The story goes ......
...... that when Tammy Wynette told her first husband
she was taking the three kids and leaving him,
to drive their beat-up station wagon to Nashville,
Euple Byrd (his real and comedy name) asked
why she was going there.
"To become a star."
The chronic, scathing Byrd spat: "Dream on."
With a CV of church singing and harmonising,
and a teardrop-sob in her voice, she made records,
hits of love, loneliness, heartache, heartbreak, divorce,
of being a woman, standing by her man, her men.
When I was a child, I wanted to be a bus driver,
a priest, an actor, maybe a writer when I grew up,
but I was never damned with any tight-lipped sneering
“Dream on” dripping with sarcasm.
My mother and several others, but especially my mother,
encouraged my dreams as mothers do,
even though I never drove a bus, wore a collar, trod the boards,
dreams of writer’s fame long gone.
Years after splitting, Euple Byrd asked
the famous Tammy Wynette for an autograph.
She wrote:
“Dream on!”
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