“Whoa,” I said, sitting up a little as the credits rolled. “I haven’t heard that in forever.”
“What song is it?” he asked, shifting under my head. We had been binging Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure for two hours and Netflix’s “Are you still there?” prompt caught us lounging on the couch, my head on his lap.
“…I don’t know. It’s been so long since I’ve heard it.”
And as he did a quick Google search, I was too busy remembering.
As everyone should know by now– by pop culture osmosis or actually reading and/or watching the series– JJBA references rock artists and songs.
And my dad loved classic rock (rock, generally). Music, generally, but classic rock was his favorite genre. When I first heard Roundabout, I wasn’t familiar with it. But I knew the style, and it was confirmed by my mom that it was one of the many songs he liked.
I may not remember much, like the title or who performed it, but I knew that tune from my childhood:
Growing up for me consisted of a lot of waiting– my school district was in another county, so we had to wait an hour for the bus. When I was older, we waited for daycare to open. During the periods where we had only one vehicle, we waited for mom to get out of work. We waited for the bus again in my high school years and when I graduated, we waited in a McDonald’s parking lot on top of a surprisingly scenic hill.
A lot of that waiting was done in the car, with the radio on. And all of the time, it was me and my dad. And finally, my dad would scope out pretty chill places to, well, wait. These would usually be bodies of water or an interesting bit of forest. When he was in the mood, he’d talk (OK, a lot of the time it was more like lecturing), but we mostly just listened to the music.
And hearing the first bars of that song… it jogged a memory of when I was much younger: There was a lake, and it was afternoon, probably early spring. We may have been killing time before we picked up mom. I don’t remember what I was doing or even which car it was at the time. Hell, human memory is pretty faulty in general and I could be misremembering all of this.
But I remember when my dad was still alive.
Grief is something else. It never goes away, it just crops up when you’re watching an animated series that’s supposed to be (for the most part) fun. But considering my reaction to Dan of Steel (Gaucho was another defining background album from my childhood), I kinda saw this coming.
So this “just” (air quotes) made me miss him.
I listened to this song on Spotify and finally cried again.