Sunday morning ramble

One time I bought an album by a fellow I'd never heard before. It was in the bargain bin and cost a dollar. He was a handsome fellow and the rag-tag bunch with him on the album cover looked like they had story behind them, and him with that cigarette and long hair -- I took a chance and spent my dollar.

It was Kris Kristofferson. He turned out to be one of my my top favorite singers. The line up of my favorites was short: Joan Baez, John Denver, Buffey St. Marie, Kris Kristofferson. Anyone else came in second.

I took that record home and put it on the turntable. I played Sunday Morning Coming Down and my Dad heard it. He didn't pay too much attention to my music, but that song stopped him in his tracks. He didn't want to be caught listening to it on purpose, but he was listening, and I saw him nod once and then a shake of his head. That song told it like it was is what he meant.

Dad drank until the last ten years he was alive. He was raised to it is what we all think. His grandmother used to give those kids "hot toddies" when they were little and took a cold. I think Dad and his brothers got a lot of colds. They were PC's, preacher's kids. Maybe they had to prove they weren't good little boys, maybe that's where the first drink came into the picture. I don't know. He never talked about it. He never admitted that he drank.

He'd come staggering into the house, barely able to stand up and his words all skidding into each other and Mom would get rather loudly quiet and whatever she was doing, she'd do harder. Stirring the pinto beans, stoking up the fire, sweeping the floor, making bread; it would all take on an extra measure of what she wasn't saying. And he would say, "Now, Grace..." And sometime in the middle of things, he'd say, "I don't know why you think I drink. I haven't drunk a drop all day." Mom would say, "Haven't dropped a drink, you mean."

This was all, of course, if he didn't go skidded, right off. Skidded. That's a word comes from logging. Trees would fall and they were said to "go skidded". Drunks did so, too. They'd pitch headlong onto the ground like felled timber. That's where "skid row" came from.

You'd think our lives would be filled with violence with a Dad who drank. But it wasn't like that. He was a gentle man, even when he was drunk. And Mom was not the sort who carried things out that far. There were times, as she put it, she "coulda killed him". But not really. She wouldn't kill anything. Neither would he. He didn't hunt and she didn't take an ax to to a roving hen, fat enough for Sunday dumplins. And their arguments...

What it was is they both could yell, but both had soft voices, so the way they'd yell was never that violent kind that upset the kids. We weren't included in the fall-out, anyway. It wasn't at us. It didn't concern us.

Now, though, when I hear ole' Kristofferson singing, "the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad, so I had one more for desert," I see Dad. I've written poems to both of them, my Spring Equinox Mother and my Autumn equinox Father, different as night and day. Upright and Wholesome and dreaming of travel but tied to home and family, that's Mom. A hobo drifter, brick mason, whisky-drinking son of a preacher, that's my Dad. I honor both of them. They had their stories; wish they'd told those stories a little bit more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDCZCCQVbRs