My Take
DiVoran Lites
Dad was tone-deaf and he hated music. He was tone-deaf, couldn’t sing a note, well, a correct note, he did go for: “Mary Ann, Mary Ann, down by the seaside sifting sand,” now and then. His rendering was unique. I can hear it still.
Dad’s mother never played music on a radio. I don’t recall her having a radio, so maybe he got the disability from her. I do know he became angry when I played mine too loud. But doggone it, I loved music, couldn’t get enough of it. I bought the, “Hit Parade,” magazine every week, laid on my bed and sang all the songs to myself until bedtime.
For our bar and restaurant, we had to have a juke box. What a wonderful, magical thing that was, beautiful too. And you know, even though Dad didn’t love music, I suspect that he must have loved his little daughter who delighted in song and dance. Sometimes when we had no customers, he’d give me the key to the jukebox (we called it a jute-box) and let me trip the trigger fifty times in order to play every single record on there. If it were winter the big table would be gone from the 10×10 dining room and I could dance to my heart’s content while Dad loaded bullets in the other room. There were a few songs he did like. I guess it was the words. He liked: “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” “Smoke, Smoke, Smoke that Cigarette,” and, “I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover.” I wonder how I know that.
Dad liked to load up mom, brother, and me, they called me, Sister, and go down the mountain roads to visit his mother and dad. The scenery made me want to sing, “When it’s Springtime in the Rockies,” and “C. O. L. O. R. A. D. O, (I love you.) quietly to myself. Sometimes I made up songs. I didn’t think anyone could hear me over the hum of the car, but I was wrong. One day my dad was taking Granddad somewhere and Granddad said, “She sure knows a lot of songs.”
“She makes some of them up,” said Dad. How did he know that?
“Well, well,” said Granddad approvingly and I thought, looky there, I’ve done something good.
One year when we took our annual trip with kids to visit Mom and Dad in California Dad had some cassette tapes in a holder on the front seat of his king cab. Of course I read the titles. You’ll never guess in a million years… Believe it or not, they were opera tapes! I hadn’t even learned to like opera myself. When taxed with the incongruity, Dad admitted it. He actually liked to listen to opera tapes driving down the road. Did that mean he missed the little music maker in the back seat? I’d like to think so. “Yep,” says he…”drives your mother crazy.”
I like opera now, too. I’m listening to Pavarotti, as we speak. You hear that, Dad?
Dad and I
DiVoran and Pavarotti at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London, England
Old Things R New 