My dad and I don’t agree on a lot of things. Most things in fact. Religion. Politics. Using curse words in my writing. How to train your dog, and probably dragons; we haven’t gone that deep yet. 

But we’ve non-verbally agreed that we want a relationship despite our difference of opinions, and I think that’s pretty great, especially within the fiercely oppositely charged snow globe we live in. Much like changing the shape and orientation between two magnets can change the way they either attract or repel each other, we search around our individual mindsets until we find connection in topics both of us want to do a deep dive in, and we jump around on those trampolines for awhile. It’s nice to have a friend down the rabbit hole. 

Nature. Art. Music. As those are things in life that give me the most joy, let me tell you how badass my dad is. If he had a wallet in a garbage bag from a diner stick up, his would be the one with badass motherfucker on it. And for the record, that’s a compliment Dad, not a cuss word. Is Pulp Fiction considered vintage now?

A few weeks ago I sent Dad a photo of my record player spinning a Tanya Tucker flea market find, declaring her a genius before her time, and it opened an unexplored porthole. He (probably) thought to himself, Well shoot. I’ve got some records and I’m not listening to any of them. They’re all living silently, collecting basement dust. My third child would appreciate them, restore their purpose, let them sing! Time to re-home them. 

I mean, that’s the internal dialogue I imagined. Because this is also what I do when I’m in possession of something someone else would appreciate more. One time I loaned my car to a dude I had met in person for less than 30 minutes on a sunset beach in San Francisco. We kept in touch over the next few months, because some people are just the kind of people you keep in touch with. When I moved to Finland to reconnect my overwhelmed mind with my broken soul, my car sat bored in Wisconsin. Jay from Jersey needed a vehicle to get him to his summer camp gig, so I offered mine up if he could find a way to Wausau, Wisconsin. I figured I’d just fly back through Jersey and road trip my way home. I saw a brilliant, no holes plan. 

So I texted my brother Sean a request to check for anything weird inside the FJ, Jay from Jersey found a way to middle Wisconsin, and boom, everybody won. Except maybe Sean, who said it felt like a dodgy drug deal in the middle of a parking lot. He thought I was absolutely out of my mind. When I got home ten months later and saw the huge box of items my brother had collected from the FJ, including a bunch of standards like ratchet straps and tire gauges and the actual car manual itself, I laughed. I said check for WEIRD stuff. 

Yeah, well, I thought it was weird you gave your car to a complete stranger from across the country, so I went the safest route and just deemed everything inside your car, also weird.

Fair. Anyway. This kind of thing happens a lot with me. And over the years I’ve come to learn I probably get that from my dad. He’s as generous as he is impossible in the strangest of ways. Same Dad, same.

When Mom caught wind of Dad’s death cleaning, she reminded him he has another daughter who also loves music and vinyl and historical artifacts. I was very aware of this, but in order to call first dibs on all that delicious vinyl, it wasn’t in my best interest to bring it to anyone’s attention. Besides, Tessa and Ben are attorneys with two kids under the age of seven. I’m a witchy, childless, currently unemployed hermit with nothing but time and the will to clean and listen to 8 million records at all hours of the day. And I mean all hours of the day. I’m in the place where my days don’t have names and my clock doesn’t tell time. 

So handing over the goods to me was factually, theoretically, and precisely the right move. I hadn’t seen my dad twice in one year for many years, and here we were, delivering and/or picking up boxes of vinyl, two times in just as many weeks. And it’s not like he just handed over them over. We went through each record one-by-one, most of them coming with a side of Dad’s Memory. How he got it. What was going on at the time. His favorite songs on the album and why. Finding the right connection, I tell you, what a gift. 

Listening to records from decades you experienced secondhand by ear, not in real life, is wild. Like any good conspiracy theorist with a lot of time on their hands, I started connecting dots that maybe weren’t meant to be connected. I listened to the musical geniuses who influenced the artists of today, even heard Chuck Berry sing a line from a Shovels & Rope song, but wait, that can’t be right, Chuck came first. Or did he.

I fell in love with Stevie Nicks and those Rumours all over again, while simultaneously wondering when, why and how I ever stopped listening to ABBA, promising that was the last time I’d make that mistake. And I looked REAL close at what it must have been like to be a woman in the 50s and 60s just in general, but particularly as a musician.

Runaround Sue by Dion used to be one of my favorite songs ever to belt out as a kid, because my mom’s name is Sue and I liked to imagine her as the belle of the ball, because it was so far from her current state delivering towels and resupply while working for my dad who owned a ServiceMaster at the time. I’ve since come to understand the implied meaning of the song and do NOT wish that kind of fame on my ma, but now I kinda wonder if Sue was just a cute girl whom all the boys loved, but like, she just liked back. She didn’t actually “run around” on them, she just wasn’t looking to be claimed. Sue was probably just a really lovely nice gal not in love with any of the boys (maybe she was even into those girls!?!), and that was frustrating for those boys. Her alternative of course, was to be a bitch, which retrospectively, she probably should’ve been, since they labeled her a slut anyway.

At least these disgruntled gentlemen were writing songs to process their sorrow, not shooting up movie theaters. Which just made me disappointed in men of today. What a journey. 

But also, maybe it’s not so wise to judge people from the past by today’s sins. Or standards. It’s a whole different universe. We may as well be aliens. Ha. Maybe that’s what aliens really are. Us. Like, humans in the future, who learned time travel. Like I said. It’s been a journey.

