Landslide
When we listen to my music in the car, we have a rule.
Frankie says “Skip” or “Keep,” and I obey. Today
we’re shuffling through a Soft Rock mix generated
by the streaming service itself, a mix created by, I’m certain of this,
another 40-something person who grew up riding through
relentless South Florida suburbs in the back of a white Honda Cressida.
It’s also possible, I must admit, that maybe all of my likes and dislikes,
my entire aesthetic history can be easily packed into an algorithm; that maybe
the streaming service clocked my whole existence a long time ago
and what I’m always listening to in the car is not the world’s abundant symphony
but the sound of my own hum, the window I think I’m staring through
actually a mirror. Either way, the light changes, and Fleetwood Mac’s
“Landslide” begins, the song that, more than any other, threaded
the channels my mother shuffled through as she drove me to school
and back again, over and over opening and closing the loop
and as I hear it, I am all at once enormously happy, brought back
to a place of calm, expansive possibility, once again young, headed
toward a pleasantly vague future. “Skip!” Frankie yells.
It’s times like this where I have to remember that my daughter
is barely three years old. She doesn’t know anything about music.
It’s my job to properly author her algorithm, to inject
every song from an album like Rumours into her small body
while it’s still forming, to bank as much sonorous pop music
as possible into her brain so that one day her taste will be, like mine,
unimpeachable and she’ll explain to her friends, as I’m explaining to her now,
about the recording process of Rumours, how everyone was dating each other
and breaking up and consuming shiploads of cocaine, the band a frayed
organism of emotion and wreckage but somehow out of that mess
they managed to compose some of the most beautiful songs the world has ever heard
and doesn’t that teach us something essential about the human spirit?
“Skip!” Frankie yells. “Skip! Skip!” My heart is breaking
but she’s right—a rule is a rule—that’s also an important lesson
so I skip “Landslide” and out comes the first, saccharine notes
of Eric Carmen’s “Hungry Eyes,” a song that is also embedded
in my brain but for completely different reasons. “Hungry Eyes” is the kind
of hackneyed FM schlock that record companies used to churn out
in waves, driving the sales of otherwise forgettable albums
funding the third and fourth homes of VPs and executives.
“Keep!” Frankie yells. “Frankie!” I yell back.
“You’re going to keep ‘Hungry Eyes’ but skip ‘Landslide?’”
“I don’t love Landslide!” she yells. I gasp audibly, and this makes her laugh even harder.
“I don’t love Landslide . . . and I don’t love Dad either!”
This is how this particular game goes—The reaction game.
The bigger deal Frankie makes of something, the bigger I react, and we keep going
until our faces explode from exertion and speed.
“But Frankie,” I yell. “Everyone loves Dad!”
“I don’t love Dad! I don’t love Dad!”
She can barely get the words out now, her whole body
erupting into a spasm of laugher, and that’s when I realize
there’s one thing I can never say to her, something that supersedes
the rules of the game. I can’t say, “I don’t ____ YOU, Frankie,”
even as a joke. I can’t even write it, like how certain believers
won’t write the name of G-d. Some things are just too holy, too sacred,
and the whole religion falls apart if they are denied, even in jest.
“Well, I love YOU, Frankie!” I say.
“I don’t love you! I don’t love you!” she keeps yelling, laughing
harder and harder, until it starts to sound like the chorus of a song.
The Daughters Album
after Campbell McGrath
When one of our daughters says they hate something
we tell them, Don’t yuck someone else’s yum
a concept I believe in theory but not in practice.
I love to yuck a yum, if it can be done safely
and in communion with someone I love. I don’t
trust people who won’t share a yuck with you
as if some barrister in a wig will one day read these yucks
back to us in a courtroom and issue
a public damnation. Yucks are a part of human
nature—a communal bond, our cut-and-bleeding palms
smashed together, although sometimes I yuck a yum
even when I don’t want to, I can’t help it, like when
the lead singer in that band all my friends love died
and I felt nothing and feeling nothing is scary so I went back
and listened to the band again but I’m sorry to report
that even washed by the great sympathy
of an early death that band is, top to bottom, drums
to microphone, one gigantic yuck. Every single song
yucks, which I know is an absurd opinion coming
from someone who cannot play a single instrument
who cannot sing in tune or clap on beat at a concert.
Only my daughters ever want to hear me sing
and that’s only because they’re so young and I’m their dad
and then it hits me: I should make a record
called The Daughters Album, using only my ridiculous voice
and the toy instruments in the house: a xylophone,
a ukulele, a plastic drum. It will be the best
album I can make and it will only be for them.
If they yuck it, they yuck it, but maybe yucking
their dad’s album will be the thing that bonds them
together, the thing they’ll laugh about for years
afterwards, the thing that, when one of them is angry
with the other they can call up to defuse the tension.
Remember The Daughter’s Album? they’ll say.
And they’ll play it and laugh at me and love
one another again, and who knows maybe
when I’m dead the album will stop being so funny.
Maybe one day they’ll be listening to it
and go silent because the songs are hitting
differently. They’re realizing that, Wow, it wasn’t
that Dad sucked at music, it was that the world just wasn’t
ready for him and they’ll release The Daughter’s Album
on a major label and it will become a sensation
a cultural touch point and I’ll be mentioned
in the same breath as The Beatles Nina Simone
John Coltrane and maybe I’ll never die either.
***
Author photograph courtesy of P. Scott Cunningham
