When my mother’s mother died, I was in my early teens. She lived in Florida before she died and my family flew from Norfolk to Ft. Lauderdale to attend her funeral. She wanted to be buried in Florida even though she had been born in Ladoga, NC and most of her family was born and still live there. My grandmother found sobriety in Delray Beach, FL and after she left rehab when she was in her early fifties, she decided to stay there for good. My mother has told me stories about my grandmother’s difficult life and it’s no wonder that she chose to stay in FL, far away from NC – the location of all of her misery. My mother has many half-siblings, but all of them grew up in my grandmother’s house in East Ladoga until my grandmother was arrested for defrauding the government and for drug possession in the eighties. She’d developed a drug habit over the years and would sell food stamps for drugs. When she was arrested, my mother and her siblings went to live with their grandmother who raised them for much of their lives, when their mother was not in jail or in rehab. By the time my youngest uncle was eighteen, my grandmother had moved to FL with the hopes that she could have a new life in a new place, but it wasn’t long before she was caught up in the same old troubles. After her last stint in jail, my grandmother managed to turn her life around and she lived in Delray Beach for about ten years before she died of a heart attack.
I liked being in Florida, but it was sad to stay in my grandmother’s apartment and to pack up her things. The apartment was small and she had very few things as decoration. She had a framed painting of a beach with footprints in the sand and a plaque with the serenity prayer on a wall, but other than that, the walls were bare, no pictures. She did have a small cassette player and one tape of Billie Holiday that my mother played as we filled trash bags with my grandmother’s possessions that weren’t worth keeping or donating.
Ambiance Playlist
I Cover The Waterfront, by Billie Holiday
Got to Give it Up, by Marvin Gaye
Return of Theodore Unit, by Ghostface Killah ft the Theodore Unit
85/Billy Dee Interlude, by Youngbloodz
Hey Joe, by Jimi Hendrix
Leaves in the River, by Sea Wolf
I Cover The Waterfront, by Billie Holiday
It was nice to be in a new place near the water when my family got the chance to explore the city a little. My brother, sister and I swam in the ocean one day my mother and her siblings, the ones that had managed the trip, talked with the local funeral home to plan the funeral service. There was a lot of tension because my grandmother’s life insurance policy wouldn’t cover even the most basic burial, and they had no choice but to have her cremated. My uncle, Paul, was the most outspoken against cremating my grandmother, but ultimately he had no way to avoid it. My grandmother was cremated and my family decided that the best thing to do was the scatter her ashes in the Atlantic, the water that beat against the shores of the new home that helped her find a semblance of peace before she passed.
And this brings me to reason number two why music means so much to me. Even though I had only a vague idea of who Billie Holiday was at the time, by the time we left Delray Beach, her voice had become the definition of the city; her slow, haunting style that gets parsed out in ebbs and flows just like the ocean. It was perfect mood music, solemn and evocative, and even though I Cover the Waterfront is steeped in sadness, I remember the song as perfect in every place that I found myself during that trip, whether we were in my grandmother’s apartment, or at the funeral home, eating at restaurant, walking on the beach. I can’t say that the trip was fun, it hurt me to hear my mother softly sobbing in the dark in our hotel room (my siblings and my parents and I crammed into one room to offset the cost of flying to FL). It’s hard to put any one emotion on it all though, it was a crazy mix of a lot of things.
Mood music, the music we listen to in order to give others a clue to our own demeanor, or the desired demeanor. And it works, when you hear Billie Holiday you can’t help but be subdued and respectful, even when you’re having fun.
Got to Give it Up, by Marvin Gaye
The death of my grandmother definitely left my family wanting to feel more connected and appreciative of one another. Before her funeral, neither me nor my siblings had seen her in person since she left NC for FL. When we got back to Norfolk, my parents had so many parties and family get together, and they would always start with the same song. My dad says that it’s the song that tells him it’s time to party and even though Marvin Gaye’s song was decades old by that point, it never lost it’s context, it will always implore the wallflower to shirk their bashfulness and dance.
By the time my grandmother died, we had moved into a house and my dad took very good care of his yard; we all did really. We took turns mowing it, though my dad always got one skip because he was the man of the house. The yard wasn’t huge and as long as you mowed early enough in the day or late enough in the evening, it wasn’t too hot and the work was bearable. When it seemed that we had parties every week, my dad would cut the grass every Friday evening, even if it didn’t seem that it was necessary. And by that time he had lined the walkway to our porch with small lights and planted flowers that my mother loved along the path and right in front of the porch. In the backyard, there was a big grill and picnic tables that my brother and I hated to have to shift back and forth in the yard while my dad moved through with his mower.
