There's No Such Thing As "Good Musical Taste"

Those who claim to have good musical taste are, frankly, delusional. Who decides what good musical taste is? Music is exquisitely subjective. That's the beauty of it.

Generally, people who drape the "good taste" sash across their shoulder are either obnoxious snobs or audiophiles more interested in showing off their expensive audio gear than their actual record collection. We've all met them. They either want to "explain" music to us or drag us into their den, drop the needle on an obscure Brian Eno LP and stare into our faces, searching for a rapturous reaction.

My dad loved any music sung in a foreign language. He didn't understand the words, but it didn't matter. He particularly loved Spanish, because it sounded "pretty" (which it does, by the way).

I'm a sucker for falsetto. Essentially any song in which the singer slides into falsetto voice hooks me every time. I have no clue why; it just does.

My husband is actually one person who does have good musical taste, by which I mean, yes, I like a lot of the songs he's introduced me to. My sister is another. But I think they have good musical taste because I agree with their choices. That doesn't mean they and I are right. Because there is no "right".

I don't always agree with my husband's opinions, however, He claims that good music died in the seventies. I love eighties pop. Looovvve eighties pop, Casio keyboards and all. He reveres Bob Dylan. And while I agree that Dylan is a singular American poet, most of his songs are not good.

If you really listen to the lyrics of this song, he's just throwing words together. No, there is no deeper meaning that we peasants just don't "get". And even if, according to Bob, there is some deeper meaning, I don't want my music to be a study program. 

I, on the other hand, like this:

Too, I maintain that music is a reflection of memory. Or memories. The life we were experiencing when a particular song was popular is almost as important as the song itself. My sons hear Beatles songs objectively. I feel Beatles songs in my gut. They were my life. 

Objectively, this is not that great of a song. Subjectively? It was everything:

I can't even try to explain how everything changed in '64, because those who didn't live it will never understand. It's as if there was sort-of music before; then suddenly actual music exploded the planet. 

I guess you had to be there.

The snobs will tell you that "Yesterday" is the greatest Beatles song. No Beatles fan will ever tell you that. The Beatles weren't about ballads. They were about splitting the earth wide open. 

Music, though, is not all conscious memory. I love Glenn Miller, whose band recordings were barely a ping on the radar when my parents became married. 

And I love rockabilly, which was my older sisters' music. 

I love doo-wop. Even I'm not old enough to recall the doo-wop heyday.

In some regard, music must be cellular. Sometimes there is no conscious memory; there is only a "feeling". 

So, Mozart? Okay. I can climb on board. That doesn't mean Mozart lovers have better musical taste than Hall and Oates aficionados. Maybe musical snobs are simply closed-minded.

Me? Well, you can see for yourself. 

That, that, is the glory of music.

Music's Worth

If I'd been a rich little kid, I would have owned the world's greatest collection of 45 RPM singles.

As it was, ninety-nine cents was damn hard to come by. My mom refused to pay me for housework, of which I actually did none, but nevertheless. I had to depend on the generosity of my Uncle Arnold, who would flip me a nickel or dime once in a while when he was helping my dad repair machinery on the farm. It was hard to save these coins, however, because the creamery truck showed up once a week to deliver milk and butter, and those fudgsicles the deliveryman carried in the back were almost impossible to resist.

By age ten I begrudgingly agreed to "help out" around the house in exchange for a weekly salary of twenty-five cents. Thus I whipped some dust around with a rag and possibly dried dishes, although my memory is unreliable on this. (In my defense, I don't recall my older sisters helping out, either. They probably remember it differently, but I am correct on this. Mom never enforced chores; I think because if you want something done right, well, you know...)

Eventually I managed to save up a dollar and promptly traipsed off to Poppler's Music to choose one lone single. My decision was not easy. I really liked The Lovin' Spoonful and The Dave Clark Five, but I almost always came home with a Beatles single. Like this:

There were, of course, other ways to consume music; most often my way was by borrowing my big brother's singles and albums when he was away. I needn't actually purchase music, because my brother had everything; but there is something about owning, holding, admiring one's own personal records. 

