“Some white drunk bum lays down his weary bones on the rocks while America is celebrating her birthday.” – Travel diary entry, Memphis, TN

Eulogy

My father knows every song no one’s ever heard of. His head is like a cemetery where the failures of great songwriters lie buried in tombs and graves like the corpses of distant uncles and aunts forever forgotten by their families.

My father is a tough man with a large chin and a nose adorned with broken capillaries that glow in the dark like little vein-shaped fireflies. He owns a rusty trumpet that is glued to his callused hand for a large part of the day, and his lower lip is permanently stained with a moon-shaped bruise from the trumpet mouthpiece.

I don’t know how to talk to my father except through songs. He talks about his life as a series of three-minute incidents, and I will respond to him in the same fashion. On Sundays, I will sit with him on the porch and we will have conversations that will essentially feel like this:

“Hello It’s Me.” (Tedd Rundgren)
“Close the door.” (Teddy Pendergrass)
“Cornbread?” (The Blackbyrds)
“One bourbon, one scotch, one beer.” (George Thorogood)
“That’ll be the day.” (The Crickets)
“Tell me something good.” (Rufus)
“I’m telling you now.” (Freddy and the Dreamers)
“I hear voices.” (Screamin’ Jay Hawkins)
“You get what you give.” (New Radicals)

He never talks through the same song twice. With each story he tells, he takes on the role of a priest delivering a eulogy to the song, and then he tucks the song away in his head next to all the others.

At times I wonder whether sometimes he is more concerned about finding the appropriate song than saying what he really wants to say, or recalling what really happened. But then again I think that these songs seem to have become as real to him as anything else, like they are physically buried in the soil underneath his porch; like they have long become a part of his memory instead of his imagination.