Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Modern Oral Tradition: A story of a story

I am a story teller.  Somehow over the ages that term has come to mean liar.  I do not agree unless you are a liar who also happens to tell good stories, at which point, who cares! I would much rather here an interesting, false story than a broing, true one.  Well... unless the story is actually meant to hurt someone.

      Anyway, so one day my dad decided he was going to clean the basement and "get rid of all the junk" (ha! yeah right).  Usually these projects involve him taking things down, looking through them all, putting them back where they were, and sweeping the floor.  Well, he had picked up a stereo from a friend of his so he could listen to his records while he worked on his cars (as if he ever had time for that) and since he stores all his cars in their daylight, 4 car-garage, basement he had to pull out all his records to see if the record player worked.  It didn't, but he re-discovered his old record player buried on a shelf and tried it out. It still worked! And, my dad got real excited when he found his favorite album from high school: Montrose by Montrose. 
      He was like a little kid as he dropped the needle on the song Bad Motor Scooter! Now, I have never seen my father dance, and I don't know if that's what you could call what I saw, but that's really the only way to describe it.  I just laughed and started upstairs and when I opened the door to the kitchen my mom stopped washing the dishes, stood stock still and said, "Montrose, Montrose, Bad Motor Scooter."
      I asked her, "What?"
      She said, "That song... Montrose, Montrose, Bad Motor Scooter," and then explained to me how when she and my dad were just out of high school they took a trip to the beach and the eight-track player jammed. They listened to that song on repeat for the 4 hours to the beach, the entire weekend they were there, and the 4 hour drive back. When my dad finally got it unjammed my mom took it and threw it away!
     After hearing this story, I knew exactly what I was getting my dad for christmas.

No comments:

Post a Comment