Then there were birthdays. I always asked for singles. I knew about albums, of course, but I really wanted the hits. My brother did buy me albums for my birthdays. He bought me The Mamas and Papas and The Yardbirds. Those two albums were the sum total of my LP collection for years to come.

This was a single I asked my best friend for, for my eleventh birthday:

When we moved in late 1966, I got myself a real job (albeit still working for my parents) and my wages increased to seventy-five cents per hour. Since my dad was constantly getting sloshed and embarking on rambling road trips, and since Mom felt an obligation to follow and track him down, I was regularly left in charge of their motel. I was eleven-going-on-twelve, but hey, the money was good!

If Mom forgot to pay me, I dinged open the cash register and withdrew the wages I was due. Dahmer's Music was my new local record store. A couple of records I purchased with my hard-fought money:

I did buy albums, too, once a year, every September, for my brother's birthday. I owed him, after all. I only purchased Beatles albums for him. In my mind, I wanted him to continue his collection. He was married by then and didn't actually care that much.  I bought Sgt. Peppers and asked him later how he liked it. He said, "It's okay", which kind of hurt my feelings. Shoot, I wasn't rich and I'd only tried to pad his repertoire. But people, and life, move on.

Once my new best friend, Alice, introduced me to country music, I dove into it headlong. Dahmer's wasn't flush with country singles (or albums) and our local country station was firmly ensconced in the Top Forty. I did buy albums, but I was limited to the offerings racked in JC Penney's basement. Thus I made some unfortunate purchases. I bought a duet album by Ernest Tubb and Loretta Lynn that I listened to approximately two times. Penneys was into "old fashioned", which was not my taste, but they hardly cared. Who but a couple of thirteen-year-old geeks was browsing their bins anyway? Their basement was flush with matrons queuing up at the catalog counter to order damask draperies. Country albums were essentially worthless unless one zeroed in on greatest hits compilations, which I definitely did buy, when available.

Soon I took to listening to far-away country stations, WHO in Des Moines (which came in crystal-clearly after midnight) and sometimes WSM in Nashville on a cloudless night and WBAP in Fort Worth. Ralph Emery and Mike Hoyer and Bill Mack understood country music -- real country music -- and I heard wondrous songs that were never once spun on my local station. But I had nowhere to buy them.

The internet was still a woozy science fiction fantasy, and computers? You mean those gargantuan whirring, beeping cyclops they showed on Lost In Space? I had a manual typewriter.

In the wee hours of Saturday nights, when I was able to tune in to WSM, right after the Opry, there was a program broadcast from Ernest Tubb's Record Shop. I figured, well hell, that store surely must have every country record known to man. I found the address in an issue of Country Music Roundup magazine, and found my way to the post office to purchase a money order*.

*the way kids who had no checking account could buy things through the mail.

I wrote long letters to the shop, specifying exactly which singles I wanted -- "not the fifties version, but the current recording by Mel Tillis". I tucked my money order inside and crossed my fingers.

That's how I eventually and joyfully received this:

And this:

Also this:

When music was hard to get, it meant more. 

Today I have tons and tons of songs on my hard drive, plus racks of CD's; not to mention my cache of fifty-year-old albums. And I never listen to any of them. But I would still get an ache in my heart if I could drop the needle on those obscure singles I strived so hard to procure. 

It's a truism that the more hard-fought a victory, the more it matters. When I click my mouse on an Amazon mp3, okay, now I've got it. I've downloaded songs that I've never once listened to. On the other hand, I played "We Can Work It Out" on my monaural record player approximately five hundred and twenty-three times, until the phonograph needle dug trenches in the vinyl. 

There is really no discovery now. No "you've got to hear this". Everybody knows everything and music doesn't matter because it's easy.

I cherish the times when I was forced to seek out music. When it was a victory to secure it. 

Now? Ehh. It doesn't really matter.

