Tell Me If You're Lying
Saturday mornings were for car rides to the flea market or around the country. Sometimes my dad gave us his historical tour of Greensboro, would show us his first house where he lived with my mother, or he’d tell us how this building never used to be there, or how that strip mall used to be all woods. From the turns in his voice I knew he was sad—his kids’ Greensboro was no longer his. There was a divide and it wouldn’t end there. In the car we heard The Who, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and old Rod Stewart, which always made me smile. Only now I imagined my mother as Maggie Mae and my father as Rod, singing about how she’d ruined him. I held my breath until the mandolin intermission was over and then wailed Rod’s painful ending notes, Maggie! I wish I’d never seen your face!
Sometimes on those drives I’d find myself nostalgic in the way I imagined my father was. I was nostalgic for what was happening now like he was nostalgic for the past. I wanted to stay young and safe because that meant he’d stay alive. There alongside him, I knew then he’d die young. I just knew. Maybe I thought it was appropriate, from a rock-n-roll standpoint, or perhaps it was in the folds of his face, the soft, curled fingers around the steering wheel as we kicked up dust pulling into the old flea market off Route 29. Maybe all his lessons were to tell us he wasn’t meant for this era. Maybe he wanted to show us all that was real, all that mattered to him; maybe he didn’t trust that we believed him enough to lead our lives in his same manner, that we’d be converted by age and time, forgetting his words for what they put together for us in nice attractive packages. At the flea market he bought us trinkets, old tin wall hangings, vintage bottles, and all the rock records we could carry. We listened to them when we got home, and when Mick Jagger sang, Time waits for no one and it won’t wait for me, I knew he was telling the truth.
