This morning I subbed someone's show on WRFL from 2 to 5am. I like being up when few people are awake (even though that of course means no one's listening). I like being at the station when no one's there. (Although this morning, there was an armed robbery at the convenience store where I buy a soda right before I went up to the station. I missed it by about a half hour.) So I will often cover late night shifts as a kind of meditation. Plus I can play music without worrying about a theme!
Last night I was rambling on the air, trying to be funny, & I made up this dumb thing about how my father used to wake me up at four in the morning to give me ridiculous trivia quizzes. (I was using it as a justification for giving a trivia quiz on the air at four in the morning.) It was completely untrue - after my parents separated before I turned four years old, I never slept in the same house as my father ever again. There is no way he could have woken me at four in the morning without stumbling through a house he didn't reside in & probably scaring the hell out of my mother & whatever siblings were around.
Also, my father wasn't someone who, as I recall him, talked a great deal. Perhaps I am remembering him wrong. He would use his turn in a conversation to crack wise & corny. When he would visit my little brother & me when we were children, he responded to every question we asked with a smart-ass answer. For example, when he was leaving, I'd say, "Where are you going?" & he'd respond, "To hell & back - you wanna go half-way?"
Some folks, I suppose, might have found that charming. I was usually confused. I was a kid.
But here's something I realized last night: I don't remember what my father's voice sounded like. I was saying on the air that if my father were still with us (he died in 1991), he'd continue to call me in the middle of the night, & I tried to imitate his voice. It hit me, live, on air, that I don't remember his voice!
It wasn't a sad thing. I'm not sad at all about it. It was just - strange. Strange to think I can remember how hundreds - if not thousands - of musicians' voices sound, the voices of actors, my friends, television people, etc. But not my father.
He spoke his last words to me probably twenty-five years ago, so that could explains it - but also he didn't say a whole lot to me in his lifetime. I'll bet one of my sisters has him on videotape somewhere - I'll ask, the next time I'm in Garland, to see. I think I'll be surprised - he probably doesn't sound in any way how I'd now guess he sounded.
Oh shit, & just think - if this were a hundred years ago, there might not even be the chance of a recording!
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