1968 ~ Fifty Years

I've been watching the CNN series, "1968" (trust me; the only thing I watch on CNN), which was co-created by Tom Hanks, who I like a lot, as long as he keeps his politics to himself.

Need I say, fifty years ago??

Every individual's reality is their own. The series is somebody's reminiscences about that year.  Mine naturally differ.

I was thirteen that year. I'd just completed seventh grade with its attendant awkwardness. I was a mess in '68 and I knew it. I just kept hoping that life would get better, or at least I would get better, but all signs pointed to no. In the realm of supreme ineptitude, I excelled. I had zero social skills. I had pimples that I tried to mask with a heavy application of Cover Girl ivory foundation, which resulted in a freakish zombie-like appearance. Nobody advised me on my hair, so I let it do whatever it wanted, and it wanted to cling greasily to my scalp.

I was skinny as hell, but I convinced myself I was fat. I stood sideways in front of my bathroom mirror and detected a "stomach bump". This made me despondent and determined to stop eating all together.

Needless to say, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were not foremost in my mind.

1968 was the year that pop culture left me behind. It's been fifty years and it's still not reconciled itself with me.  And it won't, ever. We who lived in the heartland had differing priorities, different realities. I was just trying to get by, with what is now politely called a "dysfunctional family", so anti-war protests and fire hoses and things were just images on the TV screen. The Viet Nam world only touched me in the sense that my big brother enlisted in the National Guard to thwart his number from being culled from the bingo jar that determined who would potentially die in the stultifying jungle.

Side note:  In May of 1969, my state became infamous for the "Zip To Zap", which was, I guess, the (really) poor man's Woodstock. Zap was a hamlet in western North Dakota, populated by approximately 300 souls. It had two local bars and not much else. Some kids from North Dakota State University apparently scoured the map and pinpointed a town name they could build a slogan around. The AP picked up the story and soon thousands of bored beer-seeking kids from parts unknown began arriving in the hapless town that had initially embraced the off-the-cuff notion as a potential tourism enticement.

When the pair of taverns ran out of beer and the temperature plummeted, things turned ugly. Kids ripped timbers from the skeleton of an abandoned building and blazed a bonfire in the middle of Zap's lone street. Town residents, petrified and no longer civic-minded, shoved bureaus up against doors and cocked their shotguns; peered from behind lace curtains at the vomit-spewing, wantonly urinating revelers.

Before daybreak, the governor called in the National Guard to disperse the loopy mercenaries. Our local paper, that evening, featured a jumbo photo of jeeps heading down the highway, packed with baffled gun-toting military men.

And my brother got to go!

They tell me 1968 was a turbulent year, and I don't dispute that. However, the number one hit on June 1 was this:

So, how turbulent was it...really?

I was ensconced for the week at my brother and sister-in-law's apartment while Big Bro was away at Guard camp, and this song playing on the clock radio lulled me to sleep (and why wouldn't it?):

...when my sister-in-law shook me awake to tell me they were talking about "Kennedy getting shot" on the radio. "I don't know if they're talking about John Kennedy or what," she said. We propped ourselves up on pillows and listened as the announcer described the scene in Los Angeles in the aftermath of yet another Kennedy assassination. My thought in the middle of the night was, you gotta watch out if you're running for anything, because someone will pull out a pistol and kill you. 

I don't remember if I started walking down to the local Catholic church before or after that, but I essentially spent that week in town genuflecting before the out-sized crucifix in the church's sacristy. I understood that the world was essentially insane, but I still thought it was only my world. I was disconnected from the planet at large. Bobby Kennedy's murder was just one more peg in the corkboard of my gloom.

By August, I felt a bit better, until I watched the anarchy of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago unfold on CBS news. I wasn't on anybody's side; but I was (and still am) a fan of order, and I didn't appreciate the messiness. On the one hand, I was not in favor of people getting beaten with clubs; but on the other hand, I thought these people were a bit too melodramatic. Fake outrage was born in 1968, and fifty years later, it's alive and kicking. Theater. I'm a big fan of honesty.

