[43] Summer, Holly Day

My dad used to play the bar band circuit during most of my childhood he and his friends would load up our trailer with their instruments and I’d pile into the back of the van and we’d drive all the way into the city for the weekend. Usually, the bartenders would let me and my sister sit in the back of the bar to watch our dad give us free Cokes and candy or bowls of popcorn to keep us occupied, tell us how cool it was that our dad played music, that maybe we’d grow up to be musicians ourselves someday, we’d be playing bars just like this one someday. I never thought about being a musician myself but I liked seeing my dad on stage, I thought that was super cool
and I could sing along with any Skynard or Neil Young or Beatles song after hearing him and his band practice for hours and hours in the basement.

Sometimes he’d play street or county festivals, and our mom would let us go out and explore
because she wanted to stay by the stage and watch our dad, she wanted to dance to the music, and we weren’t ever interested in that.  I’d spend hours watching grizzled bikers getting and giving tattoos on a folding card table set up on the side of the road, whole pigs gutted and roasted on spits and cut up to be passed out on paper plates drunk hippies called me over to give me lectures about life recite random bits of poetry to me. But best of all, the musicians I knew on stage would see me and shout out my name and ask me to get them a beer, and I would run over to the keg, fill four or five plastic cups and bring them over to the band, knowing that everyone I knew from school could see me even some of my teachers, who were probably writhing in disapproval, because I knew that here, in this place at least, I was pretty cool.