I mentioned this in an older entry, but to recap, when I was 16 years old my parents and sister had gone to Vermont for a week-long vacation as we did every summer. The difference was that I had stayed because I “had a job” except really I just didn’t want to be away from my boyfriend for a whole week. I mean, gasp! A week! Seven days! I would have died!

So I stayed. They left. The very first day that they were gone? He dumped me over the phone. So that was, you know, a lot of fun.

When I called my parents, 2.5 hours away, and cried, my dad hopped in his car and drove all the way back home, spent the night and then drove me to Vermont so I wouldn’t be alone. I was utterly miserable, convinced no one would ever date me again and that at 16 years of age I was destined to be a spinster who would die surrounded by my 15 cats. I didn’t know if I could manage a smile, so it was something of a shock that a song made me laugh.

Whenever we got within about a half hour of our vacation spot (a recreational trailer park in Alburg right on Lake Champlain), we’d be able to pick up a local country music station. My parents loved country music. At the time I was a closet country fan (now I shout it from the rooftops). Two songs in, they played a new song from a mostly-unknown at that time singer – Trisha Yearwood. The song was “She’s In Love With the Boy”.

You’d think a broken-hearted girl would rather hear songs about people who have “been done wrong” and mope with a bottle of whiskey with their hound dogs or something, anything other than a song about how much a boy and girl love each other.

However, when the chorus hit the line “her Daddy says that he ain’t worth a lick, when it came to brains he got the short end of the stick” I just started giggling and couldn’t stop.

I was sad most of that vacation but at least I wasn’t alone at home. And that station played that song at least twice per day so I heard it a lot and it never once failed to make me laugh.

See? Not all country music is about sad things!