Meanwhile, this song was number one:

I knew, at thirteen, that whomever the Democrats nominated wouldn't matter. They'd already committed suicide.

By fall I was enrolled in eighth grade; still in the turn of the century fat brick building that resembled a prison. 

My US History teacher was the same asshat who'd student-taught Mr. Reisenauer's geography class the year before. We'd all hated him because he was stuffy and joyless and grew miffed when we giggled at the filmstrip unwinding from the projector, coiling onto the floor. I strolled into his classroom the day after Labor Day unwilling to tolerate any supercilious bullshit. I had enough to deal with at home, thanks.

The second week of September, Mr. Hamann assigned us to create presidential campaign signs. Pissed at my dad and not yet realizing it, my fresh brain synopses suddenly firing, I went home and pasted felt letters to a sticky foam board. My finished project read, "This time, vote like your whole world depended on it. Nixon/Agnew." Before I toted my completed product to school, I tacked it up on the garage wall just outside the kitchen door where Dad couldn't miss it. I hovered in the background and watched him alight the two steps to the doorway, stop, scan the words, then shake his head in disappointment. I felt only a tiny tinge of guilt. Mr. Hamann, on the other hand, spying my poster Monday morning, smiled faintly and said, "That's plagiarism, isn't it?" I didn't know what "plagiarism" meant, but I knew I'd met a kindred spirit. From that moment on, Mr. Hamann and I were fast pals.

It was a little thing, but I found an inkling of an identity in eighth grade. My home life didn't get better and it wouldn't get better for the rest of my teen years, but I realized it was okay to be "me" and not a little clone of two people whose demeanor I abhorred.

So I guess 1968 was a rather momentous year after all. Even for me.

However, I still wouldn't do it again.

Sleepless

I'm a chronic non-sleeper.

When I was thirty, I had to work the day shift at the hospital on alternating weekends. My normal schedule was second shift, 3:30 p.m to 10:00 p.m. Invariably on Friday nights before that seven a.m. call, I remained excruciatingly conscious. I'm a guilt-ridden Catholic soul who has an aversion to calling in. However, for the majority of my first shift obligations, I staggered off the sofa sometime around four in the morning, dialed the automated mailbox number and declared that I was "sick". In retrospect, I could have sucked it up and just went to work (like I do now). At that time, though, I regarded sleeplessness as such a dire condition that at one point I actually considered killing myself.

I remember arising from my agonizing cocoon on the sofa, switching on the tiny kitchen nightlight and thumbing through the Yellow Pages to find the Suicide Hotline number. I was all ready to dial it, but then I imagined the conversation.

"Why do you want to kill yourself?"

"Well, I can't sleep."

Long pause.

"That's it?"

I didn't kill myself because I thought my reason wasn't good enough. That, plus I really had no means of accomplishing it. What was I going to use? Aspirin? How many tablets does one need to take to get the job done? There was no internet, so it would have been just a guess, and what if I guessed wrong?

Now here I am, thirty years later, and the scourge continues. The difference is, while it's still unbearable at three in the morning, I've accepted it as a fact of my life. And I buck up and plow through.

I used to think I was all alone, but I've since learned through offhand conversations that more people than not suffer right along with me. Selfishly, that makes me feel a little bit better. Nobody wants to feel alone.

I'll say right now that all the advice about how to sleep is utterly worthless. These "experts" a) never in their lives have had a sleeping problem; and b) are just spouting nonsense.

• Don't consume caffeine after 12:00 noon.

         Okay.

• Use your bedroom only for sleep.

          Fine.

• Meditate or "journal" fifteen minutes prior to bedtime.

         I neither meditate nor jot thoughts down in a little notebook, and
         why would anyone do that? 

Here is the only advice that might work:  drugs. But good luck there. My doctor won't prescribe anything, such as Ambien, and I admit I'm not keen on that anyway. I don't want to find myself in the kitchen at 2:30 a.m., baking up a late-night entree of roasted boot. Or driving around aimlessly, firing up a cigarette and stubbing it out on my car's leather upholstery. Or even worse, posting nonsensical comments on social media, inadvertently starting a Twitter war over my professed hatred of Ariana Grande's shoes.