Some weekends, my mom and dad’s family would make the nearly six hour drive from Ladoga and there would be a lot of drinking and eating, laughing and dancing, and inevitably, the mood would shift to the recently deceased, starting with my mother’s mother and then whomever else of my family had died since the last time we were all together. One of my cousins had died in the Bottoms in Ladoga after he was hit by a car. His friend had dared him to try and run across the street before an approaching car made it to them, and the driver had been distracted until it was too late. But no matter how somber the mood got, my dad could always remind everyone that we were gathered for a party by starting up the Marvin Gaye song.
Return of Theodore Unit, by Ghostface Killah ft the Theodore Unit
Other weekends my dad would host parties for his local friends in the Navy and I remember them lining up shots of liquor on the countertop, counting down, and then throwing their heads back and smacking the empty shot glasses on the countertop. My dad let me try Jose Cuervo for the first time at one of those parties and to this day I cannot stomach the taste of tequila. I threw up almost immediately after I drank it that first time.
My dad’s party song changed when it was mostly friends at his parties. He had always been a fan of rap music since he was a boy writing rudimentary poetry for my mother, and when he was with his friends from the Navy, they liked to play music by their favorites, like Ghostface Killah, that wasn’t overly aggressive or violent in its lyrics and tone (admittedly, Ghostface Killah does not seem like the best choice, but the man will surprise you if you listen through his mixtapes and remixes between album releases; his 2009 Ghostdini Wizard of Poetry is my default baby making music nowadays). My dad and his friends like to drink and laugh and then they would sit around exchanging stories about the things they had seen in their time in the service. One of my dad’s friends had been on a boat in the Middle East for a big chunk of the nineties and the early 2000s. He spoke Arabic and he liked to tell a joke that I cannot repeat here; not because it was sexual or particularly offensive, but because there were considerable Arabic words in it and I don’t think I even understood it all that much.
My dad and his friends appreciated the weekends and their time off so much that they never got rowdy or anything, not even the drunkest one of them who would always drink too much and fall asleep in a corner. They would become the definition of the word “chill”, sitting out back with fireflies spotting the night around them.
85/Billy Dee Interlude, by Youngbloodz
Eventually, we had parties less and less; we went back to holiday get togethers and the occasional cookout in the summertime. My mother was a superstitious woman and had taken down all of the pictures of her mother that were hanging in the house. She said, “you shouldn’t hang pictures of the dead, it traps them here when they should be up in heaven.” She put a sign in the flower bed in front of our porch that dedicated the beauty that bloomed there to my grandmother’s memory and we never forgot her.
I was learning to drive around that time and I think that the stress of teaching me took two years from my father’s life expectancy. I don’t know why it was so hard for me to learn, but it was and I got in two accidents; once when he was teaching me to park (not parallel park, just the regular pulling into a parking space beside another car), and the other time when we drove around a school parking lot (I ran into the back of a bus because I panicked and hit the gas instead of the break; luckily I wasn’t going very fast and it was a Saturday so there were no kids). I eventually got comfortable and I did get my license (I only failed the test three times). My brother, who was a couple years older than me and about to move out on his own for the first time, suggested that we take a road trip to Ladoga to celebrate. My brother always liked being in Ladoga with our extended family. He fit right in and when he was there, he could easily blend into a park, sidewalk, or street corner like he had been born there. I love Ladoga, too, so we convinced my father to let us drive there and he agreed but only on the condition that we call every hour. My sister would have come too, but she didn’t like the idea of spending six hours in a car with us because we wouldn’t let her choose the music. My sister has similar tastes to me and my other family members, but she also likes things that we couldn’t stomach for very long. She was a Celine Dion, Faith Hill, Mariah Carey fan and my brother and I were honest that there would be no stretch of our road trip where those fine ladies, those amazing singers, would be our soundtrack.
We set out and before long we were driving south down 85 through NC. My brother had a mixed CD of rap music and when the Youngbloodz 85 came on, I knew that I was having one of the best summers of my life. I felt old, mature, like I was making my own decisions, being my own man, and the Youngbloodz made us feel cool, like we had written the song ourselves. That song is perfect for the open road, the music propels a listener forward to the end, and the Youngbloodz themselves represented what my brother and I wanted to be at that time, partners in crime, always looking out for one another. Today, we are even more like the Youngbloodz, drinking partners to the end.
