My life my love and my lady is the sea. So what about me?
Riding along with windows down and sunroof open, I looked out at miles of salt water estuary. Heading to Walmart to pick up a prescription, I drove along the one road off the island.
A carefree solitary moment and then dagnabbit — Brandy came over the radio. The 1972 song by Looking Glass.
“And there’s a girl in this harbor town
And she works laying whiskey down
They say Brandy, fetch another round
And she serves them whiskey and wine
They say,”Brandy, you’re a fine girl
What a good wife you would be
You could steal a sailor
From the sea.”
I cried.
Every time, every last time this old song surprises me on the radio, emotion swells at my throat. I’m 8 or 9 riding in the passenger seat of a Chevy station wagon on the way to school. My dad wearing a suit drives. Who knows how I’m dressed or if my hair is up in a pony tail? A metal lunch box might sit at my side but there isn’t a backpack on the floorboard. In 1972, we didn’t need such things to carry a slim book home.
Dad and I, Easter 1968.
My dad reaches over to the radio knob and turns up the volume. “I like this song,” he says.
I’ll remember that moment till my last breath.
Why?
Why do tears well up and a lump form in my throat? I tried without much luck to force tears pooling in my innards into submission.
Why does a tune about a port city barmaid pining her life away for a sailor who can’t settle down make me soppy with emotion?
I need to figure this out because it’s most irritating when you have to leave the car and appear composed and not like you’ve been crying about riding to school with your father 45 years ago.
A conservative guy, my father didn’t listen to popular music.
In 1972 didn’t all fathers vote for Nixon, wear a crew cut as naturally as a white undershirt and leave work at 5 p.m. no matter what was on their desk? As far as I knew, he didn’t listen to music at all. It was like sex. Parents didn’t do such a thing. Ever. Okay maybe once. Three times tops depending on how many siblings you ended up with.
Here was this solid, straight-as-an-arrow guy turning up the radio for a Top-40 song. And one having to do with an attractive woman serving drinks in a bar.
Who was this man?
Maybe the tears are for the sea of everything I’ll never know about my father? For all the conversations we didn’t have. For all the ones did.
Maybe they are for the sea of things that went on between that moment and now? How that expanse of time, all its joys and mistakes, is lost forever.
Maybe because when things get overwhelming there is nothing I’d rather do than erase all the chatter in my brain and be with my dad riding to school listening to Brandy?
I can’t pin it down to one or even a hundred things.
Surely when I left the car that long ago morning, I had worries.
A test? Lord knows if it was on grammar I was worried. Or should have been.
Maybe it was my week to be on the outside of the in circle? My week to be talked about behind my back and have notes passed to-and-fro about my wader pant legs (an occupational hazard when you’re a tall girl growing an inch every other day).
And surely the boy with whom I was in love didn’t know I existed. For that was my usual elementary school love life modus operandi.
Life is wonderful but it’s complicated and not at all like I thought it would be in 1972. Things will be easier when I’m grown up. Children. Career. Novels. Time for everything. No indecision. Adults know what they want and make things happen. Just like they plan.
Just like I planned. And dreamed.
You know what really puzzles me? How moments fixing dinner and folding laundry seem to drag by then you look up and over half your life has roared by with the furious velocity of a locomotive plowing through Minnesota farmland.
Beats the heck out of me.
I do think I’ve figured out why my dad turned up the radio.
Even after 45 years — Brandy is a great song.