My doctor actually told me I'm going to bed too early. She said I should stay up until 11:30. I get up at 4:30 a.m. for work! Following her advice, assuming I fell asleep the minute my cranium alighted the pillow, I would get four complete hours of sleep.

The things I have tried:

Watching TV until my eyes flutter closed.
         
The way this works for me is, sure, I catch thirty seconds of snooze time; then a commercial jars me awake. I am then bleary-eyed for approximately three hours.

NOT watching TV. 
         
The whir of my bedroom fan, initially soothing, begins to grate on my nerves. The longer I lie awake, the more irritating it becomes. I get up and switch it off; but soon the room turns infuriatingly quiet.

Don ear plugs and a sleep mask.
        
Now I'm left alone with my thoughts. Plus my back hurts.  My mind WILL NOT SHUT OFF. I eventually begin to drift off, but the snort that wheezes through my nostrils jolts me awake and the cycle begins anew.

I only fall asleep after four or so hours once my body has acquiesced to utter exhaustion.

I believe I am genetically melatonin-deficient. And speaking of melatonin, ingest it at your peril. I tried it ONCE. I lay awake, bug-eyed, for an entire night.

My remedy is, there is no remedy.  Perhaps alcohol, but I can't function at my job while hungover. Thus, the real remedy is acceptance. Accept the things I cannot change.

I haven't tried these, and maybe they would work (but I doubt it):

These songs make sleep seem so romantic, wistful, enveloping; don't they? I wouldn't know.

The truth of the matter is, like John Lennon, who, from his songs I suspect was an inveterate non-sleeper like me, this is what it's really like at 3:00 a.m.:

I've decided I'm going to call it a "personality quirk"; one that I can regale strangers with for hours. If someone at work greets me brightly in the morning, instead of replying offhandedly, I will say, "Well, you know I only got two hours of sleep last night." Then I will sigh dejectedly. Granted, people will search for an excuse to slink away, but hey, spread the pain, I say. If I have to hear tales of your 2006 Alaskan cruise every freakin' day and how you spied a seal reposing on an ice floe, well, it's time to share MY world. And by the way, can you sit at my bedside and repeat those stories again? 

That just might work.

The Fourth of July

State Capitol Building, Bismarck, North Dakota

July 4th used to be my favorite holiday. Now it's just a day -- a day off from work; a day of watching TV and if the stars align, taking a nap. 

When one lives in a small town, summer holidays are joyful. The early morning sun beaming through the kitchen window warms your skin; your sinews tingle with anticipation.You rise early to stir up a peach coffee cake and lean against the toasty oven door to twirl the dials on the kitchen timer. The kids are still snuffling softly in their beds.

The heavy air hints of a coming sunset thunderstorm; my cotton blouse clings to the plumb between my breasts and hips. The radio on the kitchen counter thumps with John Anderson croaking out Swingin'. The phone on the wall rings and I flip the volume low on the transistor. My little sister is calling from Mom and Dad's. "What time are y'all coming over?" she asks. She's flown up from Fort Worth with her little son the afternoon before, because she, like me, knows how much the Fourth of July means. "No one's up yet," I say. "Give us a couple of hours."

I rap on bedroom doors. "Let's go!" My sons stagger out of their rooms and woozily flick shower knobs to scalding. Then they dump all manner of fireworks -- Roman candles, bottle rockets, "inferno" fountains, M-80's -- hey, how'd those get in there? -- out of paper grocery bags onto the living room floor and argue over which belongs to whom. I twist Saran Wrap around my coffee cake and grab my Minolta SLR off the bedroom bureau; snatch my purse and herd everyone and everything into the car.

At 9:00 we pull into the driveway. The garage door is wide open and Dad is sitting inside on a lawn chair nursing a stained mug of coffee and flicking his cigarette into a sand-filled coffee can.  Upstairs Mom's slicing hard-boiled eggs with a paring knife, dropping the yellow-white rings into a Tupperware bowl of boiled baby potatoes. Apple and cherry pies rest on cooling racks on the counter. She swabs her damp forehead with a tissue.

