The Right Song
In the wake of her death, I’ve thought a lot about who I am because of my mom. Every day I think about her in some capacity, but much of it is a desperate attempt to cement her wisdom in my memory before it fades. Unfortunately it’s a one-sided experience since I can’t dig deeper with her or properly say thank you.
Lately, though, I’ve also been thinking a lot about my dad.
It’s his 60th birthday this year, which is reason enough to be appreciative, but it also sets up a perfect planet alignment that has me especially introspective. I turned 30 last fall, so there’s something peculiar about being half his age for the first time. And, as if that wasn’t enough to digest, my first child is due this May, so we’ll be a surreal trio of 60, 30, and 0 years old.
I didn’t really know what to do the morning I found out my wife, Rachel, was pregnant. That’s not to say I wasn’t happy, because the complete opposite was true. It’s more to say, what was I supposed to do? Does everyone celebrate or commemorate the occasion in some fashion and I just didn’t know? Do I go to work and pretend like it was any another day? What does anyone do just hours removed from news like that?
As I floated through my morning routine, I found myself thinking a lot about my dad. Incredulously, by some miracle, that was going to be me. He became a father when I showed up and that pivotal moment was now marked on the calendar for me. It wasn’t long before it became obvious what I should do.
I put on my headphones and listened to my favorite Ben Folds song. I sang along, gender neutralizing the child, and cried.
The nonsensical minutiae of “Still Fighting It” was and is perfect. Folds muses of fatherhood and his child’s journey of growing up within the context of mundanity. Isn’t that real life?
Most of my emotion during this listen was hearing it from his perspective, what was going to be my perspective, for the first time.
None of that would mean much to me if my dad hadn’t recommended the song when I was an angsty teen. I was worried about life being so repetitious and couldn’t see what was next. He simply offered a song he liked in response.
It’s hard to untangle specifically where life lessons or key memories come from, but I’ve realized that there is clarity in many these moments with my dad because of music. Dad always has the right song.
For various birthdays, there were songs. In high school, he gifted me a Dido album titled Life for Rent for my birthday. When we were listening to it in the car together, he said, “This should totally be your song of the year,” about the title track. Even though publicly I would have said my song of the year was something like 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” to save face (still a birthday favorite!), the concept of renting life in high school made sense. To date, I’ve listened to that Dido album perhaps more than any other.
In college, the drumbeat of age continued. I learned on my 19th birthday that it would be my last year on Sugar Mountain, whatever that meant. It was a Neil Young song, another quintessential artist of dad’s, so of course I gave it my undivided attention. Halfway through the first listen, it made perfect sense.
Yet it’s hard to have a song for every occasion. Songs are incredible time capsules, but it’s not as if every moment has one that needs to be discovered and presented. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to reduce my relationship with my dad to a playlist, as good as it may be. In thinking about growing up, it became clear to me that dad is the song.
When he introduced me to Ben Folds’ sweary side, he wasn’t using the song as a crutch. His gentle patience with a moody adolescent — giving me permission to say, “it sucks to grow up” — let me know he both understood and cared. He had done a bunch of growing up as well and that human, musical connectedness strings through every single one of these songs.
It occurred to me that I didn’t know where the songs would take us. Was there an appropriate anthem for turning 37 that he was saving until I hit that birthday? (That’s not a challenge, dad, it’s rhetorical.) It also felt like the melancholy theme of aging could, well, grow old. But then one day, he sent a song that reset our march in the best way possible.
At 20 weeks along in Rachel’s pregnancy, we were scheduled for an ultrasound to learn, among other things, baby’s sex. Neither Rachel nor I had a preference, we were mostly dying of anticipation to learn more about baby and its health. Dad had hoped (and correctly guessed) we would have a girl to mix up the Kinsinger Boys Club, so he was elated when he found out. Within minutes, he texted us a link to the right song.