I drew so many parallels between Dolly Parton and Taylor Swift’s musical journey, from their lyrics full of double entendres and hidden gems, to their more obvious album cover escapades until my eyes crossed. I might as well have had one of those message boards filled with post it notes and who-done-it pictures and strings connecting all my wild theories. Kind of like all you Swifties, but with a Dolly twist. Could one of you get on that? Thx + heart hands emoji. 

Art, music, the human experience; it’s all recycled isn’t it? Everything repeats itself. But like, in an advanced way. We take the core of something that’s good, and modernize it. There are only so many sounds an instrument can make. So many beats to drop. So many ways to say the same thing with so many words. Sometimes I come across a piece of writing that sounds like I could’ve written it. But I didn’t, and I never even heard of the author before, yet it’s very in line with my own thought processes. In my younger days it was hard not to think (as we all believe we are the center of the universe at some point) did they read my stuff? Oof…did I read theirs? How do they also think all these thoughts I think?

There are only so many thoughts that can be thought and so many ways words can be arranged to produce the same general idea. It’s a little wild and a lot ego-centric to think you are the first person to have a thought worth quoting, worth repeating, worth hearing. Perhaps other people see the world the same way you do. They’re moving through life on a similar plane as you are. Maybe even 60 years apart. Sounds like you’ve found yourself a friend, not a foe, and certainly not a competitor. A kindred spirit. Yes, of course there are bad eggs out there Nancy, but I think we can all agree the rottenest of them all is Artificial Intelligence, who has the nerve to steal your shit without even the decency of having a soul. 

Still with me? Cool. Hi.

Anyway, I’ve spent the last month shuffling to the beats, toe-tapping, knee-slapping, hand-clapping, mouth-yooping, fist-pumping, and body-boogieing. We covered a lot of ground, me and those records, went to a lot of places. My dad was rather eclectic in his taste, and if you throw in a few from my mom, woof you got yourself one musical mutt packaged in boxed vinyl in desperate need of a bath. 

It’s been a heck of a trip. I found myself sending along random songs from 50 years ago with zero context to people in my phone at 11 PM, while elbow deep in Dolly or Patsy or one-album wonders. I mean, maybe they had more albums. But I had never heard of them before and I only had one album. Tosh-logic.

When I felt I was keeping too many records for which I had negative physical space (the entire reason I’d been actively avoiding acquiring a vinyl habit for most of my adult life), I developed a scientific method of choosing which album to listen to next based on the album cover. I’d select ones I thought for sure I’d pass on to Tessa (who did accurately question if she’d just be getting all the rejects when I told her what was happening), just to be completely smitten with the artist’s journey by the end of the B side. Into the collection they went.

Sometimes I’d send my dad songs I was almost confused as to why I couldn’t stop listening to over and over, and he’d shoot me back a message with his history of the song.

Hands down my most cherished discovery was Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show Revisited. The whole album is a pretty decent trip, but when I heard Carry Me, Carrie, the song felt so familiar though I don’t ever remember hearing it, like the feeling you feel when you realize you’re probably going to listen to this song 100 more times and tell everyone you know about it, even though you can pretty much guarantee most people are going to hate it. I had to know more.

Almost lost the rest of the marbles I’m still clinging onto when I learned the entire album was written by my favorite childhood poet, Shel Silverstein. As a kid, I highlighted lines in his poems that burrowed into my core, and today those same books are stacked in a centerpiece in my living room. That guy was my kind of lunatic, and I heard the real story come to life in every song after that discovery. 

Carry me, Carrie is about a man with no “home” because the love of his life is lost. I’m not the boss, but if you know Shel, that’s what it means. Probably. From somewhere in the middle, but you really gotta check it out yourself for that banging refrain:

Well he struggled to his feet,
and staggered down the street
to the window of a five and dime.
He stood and laughed awhile
at his reflection.

And then I heard him SHOUTING
something ’bout a mountain,
he could surely climb.
If she was only there to point
the right direction.
BUT SHE AIN’T, NO
NO SHE AIN’T.

As if we haven’t all been there. Well Shel, you couldn’t have possibly found a better weird ass band to personify your mind. I was right there with you. And them. I’ve highlighted this song in my mind. Here’s to freakin’ at the freaker’s ball.

What an experience, listening to vintage vinyl. You get to sit down, no skips please, and really hear songs you’ve heard for years, but maybe you don’t really know them at all. Sometimes it’s not until you merge your eyes with your ears, combine the lyrics that you see with the music that you hear, verbal + instrumental, that you realize you’ve been filling in the blanks with your own imagination. It changes the entire experience. (Starbucks lovers, anyone?) When you listen and read, there’s no time for your own interpretation, because this isn’t about you, not yet. Immerse yourself in their world, you can join it by adding movement (see boogie woogieing above), that’s all for you.

Music is such a beautiful super power. To find feeling, to build connection, to tell you you’re not alone in the world. That other people also think these thoughts you think, feel these feelings you feel. And it’s a scientific fact that there is a song for every single feeling ever felt. Ever. Maybe not science-based, but perhaps I can make that my life’s work. _{^{(Unemployed career thought #451)}}

Anyway. All that to say. Some people wait until death’s door to give away their cherished possessions and even longer to tell people how they feel. This is me telling you, thanks for being my dad. I’ll never be the daughter you want me to be all of the time, but I’ll always be the daughter you raised. 

And I hope that makes both of us proud.