My sister is parked on the sofa in front of the TV where Cyndi Lauper's bee-stung lips are warbling Time After Time. "What time you think we should leave?" she asks. "It's gonna be hell getting a parking spot...and it's hot," I say. Lissa, the transplanted Texan, reminds me that I have no earthly idea what "hot" is.

We have to finalize transportation arrangements. Since my older sister and her husband won't saunter over until three p.m. or so, they are not part of the equation. My little brother and his boys like to go their own way -- they'll get there when they get there. Mom has long ago sworn off sun, plus she's hoping to grab a snooze once everyone vacates the premises. That leaves approximately seven people to pile into Dad's Lincoln to traverse the river and pray for a parking spot that isn't two miles and two hulking coolers away. Our ultimate destination is the curb in front of Mandan's McDonald's, where my sister-in-law works the breakfast shift and my brother loiters waiting for her to doff her McD's apron and join the party. We stake out our spot on the street's edge by parking our coolers and blankets and troop inside the joint to order up pancakes plunked inside Styrofoam containers and where Dad can get his coffee fix. We hover, waiting for one party of the three hundred clamoring hordes to depart so we can finally sit down at a sticky Formica table. I'm itchy to get out of there and get down to the business of snapping pictures. Finally my sis and I lower ourselves to the curb and commence to doing what we do best -- making smart-alecky comments about anything and everything around us.

Before long we hear the faint trill of snare drums and the bassy bray of trombones. The parade has begun. Viet Nam vets march past us hoisting the American flag and the black MIA banner. I stand and my chest tightens. Damn, I'm patriotic. The Mandan High School marching band follows behind and I nod in deference to my long-ago school days. My sister didn't attend Mandan High, so it's just color and pomp to her.

Dad and my brothers (little brother has made his way over, as he inevitably always does) stand behind us and comment on the line of farm implements and antique cars. "I had one of those," is Dad's clarion call. A polka band atop a flatbed squeezes out an accordion solo. I click the shutter on my camera with one hand while herding my boys away from the street with the other, when they venture a step too far to collect candy thrown by everyone participating in the promenade. They barely avoid the hooves of the draft horses in their quest to claim bragging rights to the biggest mound of candy.

I'm feeling a little queasy from the combination of sun fever and prefab pancakes, but I'm exhilarated.  We gather up our blankets and miscellaneous detritus and tromp, sunburned, the two miles back to the car. We never even comment on the spectacle -- it is what it is -- a part of us; a part of our essence.

Mom's face crinkles with concern as we alight the stairs; she searches Dad's face for hints of sun stroke. But Dad, like me, is exuberant. He lives for this day.

The burgers are sizzling on the grill; big bowls of potato salad and baked beans claim the dining room table. Dill pickle spears repose in the crystal relish tray. My brother claims the couch and stretches out to pseudo-nap. My sister and I sit cross-legged on the living room carpet and laugh at nothing. Kids do what kids do; rambunct the staircase and holler. It's now almost 3:00 and still no sign of my big sister and her husband. I'm mildly irritated because I'm starving and the food looks sooo good. My sister-in-law will eventually pity-eat a slice of my coffee cake; I found the recipe on the back of a can of Libby's Sliced Peaches in Heavy Syrup, and it's my go-to pot luck contribution, because it's easy to make and almost impossible to ruin. It really stands no chance against home-baked cherry pie with a lattice crust, however.

Dad is down in the garage smoking again. I'll join him as soon as I'm tactfully able. Dad is  anticipating my brother-in-law's arrival -- his smoking and BS'ing buddy. That makes at least two of us who are impatiently waiting.

My little brother is outside entertaining his kids and mine with all manner of mischief. My big brother on the couch squinches his eyes open, then closed again. Mom announces to no one in particular that "maybe I should give your sister a call."  My brother rolls over on his side and grouses, "let's just eat." Of course, Mom would never broach that notion.

