In the first week after I found out that my father might die, there were two things that made me cry: green beans, and The Rolling Stones.
My sister loathed green beans. She didn't like their squeak against her teeth. Dad would eat them with gusto and drama. 'They fed us these in the army!' he'd exclaim, whilst we rolled our eyes and my sister gagged. 'Love 'em!'. I had a similar enthusiasm for food, although Dad failed to recognise his own tendency to ebullience and hyberbole in others. 'You can't love food,' he'd tease. 'You can't marry it. But my father had given me the same enthusiastic, unrestrained joy in all kinds of things. Music, for example.
'How will we ever be able to listen to them again?' my sister laughed, crying into her soy latte as I handed her a tissue. The Stones was our childhood, after all. Saturday mornings were loud music on vinyl. Parties where we would curl up under coats in the guestroom whilst the adults listened to Exile on Main Street. The naughtiness of the sleeve of Sticky Fingers. Jagger's lankiness and big lips. 'Weellllll.... did yaaaa hear about the Midnight Rambler?' or the quieter 'Love in Vain: 'I followed her... to the staaaaaaaaaaschhhiiooon'. To this day it only takes a note or two and I've nailed the song and the album. It's a kind of child abuse, or brainwashing, or beautiful musical indoctrination that you hold close to your heart forever. These say Alzheimer's patients are brought to lucidity through music. If lucidity had been the issue, the Stones would have been the playlist, followed by Dylan, Cash, Steve Earle, Greg Browne, a thousand other artists that had him calling me up and saying: 'Listen to this!' in the thirty five years since I left home. I felt the nauseating realisation that no one would call me with a song anymore, once he was gone.
Green beans and the 'Stones. I wonder what two things my life will be reduced to, in the end.
Although I could drop any Stones song here, I'll drop CW Stoneking instead, as I have fond memories of seeing him at the Melbourne Zoo a few years back with Mum and Dad. He's an Australian blues singer-songwriter, although this short description does his vaudeville, carnivalesque theatrics a little disservice. One online publication listed his repertoire as 'A 1920s pre-war blues sound...New Orleans jazz, jug band music, hokum, country, and calypso...elements of jump jive, early rock’n’roll, and gospel' Want to listen more? Listen to Jungle Blues.
This post was written in response to the prompt 'Green Beans'.
