Remembering Daddooooo

There was something to that John Philip Sousa inspired music I was playing all weekend.  It opened up posts and memories and kept a smile plastered to my face.

Considering that the sun has barely shone, that the beasties are devouring my gallardia, that it's humid and hot and I might as well be sweltering on a beach in these conditions, that my car needs a bath but I don't want to wash it because it rains every day... well, let's just say that the smile was no mean feat.

Pandora's mix included Bizet's March of the Torreadors from Carmen.  After two notes, all I heard was Daddooooo; Bernstein could have been conducting the Oceanside Junior High School Marching Band for all the difference the music made.

My head was filled with my father's bombastic baritone, bellowing the words through a gigantic smile and a puffed out chest.  No, he didn't know Bizet's lyrics.  He had the New York version, which went like this:

TOR-E-O-DORO, don't spit on the floor,
Use the cuspidor,
Whaddaya think it's for???

That basic theme repeats, ad nauseum, and so my phantom father and I had lots of opportunities to dance around the kitchen island last Saturday. There was lots of marching, and then there was standing proudly as we bellowed.... and don't tell me I didn't hear his voice, though he's been dead for more than a decade.

It was a moment, denizens.  Someone knew I needed a smile and a Daddy hug.

As if the programmer were channeling my mind, a few tunes later Dvorak's Humoresque was pouring out of the speakers and my father was, once more, in the kitchen.  This time, we were humming and gliding as we crooned:

Passengers will please refrain
From flushing toilets on the train.
The train is in the station.
I love you.

With a little twirl, a quick two step, a shake of the hips and the shoulders we finished the song with a smile.

My dad was difficult, but I'm beginning to see the wisdom in G'ma's suggestion that we concentrate on the good parts.  This was one of the good parts.