Sept. 26 -- Sunday night

Called home to Lubbock after church so Mama could hold the phone up to Mamaw and I could play her the song. The real version, the one I played Thursday in Don's office, not the kitchen-floor version.

Mamaw is 84 and mostly deaf in the left ear, so Mama had to hold the receiver on the right side and there was a lot of "WHAT?" and "SHE'S PLAYING, MOTHER." I played it through once. When I got to the end there was this long quiet on the line, long-distance quiet, the kind that costs you money.

Then Mamaw said, "Well, that's an awful lot of fuss about my hands."

And then she asked if I was eating. I said yes ma'am. I was eating a cold biscuit out of my apron pocket.

Boone called from a truck stop in Missouri at one in the morning, which is when Boone calls. I told him about the contract and he whooped so loud the trucker next to him said something, I could hear it. He said "I knew it, Kels, I told you," and he did tell me, back in 1996, and a lot of times since. Then his phone card beeped at the one-minute warning and he said he had to go. We never finish a sentence anymore. We just have the first halves of a hundred of them.

He's home October 10th. Maybe. The bus needs a transmission.

TIPS: $31 (Sunday, no lunch crowd)  |  ON THE TAPE DECK: Patsy Cline, 12 Greatest Hits, the tape I've had since tenth grade

Sept. 23 -- Thursday

OK. I have to write this down before I jinx it by thinking about it too hard.

Don, the publisher on 17th Avenue who told me in August to "bring me more," called the restaurant. Called the restaurant. Darla handed me the phone behind the ice machine with her eyebrows all the way up. He said he'd heard about "the grandmother song" from somebody who was at the writers' night last week, and could I come by at three.

I went in my work shoes. I played "Mamaw's Hands." He listened with his eyes shut and his hand flat on his desk like he was feeling for a heartbeat. Then he said he wants it. One song. A single-song agreement. He'll own the publishing on it and pitch it, and they'll record it properly in a real studio with real players, and if somebody records it I get my writer's share. His assistant typed it up while I sat there, and I signed it on the corner of his desk with a pen from a bank.

It isn't a staff deal. It isn't money, hardly. It's one song. But it's one song somebody in a building on Music Row wants, after four years and three months and, I just counted, 211 songs in the spiral notebooks under my bed.

I drove home down 16th with the windows open and hollered. Lady at the stoplight looked at me like I was crazy. Ma'am, I am.

TIPS: $52  |  ON THE TAPE DECK: nothing. I sang the whole way home.

Sept. 19 -- Sunday

Double shift yesterday. Brunch today. My feet have filed a formal complaint. Boone's bus broke down somewhere in Arkansas and he called from an all-night diner off the interstate to tell me about it, and I fell asleep with the phone on my chest. Sorry, baby. More later.

Sept. 14 -- Tuesday

Tuesday writers' night at Maxine's, which is a bar with nine tables, a PA from about 1978 and a sign-up sheet that goes around at 6:30. I was sixth. Three songs each, in the round, four writers on stools.

First two went fine. People talked through them, which is normal, the blender was going, which is normal. Then I played "Mamaw's Hands" for the first time in front of anybody who wasn't my cat.

The room got quiet. I don't know how to describe it except that you can feel a bar get quiet from the inside of a song, like pressure dropping before a storm back home. The bartender turned off the blender. A girl at the end of the bar was crying into her napkin. When I finished nobody clapped for a second, and I thought, oh no, and then they did.

The guy next to me on the stools, who has had two cuts on albums and a lot of opinions, leaned over and said, "That's the one, Lubbock." I said, "The one what?" He said, "Just the one."

TIPS: $0 (writers' night pays in free Cokes)  |  ON THE TAPE DECK: Dixie Chicks, Wide Open Spaces

Sept. 9 -- Thursday

Co-write at ten this morning with a guy I met at a guitar pull, a nice guy from Alabama with good hair. He was forty-five minutes late because he was standing in line at a store for some new video game machine that came out today. 9/9/99. He said it like it was a holy day. He showed me the receipt.

Then he wanted to write a truck song. Of course he wanted to write a truck song. So now there exists in this world a song called "Tailgate Moon," with the line she was sittin' on my tailgate like the moon was hers to keep, and I helped. I'm not proud. It's got a good hook, which is the worst part. I will probably never hear of it again, which is how most co-writes go: two people in a little room with a coffee maker, trying to be somebody else for three hours.

Went to work at 11:30. A label man ordered a club sandwich with no bread. I didn't ask.

TIPS: $47  |  ON THE TAPE DECK: Lonestar, "Amazed," on the radio every eleven minutes

Sept. 5 -- Sunday, late

Couldn't sleep, so I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the stove, because the kitchen has the best sound in this apartment, and I wrote the song about Mamaw. The whole thing. It took till almost four. I don't usually write like that. Usually it's a line on a guest check and then three weeks of fighting with it. This one came like it had been waiting outside in the car.

Here's the first verse and the chorus. It's mine, so please don't go singing it at your open mic. Ask me first and I'll probably say yes.

She could shell a mess of purple hulls
before the radio played three,
thumbs stained dark as a thunderhead
from the peas and the dirt and me.
She'd braid my hair on the back step
while the gin roared down the road,
and she never once said "I love you,"
she just carried what I couldn't hold.

Mamaw's hands, Mamaw's hands,
cotton burrs and Sunday flour,
they held the Bible and the hoe
and me through every storm-cellar hour.
Now they shake a little on the quilt,
but they're steady as the land,
and everything I know of grace
I learned in Mamaw's hands.

I cried the whole time I wrote it and I don't even know why, she's fine, she's in Lubbock watching her programs. I think it's that she's 84.

Aug. 24 -- Tuesday

My first meeting with a real publisher in a real office on 17th Avenue, in a house that used to be somebody's house, with gold records in the hallway where the family pictures used to be. His name is Don and he wears reading glasses on a cord.

I played him three songs off my work tape. He listened to about a minute and a half of each and then stopped the tape. That's how it's done here, I knew that, and I still wanted to reach over and hit play again. He said I have "a real voice on paper." He said the songs were "almost." He said, "Bring me more."

Everybody on Music Row says country music is three chords and the truth. They say it like they thought of it. What nobody says is how long it takes to find the truth part. Four years for me, and counting. I have the three chords down fine.

Bring me more. OK, Don. I have more. I have a notebook full of almost.

TIPS: $38  |  ON THE TAPE DECK: Tim McGraw, "Please Remember Me," on the radio, of course

Aug. 15 -- Sunday

Boone's been gone twelve days. He's playing bass for a singer I won't name, who had one hit in 1997 and has a bus with a bad transmission and a lot of county fairs on the calendar. Boone loves it. He's on a stage every night, which is what we came here for, both of us, from two different West Texas towns forty miles apart that we never knew each other in.

How long distance works: he buys phone cards at truck stops, the 300-minute kind. He calls from pay phones in parking lots, usually around one in the morning, and I can hear the highway behind him. I keep the cordless on my pillow. We talk until the card beeps. Last month my own phone bill was $86, which is two good lunch shifts, and I don't regret a minute of it except the ones where we fought.

We fought tonight. About nothing. About whether he called Tuesday or Wednesday. Really about the fact that he's out there doing it and I'm in here carrying club sandwiches. He knows it. I know it. He said, "Your turn's coming, Kels." I said don't. He said OK. The card beeped.

TIPS: $29  |  ON THE TAPE DECK: Faith Hill, This Kiss, because I was feeling sorry for myself