Probably my biggest flaw with my family was my father – he was a Country music fan. But he was a Johnny Cash fan, so that helps. I grew up NOT being a Country music fan, this fate fell to my brother Dave. And he will tell you he has a broad range of musical tastes – he likes both Country AND Western music.

Growing up my parents listened to country music stations in the car. Even as a child my immunity system was already kicking in because I have no recollection any any country songs growing up – with one exception. In fact, I don’t remember any of my parents albums except this Johnny Cash album. No other songs, just this song – “A Thing Called Love.”

The Hi-Fi was a regular piece of furniture for many families that were into music or gadgets. We were a gadget family. We have a automatic card shuffle machine, a hand-held cigarette rolling machine, a digital clock when they first came out (not an LED display, the kind that flipped to a new number every minute) and a microwave – all in the early seventies! I’m pretty sure all that ‘high tech’ stuff came from my dad. I’m also pretty sure he wasn’t an audiophile, most audiophile’s aren’t Country music fans, yet we had a hi-fi like this one:

Just seeing these old pictures brought back memories of being a kid, laying on the floor next to the hi-fi listening to records, mostly little kid records or Christmas albums.

I remember pressing my finger on the orange glowing power light and watching how it lit up my finger.  I often wondered if I see my bones as the light shown through my finger, but all I could see the small red glowing fingernail.

So I would lie on the floor listening to this Johnny Cash album called ‘A Thing Called Love’. Looking at a red glowing finger and singing along to this song. As I searched for this song I could only remember fragments of lyric’s from the song – phrases like “he was six foot six”, “like a cream puff” and “brought down by a thing called love. Those were powerful images to me.

As a kid, all adults are huge. And if you ask most kids, their dad’s were all between six to seven feet tall. Some dad’s could actually grow to nine feet when two boys are bragging about them. And if you asked a kids about a ‘tall man, one that wasn’t a dad, they would say he was about eight feet tall – you know – like Frankenstein. Kids tend to like whole numbers. My dad was six feet, so six foot six with shoes would make sense – to me as a kid. In reality I think he wasn’t quite six feet, more like five feet ten or so.

Later I would find out “Like a cream puff” is not part of the lyrics and “brought down by a thing called love” is a paraphrase of the correct lyrics. This is probably why I had such a hard time finding the song. I often thought the line was something like “crying like a big cream puff” but the image of a grown man crying was what I really held in my memory.

To me, the image of a grown man crying is one of the most tragic. This is because in our culture men are not supposed to cry. We expect men to face adversity and hardship being stoic and emotionless. ‘No crying in Baseball’? For men there’s no crying period. 10cc said “Big boys don’t cry.” We do not get overwhelmed, we don’t cry out of frustration, we don’t cry because we’re ‘so happy’ (that’s when we usually yell things, like “fuck ya!”, “now that’s what I’m talking about!” or we strut around – whether we actually did something or not). Society looks to men to be the rock during chaos, the calm during the storm. The stereo type goes so far as we are seen as unemotional, uncaring and cold. Which make spoofs like Kevin Wu’s “Shed A Tear” so funny.

There were three times I remember my dad crying. The first time was when he lost his job and my parents were fighting about it. I don’t know, but my memory was that he had been drinking earlier that day. The third time was during dinner prayer when he skipped over our normal ‘God is good, God is great…’ and launch into a prayer to save his marriage and even that was more sniffles then anything. The second time was the worst.

I believe it was the Fall and later in the evening because it was dark outside. I was playing at the top of the stairs in the hallway outside the bathroom overlooking the living room into the kitchen. That’s where I would normally have my plastic dinosaurs commit suicide on the basement stairs or kamikaze onto one of my passing siblings. The phone rang and it was for my dad. I don’t remember any of the conversation from my dad except remembering he was crying – huge heavy sobs, the kind that hurt your back. I remember peeking from the upstairs and not being able to see him because he had moved into the darkness of the dining room. He had just found out his brother had died, my Uncle Ron, in a plane crash.

I had never seen my dad struck down like that before. The pain was evident, transferable. I heart physically hurt to hear my dad in some much emotional pain.  I couldn’t see him as I peered down from my upstairs perch but I imagined my own red eyes on his tears streaked face. I heard his hitched breath and his agonizing sobs. Later in life I would learn my dad wasn’t always the most stable of individuals. But at that moment, he was my dad – The Enforcer, the Rule-Maker, the Judge, the Fixer, the Bread-winner, the Head of the Family, the Man of the House. And he had been struck down with a broken heart, with in a loss I could only imagine but learn sooner then any of us knew. Dad was brought down by this thing called love.

I think my mom told us what happened and I couldn’t help thinking about my cousins and what they must be going through. Uncle Ron was Dad’s older brother and, in my recollection, I’m pretty sure that Dad and Uncle Ron got along pretty well, like brothers – brothers that enjoyed each others company.

In a God-like twist of fate, in what was a lifetime later, we learned of a huge coincident. After my grandmother’s funeral, I believe in the late 90’s, my father side of the family gathered at my Uncle Dale’s house. I met my cousins Mike and Jerry, Uncle Ron’s sons. Uncle Dale had the newspaper articles about the plane crash that killed his brother Ron in a scrapbook.

I was shocked to find the plane crash was in Watertown, WI. This was Desi’s mom’s hometown. Desi’s grandparents had a farm outside of Watertown. The pilot had a heart attack and someone was trying to land the plane in a farm field. If you know the area, you’ll know Highway 26, and the other roads in the area, are raised above the fields. A plane landing in the field would slam into the road’s embankment. Mike and Jerry said they driven up the next morning, Mike was 16 at the time, they confirmed that is what happened. We checked with Desi’s mom if they remembered a plane crash in the early seventies and they did not.

In the first verses of “A Thing Called Love” has the lyrics “but I saw that giant of a man brought down, to his knees by love” and that summarizes what I saw that night. In our walk from childhood to adulthood it is these realizations, these moments of awareness that spur us along to becoming adults ourselves. I attached my male duty within the face of tragedy to this song.

But that’s not what this song is about. The song is about the power of love, even in the face of the strongest man. And this is the beauty and tragedy of art. The artist intends and the viewer interprets. And within that Walk of Life a child can grow, and a man can remember.

You can’t see it with your eyes, hold it in your hands
But like the wind it covers our land
Strong enough to rule the heart of any man
This thing called love