Hey Joe, by Jimi Hendrix
By the time we made it Ladoga, we had listened to the Youngbloodz a million times (exaggeration of course). We arrived at the house of my father’s father on the east side and he was happy to see us. My dad had learned from my grandfather how to properly maintain a yard; my grandfather’s grass is always neat because he had worked with the groundskeeper at Stonebridge in nearby Monroe when he was still a young man. My grandfather liked to be outside and his backyard had a hammock where he could sway in the shade. The first night that we were there, we sat around the burning barrel, where my grandfather would burn trash and other refuse he drummed up in the woods behind his house, and we talked late into the night about everything (my brother told my grandfather about his new girlfriend and he asked inappropriate questions about the size and shape of her breasts and behind; and I told my grandfather about how I’d struggled to learn to drive).
I would have never pegged my grandfather for a Jimi Hendrix fan, but he was, and he had managed to prop a speaker up to one of the windows in his kitchen that looked out onto the backyard, and it reminded me of that movie Forest Gump, and a couple Spike Lee movies. We never told our father, he would have been furious, but that night was my first experience with marijuana. I was sixteen and my brother was eighteen, so my grandfather decided that it was time that we accepted our inheritance. Supposedly my grandfather had been smoking weed since he was eight, which I can’t imagine is a good thing. And even though we had a good time laughing under the stars, I never had an experience as pleasant with the drug after that. People tell me that it’s all about the company; every other time I tried it, I got so paranoid I almost had panic attacks. It was the music too, and my grandfather had cooked for us on his grill. He hadn’t invited anyone else over that night because he wanted to enjoy our company.
Despite the man that other people tell me my grandfather was or is, I mostly know him as a very good person who loves me and all of his grandchildren unconditionally. I was honored to smoke marijuana with him, and someday I will tell my father about it, but not any time soon, I doubt that he would take it well.
Leaves in the River, by Sea Wolf
My brother’s Ladoga girlfriend, he had another in Norfolk at the time that he told me he actually loved and cared for, also had surprising musical tastes. He described his Ladoga girlfriend as a “head doctor.” I didn’t know what it meant then, but I knew not to take it literally because she didn’t seem like the type to go to medical school. She was nice, even if she wasn’t a neuroscientist, and she was extremely beautiful. She tried to hook me up with her sister, but her sister was too young and not nearly as pretty.
My brother’s Ladoga girlfriend came over a lot during the week that my brother and I were at my grandfather’s house. The two mostly locked themselves in the room that used to be my father’s when he was a teenager, and they always played their music loud, hoping to drown out the sounds of their sex. He always let her pick the music, and one night I came home from a night out with one of my cousins, I could hear this strange song drifting through the house. It wasn’t their normal sex music, no Jagged Edge or Donnell Jones, it was a musician that I didn’t even know about then and it sounded soft like a lullaby. On every other similar occasion I had told them to turn the music down so that I could sleep, but the song was so soothing that I drifted off without even realizing it. The next morning the song was still playing and my brother’s Ladoga girlfriend was in the kitchen trying to make breakfast (I admit that I am a food snob, I blame my uncle Thomas who is a world class chef who has worked in restaurants all over the world). I asked her about the song and she said that she found it on a tv show and it sounded just like the thing she would play for her baby to put it to sleep when she had one. “Hopefully it’ll be a little Livingston.” She looked at me as she talked and I could see my brother behind her pantomiming his dissatisfaction at the thought. When she left that day, I asked my brother what they had done the night before to the slow, melodic sounds of Sea Wolf, and he explained that he must have fallen asleep by the time she started playing it because he didn’t remember.
My brother’s Ladoga girlfriend, his now baby mama, played the song for my niece when she was a baby and my niece still sings it to this day. And even though she is almost twelve, my brother tells me that my niece still uses it to lull herself to sleep at night.
It works both ways; sometimes the music chooses the mood and sometimes you choose the music that best suits your feelings. And to match it correctly is like pairing a nice wine with a good plate of food.
Come back next week for Part 3!
P.S. Wes had one honorable mention for the Ambiance Playlist; Lana Del Ray’s Blue Jeans.
PRL Serials 