Honky-Tonk Weekly

#15: Tyler Childers, "All Your'n"

This is the fifteenth edition of Honky-Tonk Weekly, a weekly(ish) column here at the Tropical Depression Substack. You can read previous editions here. Every week, I will listen to and share a country song and write whatever comes to mind. Listen along! This week, we’re loving til our lungs give out with Tyler Childers.

We met getting our fingerprints taken. That’s just trivia, just grist for the metaphors. This was in New Orleans, Louisiana. I had just turned 28 and she was 22, who’s counting. She used to run to the door when I came to visit her. I’d hear her footfalls, like an animal.

She was from a farm in north central Florida. I was from Nashville. She liked when I would order champagne at a restaurant for no reason at all. We just fell in, real easy like.

In my memory of that time, we’re always running, running together through the streets, for no reason. We had so much fun in that time, in that place. We never did get arrested.

Her daddy at that point was raising buffalo. He was always up to something or another. Back then, she didn’t eat red meat. So when we brought back frozen packages, I grilled up buffalo burgers just for my own self. He was sick, her daddy was, with cancer. When he would introduce her to strangers, he would say, “this here is my daughter, she don’t eat any meat at’all.”

She told me she loved the part in Willy Wonka where the kids lick the wallpaper. She thought that time-travel romance was an underexplored concept. She felt badly that animals can’t always communicate what they’re thinking to humans.

She was—she is—solid.

This isn’t the whole story. This isn’t much of the story. Just some sketches, some outlines in pencil, the way it was, the way it is, the hum and warmth and fizz.

In New Orleans, there’s a live oak tree adorned with chimes.

We made up a new technology called the “hug deluxe”: You hug each other and scratch each other’s backs at the same time.

Eventually, she convinced me to get a couple of cats. She believed firmly that when a cat slowly closes and opens its eyes, the cat is expressing love. And if you do the same eyes thing back, you are saying, “I love you, too.”

She may believe that still, I’ll have to ask.

She liked to go picking at yard sales. She played trombone. She sewed. She had a way of seeing color, a way of telling stories with color, kind of. I don’t know. I thought, quit your job and paint some more and apply to grad school. And she did.

Here’s something I don’t remember but I found it in an email I wrote about her back then so I guess it must be, must have been, true: “She looks just like someone dreaming when she reads, and will say seriously of a character, He should be ashamed.”

At some point, she got a tattoo of a buffalo. The buffalo is based on a drawing by Charley Harper, an illustrator whose heyday was in the 1960s and 1970s. He’s most famous for illustrating The Golden Book of Biology.

Her family was distraught about the tattoo and there was much worried praying, and perhaps some tears. Toward the end of his life, her father had to sell off the buffalo and a few in her family probably saw the incongruity with the tattoo as comeuppance, though for her it was affirming—a permanence in spirit defined in part by the impermanence of things.

One time we went to the Gulf around Easter. She beat me at putt-putt golf. We’ve always liked beach towns.

Charley Harper called his style minimal realism. “I don’t see the feathers in the wings,” he said, “I just count the wings.”

We’d ride the trolley uptown, through the green bits and the mansions, to the very last stop at the river bend. We’d get off and go to this spot that was painted neon pink inside, or that’s how I remember it. And we’d get daiquiris and get back on the trolley and ride it all the way back downtown, to Royal Street in the Quarter, and by that time we’d be drunk. Then we’d get out and walk around.

I don’t know, I don’t want to underplay the magic of it all, but the magic part was just: we really liked hanging out together. We always did, still do, that’s the love story, or part of it.

A lot of stuff happened, is happening, will happen. Some heavy, some light. Today, this morning, she made chocolate chip pancakes while I wrangled the kiddos. Today is one point on the scatter plot of time and space and back then in New Orleans was another. We just fell in, real easy like.

Under a magnifying glass, fingerprints look like a labyrinth. We bump around, get lost, try to see ahead.

What it was and what it is and what it will be is that all the stumbling is ours. It’s this thing we do together. It’s hard to explain, but I know what I mean, and she does, too.

She likes ketchup, and so does our daughter. Not me. That’s children’s food. My son doesn’t like it either, so now the matter is even in the family. We know these little things about each other. Just trivia, or grist for metaphors.

We both have, I guess, a daydreaming disposition. We like to talk about how it will be, knowing full well that it will be some other way—because a labyrinth isn’t a map, it’s just a labyrinth. Knowing full well that whatever way it will be, it will be ours.