorded by Kenny Rogers.

Some thoughts the song elicits: Ruby, you heartless, selfish tramp. Hasn’t he suffered enough? You are breaking your already broken man! Get a hold of yourself, girl.

Until the next words, the ones I’d forgotten all about, the ones I’d sang as a child as if they were, I don’t know, normal?

 “And if I could move, I'd get my gun
And put her in the ground”

Yikes, Kenny. Did the war do this to Ruby’s man, this impulse to kill? Or was Ruby a victim of DV before he ever got sent off to Vietnam? Was Ruby finally hotfooting it out of there because now he couldn’t chase after her with his fists? Or his gun.

Who is the real offender here?

My mother’s lover went to Vietnam. As did her brother. My father was in college and thus deferred, spared the horrors of war.  And he never attempted putting my mother in the ground. But she didn’t see her children again.

The last night she lived with us was the night my sister and I stood at the door with her, wearing our winter coats. My father demanded to know where we were going. Then my sister and I were sent to bed, and by the next morning we were motherless, daughters of a castaway. The war at home would leave me grieving silently.

No matter how much time goes by, how much processing and forgiveness I’ve done, or how much gratitude I have for my life now, my heart will remain vulnerable to a song, a memory, something that pulls me back to this time.

It’s not bitterness or even sadness anymore. I think it’s just acknowledgment of the scar, a somatic memory. It’s truth.

For many, it was a convenient time because few people talked about things like violence, grief, loss, or abuse.  How many generations hold untold stories, unquestioned narratives? How many offensives, atrocities, are buried beneath all the distractions of life, wounds untreated?

The convenience of silence always catches up. The body tells the truth. The heart knows the story.

And that is why I’ve never forgotten the words to “Ruby”.

 It is why I chose to write my book  YOU-KNOW-WHO: AN ALIENATED DAUGHTER'S MEMOIR. 

Dana can be found at https://danalaquidara.com/