“Love Untold”

This week I am skipping ahead a chapter because I messed up. To prepare for my weekly blog, I start out on Monday thinking about the upcoming topic. I spend the week thinking about it off and on and come up with an approach to take. The problem is, I was thinking a chapter ahead to “Love Untold” and have been working it out all week. It’s fine and I’ll backtrack next week starting tomorrow. 

I have always been a fan of the underdog in life and I spent this week wondering why off and on. Whenever I want to understand something, I think about it, read about it, talk about it, and eventually make sense of it for myself. In the Psychology Today article “Why do we love Underdog Stories? Psychology Weighs In” by Matt Johnson, the author said something interesting that really made me think. Halfway through he argues “The underdog story is one of the most classic storylines with a universal appeal, reliably driving feelings of empathy. They tap into the qualities we like best about ourselves and find most admirable in others.” I have to admit two things here: I am naturally a very empathetic person. I don’t know why but I have always been able to connect with people who are going through something and I promise, it’s genuine. I’m sure people can fake that but I genuinely do feel for people and their experiences so that makes sense to me. But the other issue is even more personal: I guess I have always viewed myself as an underdog too. 

It’s not because I had a tough life or anything. Sure, we weren’t rich, but we certainly weren’t poor either. I had nothing like that as compared to my father. He grew up genuinely poor. I remember hearing stories about him growing up so poor he and his buddy would hunt for pop bottles to sell so they could buy a school carton of milk to split for lunch. He didn’t want the other kids to know he was poor so he wouldn’t eat the free lunch they gave to the poor kids and thought of that breaks my heart. Nobody expected that poor kid to do anything with his life. He was from the wrong side of town and a true underdog, but that boy grew up, joined the Navy, married the love of his life, made something amazing of himself, and has a family that loves and adores him to this day. How can you not respect that?

When I was in 5th grade,  The Outsiders movie came out and it changed me as a kid. It cemented what would eventually become my identity. I became obsessed with it. I read the book over and over, watched the movie everytime I could on cable, and even did a book report wearing rolled up jeans, high topped Converse, and a cut off purple sweatshirt just like Ponyboy. I connected with those boys and now that I’m older, I know why. It’s because that’s how I imagined my own father’s experience. In my mind, my old man was born “grease,” and that’s what I was too. No wonder, I loved Elvis and The Outsiders. Heck, by the time I was a Junior in High School, I was greasing my own hair (actually moussing and hair spraying it…go ahead and laugh) and pulling it down in the front. I honestly looked like some scrawny Elvis/Rebel Without a Cause/Cry Baby rip off in the late 80’s but it was my identity and it stuck.

So I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for the kid no one believes in, the kid who had no shot at success, yet somehow overcame those odds. Rocky Balboa, Daniel LaRusso, and Marty McFly…those guys were my heroes. And that love for the underdog even made its way into my musical tastes with one specific band- the greatest band that could have and should have been-The Replacements. They were a bunch of slackers from Minneapolis who formed a band in 1979. The problem for them was that everytime they got close to really breaking out into the “big time” they usually committed some act of self sabotage. Their early stuff was happily loud, obnoxious, and quite drunken. Their music matured by the mid to late 80’s much to the discontent of their early post punk fans. From 1981 to 1990 they made 7 albums and finally broke up in 1991. 

I wasn’t introduced to them until the Fall of 1990 when I was sitting in ENG 101 class there at the University of KY. My TA’s name was Ben Webb and he was a really cool guy who made a comment about being excited for the new Replacements album (1990’s All Shook Down) which coincidentally was to be their last as a band. I checked it out and fell in love with it. Now some purists would say that doesn’t make me a true Replacements fan because by that time, it was basically a Paul Westerburg solo record and I understand that argument. But for me, I started with that album, then moved back to 1989’s Don’t Tell a Soul, and finally to 1987’s Pleased to Meet Me. I loved those three albums and their “Bash and Pop” sound which bassist Tommy Stinson would later call his own band in the early 90’s. Paul was the genius behind that sound and he went on to have an amazing solo career as well. I personally believe that he is one of the finest underdog lyricists of my generation. His ability to write about everyday experiences in such poignant and playful, thoughtful and irreverent ways still blows my mind to this day. He writes about loners and losers, people who never had a chance or blew the ones they had. And he does it all with conviction and self deprecation. 

A perfect example of this is the song “Love Untold” off of his 1996 album, Eventually. It tells the sweet story of a bashful couple who were supposed to meet but never did. He sings:

They were gonna meet, on a rocky mountain street

Two bashful hearts beat in advance

Their hands were gonna sweat, it was all set

She ain’t showed up yet, still a good chance

It’s a love untold

It’s a love untold

As he sings the first verse, it’s hopeful and you can imagine these two getting ready with the sweet excitement of that first meeting. But as it develops you find out that it never happens. Ever. For some reason, they never meet or fall in love. By the middle of the song you get a sense that it was doomed from the start with “Games will be played, Excuses will be made, The stupid things they said, In their prayers, All about a love untold.” For whatever reason, it just doesn’t work out. By the end of the song the narrator seems crushed: 

They were gonna meet on a crummy little street

It never came to be, I’m told

Does anyone recall the saddest love of all

The one that lets you fall, nothing to hold

It’s the love untold

It’s the love untold

Once upon a love untold

To me, this song illustrates his genius. He takes these nobody characters that nobody cares about and turns their story into a tragedy, using it as almost a warning to us all. I love it and when it came time to pick a song for Mr. and Mrs. Johnson in Chapter 7 of my book If We never Meet Again, this song was perfect. If you haven’t read the book, it’s a chapter about a time I lied straight through my teeth to get a saintly woman back into the ER to see her husband one last time. It was right at the beginning of COVID, and she panicked, called 911, and he coded on the way to the hospital. They stabilized him, and put him on life support. I went with her to the hospital but they weren’t about to let her back in there to see him. I took matters into my own hands, and somehow after waiting there for hours well into the night, I talked the doctor into letting me take her back to him. We walked back there and I helped her stand there beside her husband so she could kiss him goodbye. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever witnessed.

Let’s face it. Outside of their circle, they were nobodies. No one would ever hear about their love story. No one would ever care. Theirs was merely another story that was destined to be a “love untold.” But just like when they told that sweet woman she couldn’t see her husband, I wasn’t about to let that happen. The chapter ends with:

“I was glad I didn’t take no for an answer from the hospital, and I am still glad and completely unashamed to this day that I lied to get her into that room to see the love of her life one last time. I have told some big lies before that I truly regret but not that one. I will gladly pay whatever price I owe for it and do it again without hesitation still to this day.”

It’s one of the best things this underdog has ever done. And I think Westerburg would love that irony.