It’s been over a week now, and I am still singing that song. I both want to and don’t want to, if that’s possible. I think it thinks it has found me and has a job to do. My memory banks are encouraging it to stick around.

It started on a Sunday morning. I turned on a television news show and sipped my coffee while playing with my phone. And then, there it was in all its rich harmonies:

“Today, while the blossoms still cling to the vine.

I’ll taste your strawberries; I’ll drink your sweet wine.

A million tomorrows shall all pass away

And ‘ere I forget all the joy that is mine…today.”

My head immediately jolts up and I begin to sing every word. I know every note. How is this possible? It doesn’t play long enough on the television and I need to hear more. I find YouTube and type in the band name they reference: The New Christy Minstrels. Who? I have never heard of them.

The New Christy Minstrels had made the news because its founder had died. His name was Lloyd Sparks, and he wrote “Today”. They released it in 1964. I was four.

In a flash, I am six and eight and eleven-years-old again; asleep in my childhood room.

That room sits at the top of the stairs and our stereo sits directly at the bottom of them. The words and melody to this song drift upstairs and right through my closed door. I wake up thinking, “Dad is up again.”

“I can’t be contented with yesterday’s glory,

I can’t live on promises winter to spring…”

The owl clock on the wall shows it’s 2:00 a.m.

 Dad had a pattern with his drinking. He would literally stay up for three straight days and nights until he crashed. Then he leveled out, and we had two nights of peace and a sense of safety that he would not try to go out somewhere, or hurt himself by falling.

As I lay there, “God didn’t make little green apples, and it don’t rain in Indianapolis in the summertime…” eventually begins. I get out of bed and creep softly to the landing of the staircase, where I sit on the top step. From my spot, I can look down and see the top of my dad’s head as he sits in his green leather chair directly below me. Sometimes, he has a drink with him and sometimes he doesn’t. Gilbey’s gin is his drink of choice. He often mixed it with 7Up.

While I watch, he gets up once to change the record; I have to hide momentarily on the backstairs which connects to the landing. Sometimes, he stumbles.

I think the music keeps him company; and he has a lot of company. He has hundreds of records, including Herb Alpert’s “Touch of Honey”, Doris Day’s “Qué Será, Será”, The Ray Conniff Singers “This Is My Song”, multiple Rogers and Hammerstein albums and several Glen Miller Orchestra records too.

It’s funny, as I watch, I suddenly remember that there is an album that my mom despises so much that she shoved it under the low television stand in the living room. I found it one day. I went to look at it again months later and I saw two (!) of the same albums there. Dad must have bought it again and Mom got rid of it again. I feel like there were illustrations of pink elephants and martini glasses on the cover, but I’m not 100% sure.

I readily admit that I don’t understand what he’s doing, but I seem to know that this behavior is hurting him. It’s hurting us. It’s a side of him I don’t know.

The dad I know reads a large Golden Book titled “The Children in The Jungle,” to my sister and I. Sitting on each side of him, in the crooks of his arms, he starts:

 “Three bored children are sitting in a room and saying there is nothing to do.”

“Let’s take a trip to India!” one of them says and they draw a tiger which becomes real and chases them. Then they paint a wide, blue river which stops the tiger. They also paint an enormous elephant they climb on top of, and they take deeper into the jungle, right to the huts of The Gobbernoppers. The Gobbernoppers were scary and dangerous, people not to mess with.

When dad was trying to get us to go to bed, he would come up the stairs saying “Here come the Gobbernoppers” holding out his arms like a mummy. Nothing got us squealing in pure delight and jumping into bed like a visit from a Gobbernopper.

Suddenly, I hear Mom yelling from her bedroom, “Turn it down Dave, I can’t sleep” and I scamper back to my room before she sees me.

I understand how music is often the “soundtrack” in our lives, but this song, with its 55-year absence in my life, is a gut punch. Its power to take me back instantly to some painful details borders on an otherworldly feeling. I hate recognizing the old signs of a deeply stressed family, but I understand I will always carry them. I woke up more times than I can count growing up and I always wanted to help my dad, but this was an adult situation way out of my reach. Ultimately, we all paid a price.

But I will say this. If I am forced to remember the music and what it represents, let the happy memories flow through, too. When I bury troubled memories, I also bury the moments and the days I want to remember; like the Goppernoppers. It seems that the good and the bad are woven so tightly together.

Today:

Music Photo Credit: iStock