Musicians & Truckers

“Musicians and truckers are the only people I hang out with,” declared the man in a denim jacket after I finished my set at Midnight Oil Brewing.

His name was Marty, and his delicate white hair hung out of a ball cap with a logo I didn’t recognize. He sported a white beard, save for the hairs around his lips which were stained nicotine yellow. His skin was wrinkled rawhide, his voice a cigarette-scarred croak as he launched unprompted into story after story.

Marty was both a musician and a trucker, eager to tell me about his long stretches on the road and the musicians he’d met along the way. He told me about jamming on mandolin with Marty Stewart at a truck stop in Oklahoma (“We were having a Marty Party.”). He said he and Harry Chapin were good friends, that he heard directly from Harry’s brother Tom when Harry had died suddenly on Long Island. And he was dismissive of Dolly Parton (I won’t deign to repeat what he called her) because she wouldn’t accept his help when her tour bus was broken down.

I could feel my bullshit detector blaring inside me. And for once, I shut it off. Here’s a man telling stories to an audience he might not usually have. The truth is surely stretched - we all bend our memories to be slightly more exciting than they may have seemed at the time. 

Of course the hard truth is important, when you’ve got to make important decisions or you’re assessing the character of someone you might marry or hire for a job.

But the truth can box us in when we meet new people, and part of the joy of this short life are the stories we encounter and our ability to hold one another in a moment, to take a listener places they’ve never been before. And I’m trying to remain open to that.