Sentimental Things

I wish I'd known my father better. He was what my mother used to call "a kidder".

Georgia called it cruel, but I thought he was quite clever when he told us to "look at the stars" by gazing up at the window through a coat sleeve as he poured water from a glass down onto our faces. Georgia also holds a childhood grudge from an incident at a birthday party where my dad told her to make a wish and then pushed her face into the cake. Georgia is not what you would call a practical joker. Now, as an adult, I can see that we could have taken practical joking to new heights with my father.

Before holiday meals, the only meals that apparently were important enough, we said "Grace", and his standard prayer was this:

Bless your ears and bless your skin
Pull out your ears and jam it in
He would then glance at the faces of his three daughters, and he could always count on one of them for a laugh. Dolly, with a look of disapproval, laughed too.

Sometimes on thick hot summer nights when we fled to the backporch to escape the stifling house, he would sing his repotoire of strangely archaic songs. We would be wowed by his World War II medly, including You're in the Army Now and The Caissons Go Rolling Along, and he'd belt out a song from his high school years that went something like this:

Hail hail to *-**-** High
You bring the whisky, I'll bring the rye

Send those sophomores out for gin
And don't let a sober person in

We never stagger, we never fall
We sober up on wood alcohol

All the loyal faculty lies drunk on the ballroom floor
My personal favorite, one that I always joined my father singing in an appropriately plaintive and ironic manner was called Oh, How He Lied:

She sat on her bal-co-ny and smoked her cigar
Smoked her cigar
Smoked her cigar
She sat on her bal-co-ny and smoked her cigar
Oh, how she smoked her cigar

He sat down beside her and strummed his gui-tar
Strummed his gui-tar
Strummed his gui-tar
He sat down beside her and strummed his gui-tar
Oh, how he strummed his guitar

He told her he loved her but oh how he lied
Oh, how he lied
Oh, how he lied
He told her he loved her but oh how he lied
Oh, how he lied
In the remaining verses the couple get married but then she "up and dies". She goes to heaven and "flip-flop she flies" and he goes to hades and "frizzles and fries" (presumably because he lied).

Wonderful lowbrow silliness. It's an artform that takes a certain humility to appreciate. A cultural artifact from a time when people, without the luxury of air conditioning, all hung out on the porch and spent unhurried summer nights together.