5 minute read
In Mixmorium
In Mixmorium
EULOGY BY WAY OF ROAD TRIP REFLECTIONS
By Nick Spacek
At the end of May, my dad texted me: “If/ when you have 15-20 minutes to spare, give me a call. I have something to ask you about that is too involved for texting. Thanks!”
Rather than call him later that night, I opted instead to call him the next morning when I got up. He answered on the first ring, sometime around 8:30. It was not a casual conversation.
My Aunt Cindy had passed almost four and a half years ago. Due to this, that, and the other thing that’s not my business to put out on Main Street, she’d been cremated. When her husband, Bill, passed later that year, so was he. Their ashes had been sitting in my parents’ house since then. Due to the fact that I’d had a closer relationship with her than my siblings, my dad wanted my help in scattering her ashes.
No big deal, aside from the fact that his sister’s favorite place in the whole world was Rocky Mountain National Park. And we had to do it in the next month because my mom’s sister, Karen, with whom we’d be staying, was selling her house and moving in July. It was literally going to be a drive out one day, sleep, drive to the park, scatter her ashes, spend the afternoon in Estes Park, drive back to my Aunt Karen’s house, sleep, and drive back kind of trip.
As I said, no big deal, other than, oh yeah—Rocky Mountain National Park has timed entry from May to October, meaning you need to make a reservation to get in during a specific time frame, and in order to scatter ashes in a national park, you need to have a permit. We were leaving in three weeks.
Somehow, it all worked out. Our permit was granted, which also gave us park entry at any time. The drive was brilliant—no traffic any step of the way. We had sloppy joes when we got to Aunt Karen's, slept, got up early, and had a beautiful drive. At most, three vehicles were ahead of us when we got to the park entrance. We drove through the park, arrived where we’d decided to scatter Aunt Cindy’s ashes, did the thing, and it was pretty emotional. On the way out of the park, we saw a moose. A ranger let us take a spin around the campground my dad had stayed at with Cindy and my grandparents on their first trip there in 1966. It couldn’t have gone more smoothly. Not a single hitch.
All told, we were gone for 56 hours, drove over 1300 miles, and since then, I’ve been pretty out of it, to be completely honest. In my 40+ years on this planet, I’ve been to plenty of funerals, but this might be the most personally connected I’ve ever been to someone’s passing. My dad trusted me to spend all that time, basically just he and I, and to help make sure that his sister ended up somewhere that meant something, not only to her but to him.
Aunt Cindy took me to my first real concert. It was the Doobie Brothers at Sandstone in September 1989. I wasn't even 10 yet and had only the barest inkling of who the band was from hearing them on KY102, but seeing a stage that big and listening to music that was so loud I had to wear hearing protection definitely made one hell of an impression.
Cindy would buy me cassettes for my birthday and Christmas, I think, in a way of trying to connect my musical tastes to her, which is how a 10-year-old ended up with Queen’s The Miracle and The Disregard of Timekeeping by Bonham. Still, there’s something to be said for getting exposed to a vast swath of weird music I don’t think I ever would’ve discovered on my own, to say nothing, getting to ride in her car while she blasted the Pointer Sisters.
Plus, she gave me the Doobies’ best-of album the Christmas after we saw them at Sandstone, so that meant the songs I heard them play live then translated into recordings, and I wore that sucker out playing “China Grove” over and over and over again—which is, again, a weird musical choice for a 10-year-old, but there you are.
She was frequently a difficult woman, and despite numerous doctors’ advice, she didn’t take care of her health the way she should’ve. She pretty much ignored the fact that my sister, Lauren, even existed, focusing instead on my brother Steve and me. My mom told me a story about how Cindy called her when my mom and dad were first married to explain how my dad liked certain things cooked.
Childhood memories are a powerful thing, though, and despite all her problems, Cindy loved her family, and I know she cared about me a bunch. It says a lot when you’re 17 and a freshman in college, and your aunt and uncle come out, take you to lunch, and buy you an Uncle Tupelo CD (No Depression, for the record) to boost your mood when you’re away from home for the first time.
All of this to say is that for the last few weeks, I’ve been listening to the odd assortment of CDs I inherited when Aunt Cindy passed, and I don’t quite know what sort of headspace I’m in right now. There’s something really weird about having a collection of albums I don’t think I’d ever buy on my own, just floating around the house and car. I can’t think of any reason I’d ever break out Fleetwood Mac’s The Dance other than the fact that it might help me make sense of some difficult emotions, but here I am, still marveling at the fact that “Tusk” live with the University of Southern California Marching Band does, actually, sound better than the studio version.
