My morning commute can take me anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours based on the traffic, accidents, road construction and rubberneckers. You get used to such things and find ways to pass the time. Just recently, I was listening to an old radio episode of Gunsmoke from the 1950’s and recognized the voice of the doctor. I just couldn’t place it.
As traffic crept along, I finally realized that the voice I recognized was that of Howard McNear. McNear played the role of “Doc Adams” in CBS Radio’s Gunsmoke from 1952 to 1961. I didn’t know him by his real name, I knew him as “Floyd the Barber” on The Andy Griffith Show.
Some folks’ voices have that effect on you – you remember them.
A couple of days later, my son had given me a demo copy of his latest album. He’s not famous yet, but he will go off to college in the fall to Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee to learn about the music business.
But I know his voice, it’s not mine, but I know his voice well. My twangy Southern voice is not shared by my children - that’s ok, I just want them have a little bit of my heart in them, because theirs is in mine.
I stuck the cd in my car’s player and enjoyed the music whilst traveling at ten miles per hour.
It only took my getting to the second song on the album to kind of lose it. I try not to lose it in front of people, but I would be lying if I were to say that more than a couple of commuters have seen me crying in the car (if they weren’t solving the world’s problems on their cell phones).
My son writes his own songs, plays the guitar and piano and mixes all of it up to produce his own creations. I’m just a math guy, I don’t understand how it works, but I understand that he seems to know what he is doing.
This second song that opened with sounds of an ocean, kind of put you on the beach. I can tell it’s him strumming on the guitar and immediately recognized the voice that I have heard through the walls for years, the voice I’ve heard in bars where he wasn’t old enough to drink, but old enough to perform and the voice I’ve watched singing from the front of the church on Sunday mornings.
My “last” voice …
They say a good song means different things to different people, making you happy or sad or pulling on your heartstrings. So, it being the first time I had heard this one and not having discussed it with him, I took it to mean what I wanted to think he meant…
“We could only keep them locked up for so long, but someone has to teach us how to live on our own.”
That line, from a Daddy’s viewpoint can be interpreted and understood easily. He may have been talking about his friends and fellow classmates who are transitioning into the next phase of their lives, but I took it as, “Hey Daddy, I’m about to go pursue my dreams.”
How else could I?
Then he goes on to sing, “You think you will be accustomed after the first few times, but the cuts get deeper as time goes by.” Well, he’s my third and final one to leave and the cuts do get deeper – again a Daddy’s interpretation.
And then he hit me with the lines in the song that got to me the most… Riding down the road at a snail’s pace… Hit me like a big tractor trailer coming 100 miles an hour from the other way… In his words, “I’m telling myself they’re off to greater things… The scariest part is the next one is me…”
To begin with, the words, the song, the music were great, but that was my son, my last child in his last year of living under my roof, saying, “The next one is me…”
Maybe he will find his niche in this world, I hope it has to do with music, because he loves it so much. Wherever he goes and whatever he does, I hope he realizes that he has a place a place in my heart – his own niche that is not going anywhere.
“The weather seems great, but the waters are rough…”
His words, but I understand that line also… We all do.
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Cranks My Tractor
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I'm BN Heard and I like semicolons, dogs and hearing the voice throughout the house.
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