Lady In Red

After spending a week together with family for an annual reunion, it was time to head back to reality and during the hour-long drive, I made the mistake of listening to this entire song.

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It’s not typical for me to stay on a radio station playing 80s music and this song came out when I was 8 years old. There’s no way I related to it in any way back then. I was more interested in Legos and Saturday morning cartoons.

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Not only did I listen to the entire introduction of the song by Nina Blackwood (she was hosting for the weekend on SiriusXM and I was hooked listening to her raspy voice), I enjoyed her retelling the about the fervor all of the country when this song was first released. She actually didn’t reveal which song she was talking about until the very end so I thought I’d give it a listen. That was my biggest mistake.

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It’s a song that little 8-year-old me would’ve forgotten about 2 seconds after it finished but 45-year-old adult Ben was melting into my seat. Instead of finding another channel, I was drawn back to just a previous relationship, thinking about some of the good moments and basically just being full of regret and hopelessness. I had a “lady in red” but I let her slip through my fingers. It’s her I think about when I’m having my own pity party. When I think my best dating days are behind me, it’s because no one I’ve dated since has affected me as much as she did.

I’m trying hard to believe I’ve still got great things ahead, maybe a beautiful match that will share life with me. It could happen. But sometimes I wish I could go back and do “a lot of things different” as Kenny Chesney would say. So many ups and downs rushing through my mind and all thanks to a 4-minute ballad. What a song. There’s no wondering why it rose to very high on Billboard charts all over the world in the late 1980s.

Do you have any songs that immediately draw out strong feelings, whether they’re good or bad? Tell me about it in the comments below…

-Out of the Wilderness