I have to laugh.
But first, let's put that tape in and hit rewind. Two decades and a handful of years.
There was always room in the car. Though mashed together in the back more often than not, somehow there was always room. Of course, at that time I was little more than six or seven years of age, and my eldest sibling merely double that.
Four in the back, two in the front, everything I loved all in one place.
Sometimes I think those holidays were less about the destination and more about the journey. Scores of expeditions mark my soul with unrevealed iridescence, waiting for the searchlight of memory to highlight an escaping wonder, bound to betray its fellow jewels in the night.
And now, a little fragment tugs in my grasp. Memories of long drives to which the soundtracks had long since twisted into the shadows, evading my erratic recollections, my blindly searching lights.
But now I have to laugh, for Voyeur (what I had initially entitled this post) is the name of an album whose songs echoed in my mind all this time. A Kim Carnes album my father slapped onto the B side of a tape that would end up playing by the time it became late. By the time we had all started to drift off.
I don't think I ever heard that album from start to finish in one drive.
Now as I listen to those songs I laugh, for I'm not sure how my father thought that appropriate fare for our young ears. Perhaps he considered it just good music (which I'd have to agree with), or perhaps he believed we simply wouldn't understand it. In which case he was right - I'm not sure if I ever asked a digging question about the music, and I asked a lot of questions when I was young. I guess I just fit the lyrics into my young vocabulary, which I'll admit was pretty easy to do.
It does make me think, though. There was quite possibly another side to my father that I never saw, never experienced, would not have understood. Even as I grew, he grew and our lives both changed. I always sensed and occasionally even saw the subtle rogue inside my father, but the side he largely presented to his children was almost infallible. If anything I could accuse him of being less emotional at times, which is a shame, for now I see and realise and remember him in a million different ways.
And he was a cool cat.
Here's to you, dad.
