written January 8, 2004
Yesterday, I received a package from my friend Spanish, which had back issues of his ‘zine, and a heap of mixed CDs he’d made over the year. I threw one – a mix of things from an old Canton radio station – in the changer and kicked back in front of the stereo.
Pretty soon, my dad wandered in from outside where he was doing something and stopped by my room. He asked what CD I was playing, and showed him the playlist. Dad used to be a DJ in high school and college, and has worked in radio all of his life, thus he knows a lot of music and got really pumped over some of the music that Spanish had put on the mixes. Dad came in and pulled out my folding chair and sat down with some of the discs, running the CD changer with the remote control, and telling me stories about the songs. “This song would have been really, hmm… ‘out there’ I suppose,” he said, in reference to the Strawberry Alarm Clock tune. He’d tell me about a song and the first time that he heard it and where it was. One of the first schools my mom taught at had used “Skip a Rope” in a school program which, now that I’ve heard the song, is wildly disturbing. We sat in my room and listened to music and he told me stories. We both sang along to “I Walk The Line.”
My dad started to tell me about some other music, too. “Go find a Roger Miller track called ‘England Swings,’” he said. “You’ll like that. Let me see if I have it downstairs.” We put the CD playing on hold for a while, and Dad went down to our basement where our large record collection It’s got nothing on Rob’s in High Fidelity, but is still nice. When I was smaller, about 5 or 6, and we had just moved into this house, I remember sitting downstairs with my parents, my mom on the couch and dad sitting in front of the turntables, with one of his hands drifting easily over the records. He’d put one on, and have two or three lined up and ready to go, using the mixer to fade one into the other. Dad called this “doin’ tunes,” and it was sometimes accompanied by a fire in the fireplace, or my parents showing me how to hold a record, and I’d carefully hand them to Dad just as he’d shown me, using the flats of my hands to hold the edges, fingers splayed away because you never, ever touch a record with your fingers.
Whenever I hear the crackle of a needle being set on a vinyl record, I remember that, and last night, hearing it again from the speakers in our basement, I smiled. I went downstairs, and there was my dad, sitting in front of the newish tower rack that he has all of our stereo equipment on now. We had to move some things around once we shifted our television to the basement, and now there is only one turntable (the other one is in storage). Dad was still sitting on the little rug in front of the albums, though, with a small stack on his lap, and his hand every once and a while going to the rack to pull down another one. “Listen to this,” he’d say, putting on another album. “Just listen.”
As I said before, my dad works in radio, and as radio has become more and more about NASA’s “better, faster, cheaper” but minus the “better,” Dad’s grown more frustrated and sad with the state of the industry that he’s put so much into. It certainly doesn’t make him as happy as it should, anymore. But last night, as I walked around picking up things in the house, and listened to the music that was drifting around, I felt so happy. I knew that my dad was happy, that playing music like this was really a wonderful thing for him, and it just made the whole house shine for him to be happy on a deeper, more meaningful level like he was. This is not to say that my father is an angry or sad man, but he deserves nothing but happiness, and I think last night helped him remember another place that it lives for him.
The transitions between songs were long, and I don’t know if that’s because we only have one turntable connected or because Dad is getting older. Probably some of both. Mom and I sat on the couch and listened to the songs, and even though none of us were talking, we were. My family has always “talked” like this, and it felt good to do it again.
I don’t live at home anymore, so when I do see my parents, it’s usually full of catching-up and chat about school and work and things. We’re so busy trying to fill ourselves up with each other’s presence before we have to part ways, that there are rarely any moments left like this, and there haven’t been any in a long time. I don’t know when the next one will be, and if I move out this summer, there may not be another one. I’m saddened by this, but I know that the times we have had are ones I won’t forget. I still know how to run the turntable, and, though I’ll never be as good as Dad is, I hope that if I ever have kids, we’ll be able to sit around, and I can tell them stories about their grandpa, and how, when their mom was a little girl, they would sit and play music.
Filed under: Music
