Today’s Theme Music

I moved in with Dad in nineteen seventy-one. I was fifteen. He was in the U.S. Air Force, and had returned from Vietnam by way of Germany (where he had a gorgeous blue Mustang convertible). Now assigned to DESC, Wright-Pat AFB provided administrative support. We lived on Page Manor military base housing.

That lasted about three months. Presented with an opportunity and having his years in, Dad retired from the Air Force. We moved to southern West Virginia. After moving into a place, it burned down. If we didn’t lose our possessions to fire, we lost them to smoke and water damage. He and I spent a month living in a friend’s home but it was small and cramped. Unable to find anything else, Dad bought a seventy-foot long, fourteen foot wide mobile home and rented a space in Doy Mobile Home Park.

In retrospect, Dad lived through an interesting period then. He re-married when I was sixteen, almost seventeen. New offspring soon followed. Graduating high-school, and with a second child on the way to join Dad’s household, I joined the military and left.

Dad had two young sons by the year’s end. One of them was killed in a car accident. The loss destroyed his marriage. He ended up having an affair with a co-worker. Her marriage was disintegrating. Her husband was already suffering emotional issues, and committed suicide. Dad moved in with the widow. That all took place in a six year run.

From that era comes a song that makes me laugh. Ranked as one of the greatest pop songs of all time, it came out in nineteen seventy-two. Carly Simon’s song, You’re So Vain’, stays in conversations about who the song is about. She’s given clues. Others claim she’s confided in them. Men like Warren Beatty insisted the song was about him.

Whatever. Here it is.