14. Down on the Corner - Creedence Clearwater Revival

My father has always owned a Toyota Landcruiser, or so it seems anyway.

There was a small break where he had an unreliable blue Ford Fairlane, with inherently lazy electrical wiring, but on the whole it’s been Toyota Landcruisers.

The first one was a beige 1980s model, with roof racks that my brother and I would climb up and hide when it was in the garage.

Same with the bull bar, but we’d get a lot dirtier from the many, many flies and bugs crushed against the steel, so the roof rack was the safer bet if you wanted to avoid Mum’s laundry-based irritation.

I remember there weren’t any headrests, but plenty of dotted vinyl edging everywhere.

The front seat also had one of those triangular sections in the window that you open and push out, allowing the air to rush in.

I didn’t realise it then — given that I’d never been in another car — but it was high off the ground, high enough that getting into the seat required quite the effort from my 6-year old legs.

It must have been a manual, but I would have been too young to care about what transmission he was using to haul that thing up and down the hills.

I do, however, remember that it had a radio/cassette with AM and FM on the dial.

My son is getting to an age where I think memories are starting to form and shape in his mind.

Nothing too significant — I think — but I’m excited to see how this moves and changes over the next few years.

Watching him grow, day by day, I wonder what I was like when I was his age, and how my parents handled the many glories and challenges that children bring.

When I think about this, I normally think about the time we spent in the car, for some odd reason.

I’m sent back to my safe-for-the-time car seat, looking forward while my Dad drives.

Was I as chatty as my son is? Singing and yelling and laughing and grinning and then, suddenly, sleeping?

Did my Dad also move the rear-view mirror to sneak a look at me as I was snoring, gently?

Would they whisper up front, so as not to disturb me?

Or would they embrace the few moments of peace the car trip would afford?

Or when I was awake, what was on the radio in those pre-Wiggles days?

As reliant on those skivvies as we modern parents now are, what did my parents do to capture my attention?

Or were they not quite as fearful of an unoccupied child as we all are now?

It’s these questions, these unanswerable questions about minor irrelevances that fascinate me as I watch my son grow up.

Because I believe that it’s in these tiny actions and memories that a life is demonstrated and lived.

It’s the between-the-lines questions that I find myself thinking about now.

Including what was playing on the radio.

I do know one song that was played in that car, and hearing it now takes me right back into that high-off-the-ground, cumbersome, roof-racked four wheel drive.

Back when I had no idea of what a band was, or instruments or anything beyond sound, I heard Down on the Corner by Creedence Clearwater Revivalon that car radio.

It might have been on a tape actually, or else it was getting played a lot on radio in the late 80s, because I clearly recall trying to sing along to the chorus and always getting the second half of the first line wrong:

Down on the corner, out in the street
‘Willy and the Poor Boys’ are playin’
Bring a nickel, tap your feet

It might have been the harmony in that first line or the bass line dancing through the whole tune, but I loved this song when I was a kid.

I have no idea how old I was when this memory took root. I had no understanding of what it was about, or what it meant.

All I remember is that I liked the singing and the music.

It’s the first song I remember hearing and the first I remember noticing.

And to this day it takes me right back to being a kid.

I wonder now what I did when this song came on.

Was I old enough to keep all of this in my head, or was I still in full think it/say it mode?

Did I sit in my car seat, excitedly kicking my feet, crammed into the same blue sandals I see in every photo from that time?

Or would I stare out the window and quietly try to get the chorus right?

And I also wonder now which song it’ll be for my son, which song will sneak its hooks into his memory.

Which song will make him think of driving along with Mum and Dad, going somewhere - together?

The idea of this continuum, the cycle of parents and children, has been a real source of confidence in the first years of my son’s life.

As fortunate as we’ve been, there are still challenges parents know about — the nappy escapees, functioning at hours I wasn’t entirely sure actually existed, regular offerings to any deity that would make them sleep.

And thinking that it’s been done thousands, millions of times before — including by my parents — makes it a lot easier to keep a clear head and not (fully) buy into the industrial parental insecurity complex.

I play this song for my son sometimes.

It helps that his mother loves Creedence, so it’s not the only song of theirs he hears. I doubt it’ll be this song that sticks for him, but I’d like him to one day know why I kept playing it.

This whole Music with Meaning exercise is, at it’s core, my attempt to describe to him what these songs meant to his old man.

So that maybe one day, when he’s asking his own between-the-lines questions, these might provide the occasional answer.

I might not be here to answer them, or I might simply not remember.

But my hope is that one day he’ll be able to read these idle scribbles and have some idea of these songs mattered to his Dad.

In the meantime, sometime soon he’ll start singing along to the songs he knows.

And I’m very much looking forward to glancing back in the mirror while he does.