By and by, the missing couple arrives; my sister toting a tray of deviled eggs. Mom gushes over this offering and declares that she needs to get the recipe, as if she (or even me) does not know how to pipe mustard-mayo into boiled egg crevices and sprinkle them with paprika.

The entire scattered family, their antennae quivering, descend upon the dining room table like ravenous raccoons, pawing and snatching food items with abandon. Chinaware plates piled high, they find the nearest folding chair, empty floor space, recliner arm, to perch on and savor the repast as if it's their final prison meal before the noose drops.

The bellyful re-energizes my brother. He badgers us to play a board game or at least break out a deck of cards.  My little sister and I sit it out. We'll go our own way, which is downstairs to the family room to watch Beavis and Butthead and giggle. My kids eventually saunter in and join our MTV party.

Unspoken, everyone is waiting for night to fall and for the pièce de résistance -- the lighting of the fireworks. Once dusk descends, everyone congregates on the front stoop -- Mom sips from a mug of coffee that will keep her awake until two a.m. Dad settles in beside her and fires up another smoke. My brothers become the kids in the clutch -- setting up combustibles in the middle of the street and lighting them afire. I hold out my arm to bar my kids from running out too close and suffering debilitating burns. A couple of houses down the block, someone is firing up bottle rockets, which zoom and whiz and pirouette. My brother-in-law scuttles out of the way of the flaming missiles just in time. My oldest son wants desperately to set off one of his showering fountains, so I pull out my lighter and touch it to a "punk", wait for it to glow red and carefully hand it over. He rushes into the street, lights the fuse and runs. Life is inherently dangerous. A little bit of risk gets one's corpuscles pulsing.



The family show continues for an hour or so. I hear the rumble of thunder in the western sky. Or is it fireworks? The horizon flashes orange. A nighttime thunderstorm is the perfect ending to a glorious Independence Day.

The clock ticks; the showers of sparks become redundant. My kids are beginning to wither. It's late. Time to lift their dozy bodies into the back seat and depart. We say our goodbyes, knowing we'll meet again just like this the next Fourth of July and we'll follow exactly the same routine.

I arrive home and spy my countenance in the bathroom mirror. My face is pale salmon except for two white rings circling my eyes. I change out of my sweat-dampened shorts and tank top and snuggle inside my living room rocker, light up a smoke and savor the bliss.

Today was perfectly perfect.

"Country Music Is So Depressing"

As long as I've been listening to country music, which includes my pre-country music period (my mom and dad's music) as well as my three-decade obsession, from approximately 1967 to 1999; I've heard two criticisms:  country music is soooo corny and country music is too depressing.

I never found country music depressing. A track by Little Texas never once made me consider killing myself. Of course there are sad country songs -- country music is just like life; sometimes we're happy; other times wistful. Sometimes we feel giddy and silly; ready to break into a dork dance. And sometimes our hearts are broken.

The times when I've been sad, I wanted music to wallow in. Crying is sorely underrated. Right after my dad died, I sat in my room and played Ray Price's "Soft Rain" over and over and over. The grief I couldn't put into words, Ray did, and perfectly.

I don't know what those judgmental people are listening to, but obviously not the country music I know. In the eighties and nineties country music was glorious, even the sad songs.

This is ostensibly a sad song. Does it sound sad?

Likewise:

If it's got a good beat and one can two-step to it, sad or not, it's happy. At least it makes me feel happy. 

And, you know, everyone in country music is not heartbroken:

Sometimes they are falling in love and it's just now hit them:

As a country music historian, I know there are (old) songs that are frankly, maudlin, or at least cheesy. Do you like every rock song every recorded? Don't judge a whole genre of music by "I Wish I Was A Teddy Bear" and "Honey". In my teens and pre-teens, I felt obliged to defend the bad country songs, because people were so vociferous in their hatred. "Folsom Prison Blues? Yea, really great with that chunka-chunka guitar." Guess what? I didn't like that song, either. I also didn't like Rose Garden, but had I named a good country song, I would have gotten quizzical stares, because all those people knew was what was played on Top 40 radio. 

