THE WORDS THAT FORMED ME

CHAPTER 19

Kentucky Rain

I cannot remember the first time I heard Elvis Presley sing Kentucky Rain¹, and memory refuses to manufacture a room for me merely because a chapter would benefit from one. I do not know what I was wearing, which radio carried it, or whether anyone else was nearby. What remains is not the arrival but the sensation of a man moving through bad weather because stopping would mean admitting that what he seeks may already be beyond recovery. The song has never sat among my declared favourites, yet it has the irritating authority of something that does not require my affection before it reaches the bone. Some songs ask to be loved, while this one simply keeps walking.

There is a difference between a road that leads somewhere and a road that merely allows movement. Take Me Home, Country Roads² offered the hope that a person could recognise home from a distance and eventually find the turn that carried him back towards it. Kentucky Rain offers no such reassurance, because its road is not a route home but the territory of the search itself. The man at its centre keeps moving through towns, backroads and weather, asking strangers whether they have seen the person who has disappeared from his life. He receives assistance, but he does not receive an ending.

That distinction matters to me because I have spent much of my life believing that persistence would eventually force an answer to reveal itself. Work encouraged that belief, since accounts could be reconciled, problems could be traced and the missing number generally existed somewhere, even when it had been placed in an account bearing no sensible relationship to reality. Business problems were not always easy, but they usually submitted to enough evidence, enough questions and enough refusal to accept the first convenient explanation. Human problems were less cooperative. They could remain out of balance for decades without producing so much as an error message.

The search in Kentucky Rain has gradually become, for me, less about a missing woman and more about the search for sanity. I do not mean sanity as a medical verdict delivered by somebody with a clipboard, nor do I mean the crude division between people who are supposedly sound and those who are not. I mean the search for coherence, for a way of placing what happened beside what I felt and discovering whether the two can occupy the same set of books. It is the search running through Dumbing It Down, where I have tried to understand what was lost when I learned to reduce myself to fit the room. It is also the search behind How Did We Get Here, where the question moves outward and asks how whole communities came to accept outcomes that collapse under even modest examination.

Those two searches travel in opposite directions but keep meeting on the same wet road. Dumbing It Down turns inward and asks what happened to the boy who noticed too much, questioned too readily and discovered that intelligence was not always welcomed as a contribution. How Did We Get Here turns outward and asks why systems, institutions and crowds so often prefer a comfortable answer to a difficult truth. One examines the cost of becoming smaller, while the other examines the world that made smallness appear sensible. Neither has yet produced the person, place or final answer I set out to find.

The love being searched for in this chapter is not confined to romance, although adolescence supplied enough evidence for me to confuse the two. There were girls whose attention I wanted and did not receive, and at the time each disappointment seemed less like a single rejection than another witness called by the prosecution. I was too young to understand that they were young as well, not a formally appointed committee charged with deciding my permanent value. They did not owe me affection, and the older me knows that without qualification. The younger me nevertheless heard their absence as confirmation of something he had already begun to suspect.

That suspicion had deeper roots than adolescent awkwardness. A child does not conduct a mature assessment of the forms in which love is delivered, then make allowances for generational habits, emotional inarticulacy and the parenting customs of the day. A child simply learns whether warmth feels available, whether questions are safe and whether being fully present causes pleasure, irritation or punishment in the adults nearby. Love may have existed in forms I could not recognise, but love that cannot be recognised by the person needing it leaves an absence that behaves very much like denial. The adult can later explain the circumstances, yet the body and the memory often continue to keep their earlier records.

I suspect that is why the song cuts beyond the ordinary sadness of somebody being left. The missing person becomes the missing assurance that I mattered before I became useful, before I could solve a problem, earn an income, explain a tax consequence or carry somebody else’s worry. Usefulness became a very effective substitute because it produced immediate evidence that my presence had value. People might not have wanted the complicated person, but they wanted what the complicated person could do. That arrangement kept me employed, needed and moving, although it never fully answered the original question.

The intellectual wound belongs beside the emotional one because they were never entirely separate. I was not simply looking for somebody to tell me I was clever, since praise of that kind can become another empty certificate pinned to a wall. I was looking for a place where the strength of my mind did not have to be disguised, diluted or translated into something less threatening before it was allowed through the door. Too often, the response to a difficult question was not engagement but discomfort, and the response to a connection others had not yet made was to treat the connection as the problem. Eventually I learned that belonging could sometimes be purchased by pretending not to notice.

