Well, I’m butchering an unrelated country song title, but I saw this meme on Facebook:
And I immediately thought about the song “The Bird” by Jerry Reed:
And I remembered when it was on the radio:
It was 1982. I was freshly ten years old; my parents were separated for probably a year. My mother listened to country and western on the radio when we lived in Milwaukee before shifting to oldies when we lived in St. Louis, which explains my listening habits as I grew up (I didn’t learn I could change the station on the radio and did not have a radio of my own until I was about thirteen, which explains why I was so pressed to think of a pop song as a favorite song on a questionnaire when I was chosen as Student of the Week in eighth grade and had to go with “Ghostbusters” as both my favorite song and movie). We spent a lot of time with the Odya boys, and I remember singing along with them when “The Bird” came on the radio.
I’m not sure I had heard the song between then and looking it up on YouTube to post as a comment on Facebook.
But now I have, and I feel all thirty-six years that have passed.
