soapboxdiner

Old hippies need love too

I was reminded last night of my father - the father I knew in the later years of our relationship. I say that like he's dead. But he's simply living in in the red light district's rent-by-week motel.

But the father I'm remembering is the man in the Bronco, before Broncos were popular. In the twilight of a New Mexico evening, still warm and muggy. Sitting in the driveway of his parent's house, where he lived in the backyard in a camper trailer. He'd taken me along on his third trip of the evening to the drive-through liquor store.

Cloistered in that Bronco, the world only a blackened shadow outside the mirrored windows of that truck. Listening to country music with my drunken dad.

Perhaps I was old enough to start recognizing defeat. Perhaps I only had an ethereal sense of what that is. Watching my father lift the Coors can to his lips, watching the light reflect off the moisture deposited there when the can was lowered.

Watching those lips dance as he quietly sang along to the lyrics of a song... and watching them mumble at the end of it, "That's your good old dad, girl. That's me."

There are times when you really wish you could save a person. Times when you wish you could just make things right. I miss the dad I knew before then. I miss the man who took my hand and taught me obscure facts no one in the world cared about save us. It's a shame that life presents what it does, and I'm saddened that now as an adult, I understand what ailed him.

He's an old hippie
and he don't know what to do
should hang on to the old
should he grab on to the new
he's an old hippie
his new life is just a bust
he ain't trying to change nobody
he just trying real hard to adjust

6:18 am - 09.11.02
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