My Dad and Paul McCartney

Teenage freak out

It was the early 1970s. I was a teenager in high school.

My dad was well into his fifties. (He became my father just as he was about to enter his forties.)

Back then I considered my dad to be really, really, really old. While he put on this persona of being tediously straight-laced, I knew that it was just an act that he put on in order to stay in the good graces of his wife (my mother). She completely ran his life and he did whatever she told him to do. This kind of pissed me off.

But over the years I spent enough alone, one-on-one time with my dad (away from HER) to discover that there was a whole different person behind the mask.

Before I got my own car I used to share a car with my dad. It was, of course, his car. I walked to high school each morning. It was almost two miles. I never walked it during a blizzard or anything because we lived in the desert and we only had blizzards once every 11.8 years. It really wasn’t such a big deal.

The good thing, though, was that I didn’t have to walk home from school. We lived in the suburbs way, way out at the edge of town. My dad worked smack dab in the middle of downtown, which was around fifteen miles away.

He went to work at five in the morning and he got off work at three in the afternoon. It was perfect timing because on his way home he could pick me up from school. We rode in his car home every day together.

(I would then use his car to go to work at five o’clock and come home around, and usually well after, midnight.)

He was always sitting in his car waiting for me when I got out of school. He usually had about a five minute wait until I got out. He never complained about that. He seemed to really enjoy those five minutes.

Over time I started to realize something. Several times after I got into the passenger seat of the car my dad would start the car. Abruptly, the radio would come on, which, of course, meant that he had been listening to the radio while driving and failed to turn it off before turning off the car.

And every time the radio was tuned to the Top 40 station! My old, old, old father was listening to the same music that I was listening to?

WTF?

But he always immediately turned off the radio so that we could talk on the short ride home.

But then one day something truly bizarre happened!

Instead of turning off the radio my dad instead just turned the volume down. That was surprisingly nice. We could hear music AND talk.

But then suddenly my dad frantically waved his arm through the air in front of my face in order to shush me. He then drastically turned up the volume on the radio. A song began playing that I recognized and really liked. It was one of Paul McCartney’s latest hits (at the time).

My dad and I liked the same song?

WTF?

But then it got way, way weirder. My dad started singing along!

And he knew all the lyrics! (And surprisingly he had a pretty decent singing voice — which I had never heard before.)

I was speechless. I was stunned. I kept looking at my old man thinking, “Who the fuck is this guy?”

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