“My Wife Ran Off With My Best Friend and I Sure Do Miss Him.” Those lovely lyrics filled my ears as I drove own I-35. Then came “Red Neck, White Socks and Blue Ribbon Beer,” and I knew I should have stuck by my guns.

There was a time only months ago when I swore I would never drive through Texas again — no, not because of any affinity to the current administration in Washington, just because it can be such a brutal trip.

Of course, with a daughter and two granddaughters in Fort Worth, that was an empty threat. But I could still hold fast to my vow if I never went any further than Fort Worth and back. Not.

There I sat on Sunday morning near downtown Houston, ready to head for Panama City and a much-anticipated reunion with a military school classmate who is hospitalized there. I met a friend I went to school with from fifth grade on here in Houston (in fact, we celebrated his wife’s 70th birthday Saturday night with a lovely dinner) and we headed for Central America Monday. But getting here is the story.

Driving across Kansas, through the heart of Oklahoma, and down to the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is a day’s drive, any way you cut it. DFW to Houston takes another four hours, potty stops and all. I had neglected to secure a book-in-a-box to pass the time, and I would never, ever, use a hand-held cellular telephone while driving, so all that remained for me to do was to listen to the radio.

Now granted, that is a somewhat more pleasurable with the luxury of XM, and this time I decided to get a little crazy and move across the dial from my trusted ‘50s music and the jazz channels to see what other offerings were there for my listening pleasure. Well, I found channels 10 through 14 to be country and western music, of one kind or another, and since I was transversing cowboy country, I decided to fully immerse myself in the experience.

The America music channel has fewer commercials; Nashville is Nashville oriented, and Willie’s Place is, well, quite a lot of Willie Nelson, with a wide selection from other artists. Now I come from a part of the country when country music is not unheard of, but it was never my genre of choice. I even went to the Grand Ol’ Opry a couple of times while I was in military school, 30 miles east of Nashville — on free tickets from Ophelia Colley, a friend my mother had grown up with. You would recognize her by her straw hat with the still-attached price tag and her familiar “Howdeee, I’m jus’ so proud to be here,” or by her stage name, Minnie Pearl.

Well, needless to say, country music — like most everything else — seems to have changed quite a bit since the days of Roy Acuff, Hank Williams, Hank Snow and Ferlon Husky. Lyrics as well as performers have taken a turn toward more modern entertainment.

But I get it that the themes are still the same: lost loves, rain, railroad tracks, pickup trucks, and loneliness — in no particular order. And the sentiments are pretty much the same as always, too.

Please understand I am taking some literary license here when I run through the titles of some of what I enjoyed (endured) on my drive through Texas, but not by much.

Where else are you going to hear expressed sentiments like, “If I Had Shot You When I Wanted To, I’d Be Out by Now?” or “If the Phone Don’t Ring, You’ll Know It’s Me.” Touching, through and through.

The songs kept coming as the miles rolled by. I listened to numbers like “How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away?”, “I Keep Forgettin' I Forgot About You,” and “I Liked You Better Before I Got To Know You So Well.”

If those numbers didn’t bring a tear to your eye and a palpitation to your heart, the next set (as I crossed the Oklahoma-Texas line) sure would have. It started with “I'm So Miserable Without You, It's Like Having You Here,” and then came two really sentimental numbers, “You're The Reason Our Kids Are So Ugly” and “I Wouldn't Take Her To A Dog Fight ‘Cause I’m Afraid She’d Win.”

After a brief respite in Fort Worth, I continued my tortuous journey from there to Houston, and the beat went on.

The sentimental “I've Got Tears In My Ears From Lyin’ On My Back and Cryin’ Over You” was a repeated request, as was “Please Bypass This Heart Of Mine.”

“I Just Bought a Car From the Guy That Stole My Girl, But the Car Don’t Run So I Figure We’re Even” was one of the more practical titles I heard, and I was taken by the tender “Her Teeth Was Stained, But Her Heart Were Pure.”

And I heard two of my favorites just as I rolled into the Houston city limits: “She’s Out Actin’ Single, So I'm Drinkin’ Doubles” and “She’s Looking Better After Every Beer.”

Bring on Beethoven for the return trip.