That is the rain inside Dumbing It Down. It is not a complaint that every room failed to recognise genius, and I remain wary of any version of the story that turns me into the lone intelligent man surrounded by fools. It is the quieter and more damaging account of learning to mistrust the very faculty through which I understood the world. I could lower the volume, simplify the sentence, leave out the inconvenient step or allow certainty to win because certainty had arrived wearing the correct uniform. Each small adjustment appeared practical, but a lifetime of practical adjustments can leave a person searching for the voice he remembers having before he became so agreeable.

The people encountered along the road are important because the search has never been entirely solitary. Well-meaning people have offered lifts, shelter, theories, encouragement and their own versions of the missing answer. Some have recognised part of me accurately, while others have recognised the part that fitted the framework they already understood. Their help was often genuine, and gratitude does not require me to pretend it was complete. A lift through the rain is still a kindness even when the driver cannot take you to the person you are seeking.

That is one of the song’s most unsettling truths. The searcher meets people who assist him, but each act of assistance merely returns him to the search with slightly more information and no greater certainty. Kindness reduces the immediate hardship without resolving the absence. It is possible to be supported and still remain lost, just as it is possible to receive good advice that does not answer the question underneath the question. The failure of an answer to save me does not necessarily mean the person who offered it failed.

I have sometimes been unfair to those helpers because I wanted more than they could provide. I wanted a teacher, mentor, adviser, friend or loved one to identify the point at which I had taken the wrong turn and direct me back to the undamaged version of myself. That request was impossible, not because nobody cared enough, but because there may never have been an undamaged version waiting beside the road. Childhood does not preserve a sealed original in storage, available for collection once the adult has completed sufficient reflection. We grow around what happens, and the shape of that growth becomes part of the person doing the searching.

There is rage in that conclusion, and I do not intend to make it polite merely to improve the weather. I can become angry at the waste involved when a strong mind is treated as an inconvenience, when curiosity is mistaken for defiance and when a person is rewarded for becoming less than he might have been. I can also become angry at myself for accepting the bargain, even though the child and younger man who accepted it had fewer choices than the older man now judging him. Anger supplies energy for the search, but it can also make every roadside figure look like another person withholding directions. At times I have been so determined to prove that something was taken from me that I have risked overlooking what remained.

Persistence has a noble reputation because we prefer stories in which the person who keeps going is eventually rewarded. The searcher crosses one more town, asks one more stranger and endures one more night, then the missing person appears and the music resolves itself. Kentucky Rain does not offer that comfort, and perhaps that is why it has stayed under my skin without becoming a favourite. It understands that effort and outcome do not operate a joint bank account. A person can give everything and still fail to recover what was lost.

There is another uncomfortable question hidden within the search, and the older me cannot avoid it simply because the song does. Does the person being sought want to be found, and was the imagined home ever shared by both people? The man’s persistence can sound like devotion when heard from inside his pain, but the absent woman may have left for reasons he has not understood or has not wanted to understand. That does not make his grief false, although it complicates his claim upon the ending. Love cannot be restored merely because the searcher has suffered enough to deserve relief.

The same challenge applies to my search for earlier forms of love and recognition. No amount of analysis can compel childhood to return and offer a revised performance, and no later understanding can require the girls of adolescence to provide the validation I once imagined they possessed. The people who failed to recognise my intellect may never accept that anything was discarded, because from their position the reduction may have looked like maturity, cooperation or common sense. I cannot march back along the road collecting apologies as proof that my interpretation was correct. Even if every apology arrived, it would not return the years spent speaking below my natural volume.

That is where searching for sanity becomes dangerous. I can begin with the reasonable wish to understand myself and gradually turn understanding into a condition that must be satisfied before I permit myself to live. I can insist that every contradiction be resolved, every injury named and every missing piece recovered before the mind is allowed to rest. The analytical Jeff is especially vulnerable to this because unfinished accounts offend him, and the human Jeff keeps presenting transactions for which no supporting paperwork exists. Between them, they can convert reflection into an audit with no statutory deadline and no prospect of final sign-off.

