My two cents — I think this tale/song is told from the perspective of a man reflecting back on a traumatic event from younger years in his life. In the first verse he is telling of his adolescent years when he was about 10 or 11 years old. He and his family were poor and they lived outside a small town on an old dirt road. To drive into town they had to pass an old, rundown shack that a poor, old, crazy woman named Mary lived in. (They all lived on the wrong side of the tracks) As a young boy, the narrator was fascinated with Mary because she was such a character….with her wild eyes, flailing arm gestures.
In the second verse I think the narrator is an older teenager, about 17 or 18. There is nothing to do in this small, boring town, so everyone just hangs out outside the corner store and drinks beer. To get to the corner store from his home he has to drive his old blue car past Mary’s shack and past the Parson’s place. The Parson’s are another family that live off that same old, rural dirt road. One night the narrator is particularly drunk. He is driving home on a big, beer high. Even though there is a rainstorm and he can’t see well, he is speeding along and he feels like he is “flying high above the trees and over the hills”.
The next day on the way into town as he approaches old Mary’s house he sees skid marks in the road and suddenly his world comes crashing in around him. He realizes that the dream he had of Mary’s newspaper covered walls wasn’t a dream at all…it was his fuzzy, disjointed, hung-over recollection of the events of the night before. He had crashed through Mary’s shack driving home.
When he says, “that which you fear the most can meet you halfway” he is talking about death. Death met him halfway…he didn’t die, but he took another life with his drunk driving from the night before. As a grown man, he will never get over this…and we realize the tragedy of the song/story.
My two cents — I think this tale/song is told from the perspective of a man reflecting back on a traumatic event from younger years in his life. In the first verse he is telling of his adolescent years when he was about 10 or 11 years old. He and his family were poor and they lived outside a small town on an old dirt road. To drive into town they had to pass an old, rundown shack that a poor, old, crazy woman named Mary lived in. (They all lived on the wrong side of the tracks) As a young boy, the narrator was fascinated with Mary because she was such a character….with her wild eyes, flailing arm gestures.
In the second verse I think the narrator is an older teenager, about 17 or 18. There is nothing to do in this small, boring town, so everyone just hangs out outside the corner store and drinks beer. To get to the corner store from his home he has to drive his old blue car past Mary’s shack and past the Parson’s place. The Parson’s are another family that live off that same old, rural dirt road. One night the narrator is particularly drunk. He is driving home on a big, beer high. Even though there is a rainstorm and he can’t see well, he is speeding along and he feels like he is “flying high above the trees and over the hills”.
The next day on the way into town as he approaches old Mary’s house he sees skid marks in the road and suddenly his world comes crashing in around him. He realizes that the dream he had of Mary’s newspaper covered walls wasn’t a dream at all…it was his fuzzy, disjointed, hung-over recollection of the events of the night before. He had crashed through Mary’s shack driving home.
When he says, “that which you fear the most can meet you halfway” he is talking about death. Death met him halfway…he didn’t die, but he took another life with his drunk driving from the night before. As a grown man, he will never get over this…and we realize the tragedy of the song/story.