Dead Crush #7

My favorite Johnny Cash song is “Ballad of Barbara.” I’ve been listening to it a lot lately in my car, and whenever it’s over, I get choked up. Sometimes I start crying, and then when I walk into the house crying, (which I do often, for some reason--I do a lot of my crying in the car) I have to tell my dog, "I'm sad," because she always gives me such a weird look when I cry, as if she's not sure it's really me. She doesn't really understand me when I say this, but sometimes she will run to me with both the kong AND the nylabone in her mouth, instead of just the nylabone.

If you don’t know the song, it’s about a man who grows up in the country: “I worked in the fields, and I walked in the woods, and I wondered at creation.” Then,when he becomes a man, he moves to the city. He lives a wild life where people “sleep all day and they wake all night to a world of drink and laughter.” In this world he meets Barbara, whom he marries. She doesn’t care about his country home or his people; in fact, she loves the city so much that by the end of the song she actually turns into concrete and steel. Then the last lines: “Now the cars go by on the interstate, and my pack is on my shoulder; and I’m going home, where I belong, much wiser now, and older.” The way he sings those last words, so slowly and deliberately: “and older,” suddenly makes the whole song about the last two words: running away is something you have to do when you’re young. You have to try out that which is opposite. It’s a way of asking yourself who you are, even if it means abandoning your family, your solitude, your life. When his woman turns away from him, the protagonist knows that it’s time to go back to himself. Instead of regressing, he’s moving forward to the life he used to have. He tried marriage to the person made of skyscraper parts, and now he’s returning to himself, a lone man in the woods, surrounded by green things growing.