lida rose, oh won't you be mine

I was really missing my Grandpa Warren this morning. I don't suppose that this is really that unusual, save for one tiny detail--he died two years before I was born.

In itself, the situation is strange enough, but for me I think it is especially exceptional. I don't easily form emotional bonds with people. As a matter of fact, the first time I heard about "attachment disorder," I checked WebMD and various other online sources repeatedly for 3 days before I was finally able to convince myself that I didn't have it (one of the major symptoms was "markedly disturbed and developmentally inappropriate social relatedness in most contexts"--that's just me all over). I am a person who was ready to let an entire branch of my extended family fade into memory as a result of a petty disagreement--not out of malice, simply because I didn't care enough to play the game. I'm sure that if someone read into this enough they could fabricate some type of deep rooted psychiatric malady with which to diagnose me. But I wasn't neglected. I wasn't abused. I wasn't unloved. It's just the way that I am.

However, against all odds (thank you, Phil Collins), I have developed a profound emotional relationship with a grandfather that I have never even met. For this minor miracle, I assign my mother full credit. I can't remember exactly when she first began telling the stories about Warren, but all of them were relevant to the goings-on in my own life. It seemed like every interest I had, every trial I suffered through, and every bawdy joke I laughed at was something that he would have had a deep and personal interest in himself. He was hilarious and emotional and real, and I felt closer to him than I did most of my living relatives.

I was surprised the first time I really missed him. My second year of college I was home visiting, and my mom and I went to see a barber shop/sweet adelines quartet competition over at Furman. My grandpa had been involved in a barber shop quartet for years when my mom was a kid, and she always had played recordings of the Buffalo Bills to acquaint me with what she perceived as a dying art form. I really loved the close acapella harmonies, and even though it probably would have been classified as supremely nerdy by around 99.9999% of the young adult population, I went. We sat through a long list of introductions and thank yous, and finally the competition started.

I have never heard anything like it before--I had to remind myself to close my gaping mouth 3 or 4 times throughout the course of the competition. Every group was amazing, and the applause was sustained and deafening. Finally, as a grand finale of sorts, all of the groups separated out into their respective parts and assembled to sing the song "sincere" as a large four part chorus. I knew the song by heart and was singing along, and halfway through I looked over at my mom. And she was crying. It was the first time in my entire life I had seen my mom really cry, and at that moment I realized that I missed him as much as she did. I missed him so much I could hardly breathe.

We left quietly after the conclusion of the song, both awkward in the afterglow of our shared moment. Neither one of us said anything all the way home. We walked wordlessly from the car to the kitchen, and when we got inside I sat down and she started dinner. After a few minutes I put on a CD of The Music Man. We sat there listening for several minutes, and then started singing along together to Lida Rose. I sang baritone and she sang lead. It was a lot less cheesy than it sounds, especially after the dog tripped her up and she yelled "goddammit midnight, don't make me grind you up and serve you as taco meat!"

When she curses, she always refers to it as "the Warren in me."