Recently, my husband was unpacking a box from our move nearly fourteen years ago – yes, I am that person – and found a pen and ink drawing of my childhood home that was made in 1990. That was the year that my parents were trying to shut down and sell the house that they’d called home for 18 years. I think mom must have commissioned some young person in her life to do the drawing. I remember she always claimed a “dear friend gave this to me” – which is always possible but our mom was a master storyteller, and I highly doubt anything that she said during that period in her life.  The artist who signed the sketch is Kim/Tim/Jim St Clair (it’s hard to read, even blown up) and I don’t recall ever meeting someone with that name in my life. But by 1990, I was living my own life 45 minutes away from that house, so who knows.  

Makes no difference, really. The point is that I like the pen and ink rendering far more than the austere photo I screenshot on Google maps yesterday. The sketch looks so much more like the home of my memories. Surrounded by trees and secrets. Filled with love while overflowing with war. The yard is open, not fenced, and you can see one of dad’s sheds – those hated, gas-reeking dwelling of Playboy magazines and lawnmowers – peeking out around the back. It looks almost friendly in the sketch, but it – and its brother that you can’t see because it sat directly behind the house – was my teenage self’s mortal enemy. Well, the sheds and their master. I loathed all three. AND the decrepit wooden building we called the “garage.” You can’t see that either, but would have been at the end of the driveway, behind those bushes on the right. The only good thing about that garage was that it held our primary vehicles of escape – our bikes – and it never fell on us every time we opened its wobbly, rotten, 20-foot-tall doors.

The bikes were important part of our childhood. So were the hated lawnmowers. But those are stories for another day. Today, I want to talk about music. How it infiltrated our home, and our souls. It was not the church our mother dragged us to every Sunday that saved my sisters and me. It was music. Like our dysfunctional childhood, music was full of dichotomy. It was hope and despair. It hurt and it healed. It helped each of us, in our own way, to hold on to the part of us that was essential. It provided armor against a cruel stepdad and overbearing mother who loved us unconditionally but was incapable of distinguishing truth from fiction. And it all started in the kitchen.

When my parents were young, before they met, my dad listened to country western – we’re talking Ray Price, Jimmy Dean, and the master of them all (in Dad’s eyes, at least) – Frankie Laine of “Rawhide” fame. My mom on the other hand loved the Supremes, the Beatles, Jack Jones, Tom Jones, Barbra Streisand, every member of the Rat Pack, every musical, and Mario Lanza just to name a few. Her eclectic ear came from her father, my grandfather, who was a professional singer in his heyday. I know exactly what my parents listened to because I started stealing their albums fair and square around the time I turned twelve. It’s not like they were listening to them! In 1990, about the time that the sketch was drawn, I was horrified to discover what was left of their album collection sitting in a box at one of the many yard sales my mom held to help pay for their move to South Carolina. I indignantly loaded the whole box into my car and threw a $20 at my mom. The nerve!  

But we’re not talking about 1990 here. We are still back in the 1970s when Album Oriented Radio was king. By the time we moved into the “new” house, the stereo cabinet with the turntable built in was rarely used, but the radio in the kitchen was never turned off. Growing up in the 70s was a mixed bag, but one of the great positives was the radio. Back then, you could hear country, rock-n-roll, and easy listening all played back to back on the same station. And just look at the selection of music that was coming out back then:

Top Songs of 1975:

• Love Will Keep Us Together. Captain & Tennille.
• Rhinestone Cowboy. Glen Campbell.
• Philadelphia Freedom. Elton John.
• Before the Next Teardrop Falls. Freddy Fender.
• My Eyes Adored You. Frankie Valli.
• Shining Star. Earth, Wind & Fire.
• Fame. David Bowie.
• Laughter in the Rain. Neil Sedaka.

Source: https://top40weekly.com/top-100-songs-of-1975/

While it seemed to us girls that my parents rarely agreed on anything, having music played around the clock on the kitchen radio was something they continued to do until the last two years of their life together. (Now that I think about it, the fact that the radio was finally silent should have warned us that the end was nigh). The sheer stretch of the musical canvas back then just seemed to bridge the gaps in their different tastes in music, and we girls were the beneficiaries. It opened each of us up to all styles of composition, and helped us find our own way.

As children, this spilled out into the back yard. The back-back yard, that is, not the front-back yard. Yes, we had two back yards. Divided by a drainage ditch. The front-back yard was generally dad’s domain, where he would sit and smoke his cigarettes and drink his beer and watch his house. He only went through the back-back yard to get to the hated shed brothers. The back-back yard, could be both our paradise or our hell; it all depended on whether you were wearing shoes. We were captains of our own lives in the back-back yard.  Okay, I was the captain of our lives back there (oldest!). Plus, the entrance to “our” woods lay just past the furthermost holly tree in the back-back yard. Once in the woods, no one could see us or tell us what to do. Except me (cough). But those holly trees and their fellow foot-torturers, the great gumball trees, made sure the barefoot child never ran in pure pleasure.

There were two swing sets in the back-back yard. A rusty piece of iron that was probably as old as the house, and a new one that mom and dad erected just for us. Guess which one we preferred? Mom and dad had hung an old wooden porch swing on the rusty one, leaving the metal slide intact. From 21^st Century eyes, this was an accident waiting to happen and total neglect on our parents’ part. One might think they would have just taken it all down, but its footers were encased in concrete. That thing wasn’t going anywhere.  

And as it turned out, this was a very good thing, because it wasn’t actually an old, rusted out swing set; that was merely its secret disguise. In our reality, it was the world’s grandest sound stage! The contraption was situated next to a towering King Crimson maple tree, which turned out to be the perfect power source for concerts. Who knew? We set up tent poles as microphone stands, and converted jump ropes into mics and cabling. This was a super adaptive setup too. One of the neighborhood kids, Frances, was our awesome sound crew, and if she was around, we plugged into the swing-set, and then Frances plugged the swing-set into the maple tree and ran the sound from atop the slide. If no sound crew was available we would sometimes bypass the swing set and just go right to the tree. The porch swing served as the front row seat to our epic concerts.

With or without our sound crew, I feel like both the old swing set and the tree were happy that we girls understood their real purpose in life. We performed more concerts in the back-back yard than I could possibly remember. And we would practice and practice new material if we knew that mom and dad were going to be hosting some kind of yard party. That was when we were allowed to play in the front-back yard with our cousins, and the occasional wayward child mom had taken under her wing. So, we’d setup our equipment in the front-back yard and force everyone in attendance –  including the adults! – to listen to our songs. The Captain & Tennille were particular favorites.

Reflecting on those days I realize now that my memories of that maple tree and swing set is the reason why “The Giving Tree” by Shel Silverstein always makes me cry. Because we all grew up. One-by-one we abandoned the great sound stage. Each of us escaped from the New House at 18, and none of us looked back until our parents sold that house. Sure, we would visit, and Peep would come home from college in the summertime, but it wasn’t the same. The magic walked away, hand-in-hand with our childhoods. I hope they are happy wherever they ended up.