Wearing Tennessee Orange for Him

By Bobby Neal Winters

God has gifted me with three daughters.  My wife was involved to a certain degree in this as well, but I am giving God the credit because the sex of the child is a random process, and I am thanking God for loading the dice.

Don’t get me wrong.  Boys are okay. I’ve got a pair of grandsons I can build things for, but I am happy that I’ve had daughters.  Even before I was married, whenever I thought about the future, I imagined having daughters, never sons.

Well it happened.

And what I want to tell you is that my experience is that daughters own you, heart and soul.

I always knew I loved them, but I didn’t realize how much until just before bed on the day my eldest got married.  We’d had the wedding. We’d had the reception. I’d danced the first dance with my daughter to the song “I Loved Her First,” and I cried a bit then.

But then I got home and was locking up the house.  Before whenever I locked the front door I’d always left the porch light on because my eldest would be coming home late.  When it occurred to me than I could turn the light off because she wouldn’t be coming home, I absolutely lost it.  It was not a moment of great control.

Indeed, in recalling it more than a decade later, the tears are here on my cheeks again.

But this doesn’t happen often.  I am a man. I bury my feelings like we are supposed to.  It frightens the women and children when we don’t, so they lie there within us covered up.

Until something taps into them.

With me it’s usually music. “I Loved Her First” by Heartland will do it, of course, but recently in my woodshop I was listening to the Dolly Parton Channel on Amazon Music from my Alexa as I was chiseling away when it played a song by Megan Moroney entitled “Tennessee Orange.”

For those of you who are familiar with the song, you might be surprised.  The lyric set up is kind of a joke.  A girl is calling her mother and is going through the process of breaking shocking news: In spite of being raised correctly in a good, southern home from the State of Georgia, she has not only fallen in love with a boy from Tennessee, not only begun to attend football games with him, but is wearing “Tennessee Orange” as she does so.  She is even a bit disgusted with herself because she is learning the words to “Ol’ Rocky Top.”

Moroney’s skill as a singer--as well as that of the lyricists--keep this from being a novelty song.

We men of the traditional stripe view ourselves as protectors.  We were raised that way.  We were taught from the time we were little that we shouldn’t ever hit a girl and, because of our greater physical strength, should open doors for them, reach heavy objects from shelves for them, open jars for them, and protect them from the violent, baser sort of men who were not raised correctly.

We did not create this tradition; we were simply born into it.

That tradition was created with the knowledge that, however well we might take care of ourselves, we will get older, more feeble, and less able to be protectors.  Indeed, we will eventually die probably long before our daughters.  At that time, we won’t be able to do anything at all. It is because of this, that there is the part of the wedding ceremony where we give our daughter away.

Then it’s the husband’s job to protect--unless he’s the baser sort of violent man and we have to shoot him.

There is a line in the chorus of “Tennessee Orange” that goes:

He ain't from where we're from, but he feels like home, yeah /

He's got me doin' things I've never done

This took me back to the same feeling I had turning off the porchlight all those years ago.  My youngest daughter has found a young man from another state.  He’s a motorhead with many of the skills that go along with it and has her--who was in all the time she was at home quite a girly-girl--working on cars and occasionally welding.

All of the emotions that we men are taught to bury came bursting forth, and tears flowed from my eyes like a waterfall.  Fortunately, it was just me and my chisel to witness it.

But, as I said, thank God for my daughters.  I don’t know what life would be without them.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.