I wasn't a top forty kind of gal. I had taste; not that it mattered one whit to anyone but me. But that's okay, actually. When it comes to music, I only need to be true to myself. 

And, no. Country music is not depressing. Unless you want it to be.

Dad

Dad died in 2001, but he was gone long before. I'd moved 600 miles away when things turned bad; when he became someone else; someone elemental -- a newborn who lived a life deep inside. It was so gradual, so gentle. Dad had always been eccentric. That's what fascinated me about him. He was a constant surprise. As a little girl, I worshiped him. If I have any sense of imagination, it's because of Dad. Maybe he taught me to be a daydreamer; maybe it was genetic. I'd follow him around the farmyard as he tended to his chores and repairs, and he'd make up a silly song or a goofy phrase that I found captivating. Often I didn't understand what he was saying, but it didn't matter, because it spawned a wondrous life of its own.

As the years passed, I disdained him. He descended into alcoholism; falling-down drunkenness. He drove my mom crazy, which drove my life crazy. A switch flipped on for me around age twelve, and it didn't flick off until I was old enough to acquire a modicum of wisdom about the vagaries of life. (It took a long time.)

My mom committed him to the State Hospital For The Insane, which in the sixties also claimed to treat alcoholics, but actually didn't. It warehoused those who couldn't handle life. Then she did it once again nine months later. The "cure" never took. What it did, though, was break him. The whimsical oddball Dad had always been evaporated. He turned docile; subdued. On our infrequent visits, he was tentative. He traversed the stone walkway with us as if his bones would shatter if he made an untoward move. I mentally distanced myself from the whole imbroglio, resolved to X off the days on the calendar until I was old enough to get the hell out and away.

Once I made my escape at almost nineteen, I dispensed with the whole mess, but home was a ghost that whipped the curtains. I was gone but never gone. Early in 1976 Mom informed me that Dad was back to drinking again. By then she was resigned. The years had become an endless stabbing needle of Dad's meek compliance interspersed with bursts of defiance. Mom told me that he had checked himself into a rehab center; one more in a long string of healings that had never once taken.

This time it did.

I don't know what Heartview had that the other places didn't, or if he just surrendered. After Dad's six-week stint in Heartview, he never again took another drink.

I never once told my dad how proud I was of him. We didn't say things like that in our family. We actually never said much of anything to one another.

Instead I did what I knew how to do -- I wrote him a song:

When Dad was in Heartview, I learned that I was pregnant. Thus, two lives began. My little boy celebrated his first birthday at Mom and Dad's home, but it wouldn't be long before my parents decided to start a new life. They sold the business that had turned into a bargain with the devil, and moved to a real house, where Mom baked banana bread and Dad chased the rabbits out of his garden. In more than thirty years of marriage, this was the first calm existence they enjoyed. Dad carried his white coffee mug with him everywhere, attended AA meetings every week; stubbed out his cigarettes in a sand-filled coffee can in the garage. He became Dad again; goofy, amused by stupid seventies TV commercials.

In 1978 my second baby boy came along. He had dark hair and dark eyes; a genetic generation-skipper. He looked just like Dad. My boys spent many a Fourth of July sunset shooting off fireworks in the street in front of Mom and Dad's house, alongside their cousins and kid-like uncles.

The last time I visited my dad he existed in a world all his own. Mom said she had to set an extra place at the dining room table for Dad's "friend". He talked to his friend late into the night as he rested in his blue corduroy recliner. I went to bed in my little sister's old bedroom and fell asleep listening to Dad talk late into the night. His voice was so gentle, I felt like a little girl again, snuggling on Daddy's lap.

I wasn't there for the end. I prefer the memory of my dad's soothing tones as I drifted off to sleep. That's how I want to remember him -- the same beginning; the same end.

It's been seventeen years and I still miss him.

Happy Father's Day, Dad. My heart aches from missing you.