C is for Commodores

I am participating in a month-long A-to-Z blog challenge. My theme is ... The Music of My Life.

Everyone has that moment in life when they realize something so profound and paradigm-altering that it marks the beginning of an era. For me, it was realizing that the man I had been calling “Daddy” for as long as I could remember was actually my dad.

         

My cousin, Erin, who was three years older than me, lived in Roanoke, but she stayed with me at my grandparents’ house every holiday and the entire summer. We were the closest thing that either of us had to a sister. While sitting in the car one day with my mom and waiting for my grandmother and cousin to come out of the grocery store, she told me that Erin’s parents were divorcing. 

“What’s divorce?” I asked.

“Her parents aren’t going to live together anymore.”

“Why?” I asked.

“They just grew apart. They weren’t getting along anymore.”

“But why?” I asked. My seven-year-old mind just couldn’t comprehend the reason why anyone would stop living with their husband or their wife.

“It’s like your dad and me,” my mom said. “We couldn’t get along, and we finally had to divorce.”

“What? What do you mean?”

My mom laughed. “Well, yeah. How did you think your dad became your dad?”

Honestly, I didn’t know. It had simply never occurred to me that Mom and Dad had ever been married or had ever lived together. I was completely shaken to the core by this news. On some level I figured that I called this man “Daddy” just like someone would call someone “Uncle” when they weren’t, actually. But suddenly, everything clicked. This explained the reaction my dad had when I’d told him that I figured I would just start calling him by his first name, and I would switch to calling my stepfather “Dad.” This explained why I saw him every week, albeit only for an afternoon and only at my grandparents’ house.

Worlds collided in my head. Why hadn't anyone ever explained this to me before? How had I not known this? I never looked at my dad the same way after that. This was how I learned the true meaning of divorce.

And the soundtrack to that time of my life? The Commodores…

What was a moment in your life that changed everything?

B is for BeeGees

When I was five years old, disco (and John Travolta) fever was in full swing!

My mother and father had divorced when I was two, and Mom had married another man not long after—a friend of her brother’s. He was a good man, and because I only saw my biological father on Sundays at my grandmother’s house, my stepfather was the man I understood to be my “dad” at that time. Young children don’t recognize the ins and outs of adult relationships, and in the 70s, people didn’t necessarily tell their children what was going on in their lives. I understood that there were some things that I shouldn’t ask about, so I didn’t. There were some things I did ask, but was told, “Don’t worry about it. That’s not for you to think about.” So I was left to worry and think about it in silence, in the confusion of my own five-year-old mind.

 

For the most part, our family seemed like other families. I didn’t know anything about divorce, none of my friends’ parents’ were divorced, and it didn’t occur to me that my stepfather was anything other than my dad—after all, I had never lived with any other man but him. It didn’t seem strange that I called him by his first name because I called my grandmother by her first name too. He did all the things that dads did. He worked, he came home, he played golf on the weekends. We played games together and he told me he loved me. And that was enough.

 

He seemed to love my mother too. I never heard or saw them fight—at least not during those early years. He was an important guy where he worked and there were many dinners and parties associated with his job, and I loved watching Mom put on her dresses and heels as they got ready to go to the country club or to some other function. I was happy then. Through my five-year-old eyes, they seemed happy too. Everyone I knew seemed happy to me at that time.

  

When Saturday Night Fever came out in the theaters and everyone was gaga over the movie, John Travolta, and the BeeGees, Mom and my stepfather took disco lessons. I remember them coming home, playing the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack on the turntable, and showing me the steps they had learned. Turns, shuffles, hands moving and fingers pointing diagonally across their bodies and then in the air. And “More than a Woman” played on the stereo…

Ageless

It is the first day of the A-to-Z Blog Challenge of 2016! My theme is The Music of My Life.

My mother took me to a Neil Diamond concert before I was born. When I was still in her womb, she discovered that the singer was coming to Johnson City, Tennessee—the next town over from my small hometown of Kingsport, Tennessee. She told me she had hopes of meeting the man himself and hung out after the performance (groupie-style) with that end in mind. In actuality, he never showed, and my mom and her friends ended up hanging out with the roadies instead.

I have always viewed this backdrop as the introduction to my love of music. All of my life, music has played a crucial part. Some of my earliest memories are connected with music—all kinds of music. My tastes have always been varied and eclectic, and music has played different roles at different stages of my life. There are some artists and song selections, however, that will always remain ageless.

         

As Maria sings in The Sound of Music,  the beginning is the very best place to start, so I will start there.

One of my earliest memories involving music: me standing in front of my grandparents’ fireplace in their living room, holding a candlestick like a microphone, and belting out the tune, “You Light Up My Life” by Debbie Boone.

After that, my mother played music on her stereo turntable and in the 8-track cassette player in the car. As Mom drove me to preschool in the mornings, I remember singing along to Barbra Streisand’s “Evergreen” from A Star is Born (still one of my favorite albums of all time).

My mother had every, single Barbra Streisand album ever sold, and her flawless, powerful voice shaped my love of powerhouse singing.

A couple of years later, we were in the car on our way to Jackson Elementary School listening to Donna Summer’s “On the Radio” and Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana.” Staple tunes of my childhood.

Although marked by style and era of music, these are tunes I consider ageless in their capacity to move me (sometimes with tears, other times with smiles of joyous nostalgia). But I never tire of listening to them.

What tunes are ageless for you?