My first Victrola

Listening to the Carter Family on the Victrola, father with his fat thumb on the dial. The combination of voices nudged up against each other sounded like the working class talking to god himself, as my father stoically stood, eyes staring out at the rails, tapping his right foot.

How I chased paths with the Carter Family, took umbrage in the doors forged by them ten years prior knowing I was ten years too late. Growing up it was they who I looked up to. My Father and I were always singing a Carter tune. I remember when we bought the first Victrola after Mom died, I could hear all the voices around the lone microphone. The dust in the grooves, the lost voices that time left behind. The almost schizophrenic way I viewed the world, I never knew the difference between father's stories & what had really happened. He played like the record like a kid, waving the floppy railroad hat around, while outstretching his arms, inviting me to dance. In the movie of my life, he is forever rising over the camera, tossing his hat into the ring, throwing caution to the wind in everything he did and lived. I moved out west in the early 1960's, trying to ride a resurgance in country and folk music, but it was too late was almost over at that point. No one wanting to hear about our legends anymore.

"Listen to those voices, Marzie, listen to them soar." Pop would say, while waving his arms up to the sky, as I pushed my imposing spectacles up my long nose,laughing because I felt freed by those voices; It was like I had been listening to a single note played off key for my entire life, and now the entire spectrum of sound had been introduced to me the moment he delicately pointed the needle at the start of the record, “Your going to miss me when I’m gone.”

From the old railroad songs Dad would sing to that first song on the Victrola, he gave birth to something that would never die in me, even after two marriages, a breakdown, addictions, and salvation. Even in my darkest hour, he’d be there for me, pulling up the kitty flower patch quilt to the tip of my chin. His comforting tenor, whispered tales of hammers, lost loves, galloping trains and shrewd industrialists. At home Mama was sick, was always sick, stern and mostly angry. I never knew why.

Dad was always kind, soft and larger than life. He loved her no matter how sour or sick her mood was. Pale pallor, “like chicken soup”, he’d say, on his way out to work, kissing her deserted forehead and swinging his lunch pail.

When I took that trip down to the river when the icebox shorted, to pull the chain containing the locked box of dairy products and coming back to see the pale of her face change to white, reflected by the spilt milk, the bottle shattering after I dropped it. How I cried and Dad took us away. I guess he did everything for me. I think that’s why Mom was mad all the time. She knew I meant more to him than she did. Like when he spent the last of the monthly wages on a guitar for me. The brand logo “Martin” shining back through the fog of tears on my glasses, after coming in from the cold, to beef stew and a face that showed no love to Father, coming from Mother.