There have been many versions of the answer offered along the way. Some have suggested acceptance, some have emphasised achievement and others have implied that the past loses its authority once a person decides to think differently about it. Each contains a portion of truth, but portions of truth are not the same as the whole meal, particularly when the person serving them insists they should be filling. Acceptance can become surrender if demanded too early, achievement can become another disguise for hunger, and positive thinking can become a polite instruction not to mention the rain. I have tried enough explanations to know that an explanation can be useful without being final.

My work as an adviser taught me to speak in another person’s language, and for many years I took pride in being able to make complexity understandable. That ability is not the same as dumbing myself down, although the boundary between the two has sometimes been difficult to see. Translation keeps the full idea and searches for a form in which another person can receive it, while self-erasure removes whatever might disturb the listener before the conversation has begun. One is an act of service, and the other is a fee paid for admission. The tragedy is that I became very good at both.

Perhaps that is one reason writing has become part of the search. On the page I can allow the sentence to take the road it requires, double back when memory objects and carry both the logical explanation and the emotional contradiction without demanding that one of them leave the vehicle. Dumbing It Down does not recover the boy who learned to shrink, but it lets the man examine the measurements used against him. How Did We Get Here does not repair the systems it questions, but it refuses to let absurdity pass as inevitability merely because enough people have become accustomed to it. The books may not be destinations, yet they are places where I no longer have to pretend the rain is fine weather.

Retirement has altered the search because work once supplied both the vehicle and the map. There was always another client, another deadline, another problem requiring the mind I had been taught to restrain everywhere else. Usefulness gave me direction even when it did not give me peace, and professional responsibility could postpone questions that had no obvious entry in the diary. Turning the page sounded like movement, but a blank page does not tell the writer which road to take. Without the old structure, I am more exposed to the possibility that the search itself has been carrying me for longer than any destination could.

This is where this chapter belongs after the preceding one. That chapter asks whether I can begin again without pretending the working years did not matter, while this one asks what happens once the page has turned and the missing answers remain missing. Retirement does not automatically return the parts of a person surrendered to work, conformity or survival. It may simply remove the noise that prevented him hearing how long they have been absent. The rain sounds louder when there is no office door to close against it.

Yet the search has not been entirely barren. Along the way I have met people whose kindness mattered even when their answers did not endure, and I have found language for experiences that once existed only as anger, discomfort or a sense of being misplaced. I have learned that being understood in part is not the same as being dismissed in full. I have also learned that the mind I thought had been discarded was not destroyed, because it kept objecting, connecting and asking how we got here even when I tried to quieten it. A lost thing that continues to call from inside you may not be as lost as it first appears.

That thought does not provide the neat recovery the song withholds. The love denied in childhood cannot be recreated as though time were merely an inefficient filing system, and the adolescent boy cannot be sent back into the room with improved confidence and a prepared speech. The intellectual strength reduced for the comfort of others cannot recover the years in which it might have travelled differently. Some losses remain losses, and calling them formative does not make them gifts. I do not owe gratitude to every wound merely because I eventually found words for it.

What may still be available is the right to stop treating the missing answer as the sole authority over the journey. I can continue asking what happened without assuming that life must remain suspended until the witnesses agree. I can accept help without demanding that every helper become a rescuer, and I can value a temporary lift without pretending it delivered me home. I can recognise the rain, feel its weight and still decide that the next step belongs to me. None of that guarantees arrival.

When I hear Kentucky Rain now, I do not hear a promise that persistence will be rewarded. I hear the sound of somebody moving because movement is the only response he has yet found to absence, and I recognise both the courage and the danger in that. I may never locate the exact point where love, confidence and intellectual belonging slipped beyond reach, because there may have been no single point and no single road. The search for sanity may not end with recovery, but with a less dramatic and more difficult decision about what no longer has to be recovered before I can speak in my own voice. The radio has not supplied the answer, although it has at least stopped pretending that every road leads home.

Notes

1. Kentucky Rain was written by Eddie Rabbitt and Dick Heard. Elvis Presley recorded the song at American Sound Studios in Memphis on 20 February 1969, and RCA released his recording as a single on 29 January 1970.
2. Take Me Home, Country Roads was written by Bill Danoff, Taffy Nivert and John Denver. Denver’s recording was released in 1971 on the album Poems, Prayers and Promises.