Hot dog songs bring back the memories

 I can’t sleep tonight. I keep thinking of a song I heard come on in the background at work today —yacht rock channel, Dan Fogelberg. Funny how a song can elicit feelings that transport you to a time that doesn’t exist anymore. My sisters and I over the years, joked a lot about how hits from the 70s and 80s remind us of being kids at the home we grew up in on Kent Drive in Granger, Indiana. We called them ‘hot dog songs,’ because they reminded us of our dad’s old songs on the record player in summers of our youth, when he was barbecuing out back or probably doing yardwork. Mom might have been in the kitchen canning tomatoes that my dad grew in his magnificent garden (a garden with corn so high it touched the heavens). My sisters and I might’ve been on the slip n slide by the clothesline or climbing trees or building forts. We’d also hear Billy Joel, the Eagles, Crystal Gayle, Jim Croce —these are the songs on the soundtrack to our childhood there on Kent Drive. These hot dog songs.

I went back a few weeks ago to visit my aging parents, who are in assisted living now and battling the varied stages of dementia and Alzheimer’s—only a few miles down the road, but yet worlds away from this modest tri-level home they bought in 1978 and raised all four of us girls in—when at the time we were aged 9, 7, 3, 1. Where we were tucked into bunk beds waiting for Santa every Christmas Eve and where we lined up in front of the fireplace for pictures in front of our stockings every Christmas morning. It’s where we shared the same bedrooms well into our teens, where we lost baby teeth, built snowmen, caught lightning bugs, jumped in leaf piles that dad raked in the fall, first rode our bikes (and where years later one of us who shall remain nameless would crash said bike into a neighbor’s mailbox), where we played tag and made up games and imagined being runaways, made friends and got tee-pee’d by not so great friends. It’s where we fought over everything from stickers and Barbies to perfume, hand me down bras and clothes. Father-daughter dance pictures and prom photos right here. It’s where we learned what that wooden spoon was really for when we sassmouthed… where we’d bring our first (and last) boyfriends for parental approval, it’s where we whined about algebra homework (one of us anyway), where we banged on the piano to annoy other sisters (again, a nameless one), where we cried about high school heartbreaks, or cried after cars were crashed. Lots of tears. Lots of cars crashed (again, she shall be nameless). The front living room window was where we all sat for pictures on each of our wedding days and where all our babies were brought back over the years and lined up for photos right before their Grammy and Grampy would love on and spoil them. So many Thanksgivings. So many Easter Sundays and baptisms. So many Christmases. I know my parents have forgotten many things. Their memories have been stolen by age and time. But I don’t think I could ever forget my dad leaning over his yard, picking weeds from his immaculate grass every Saturday morning. I won’t forget them sitting on the back deck porch swing, dad whistling and mom offering us raspberry tea whenever we came home from college. I won’t forget how they waited, watching out that front window, ready to greet any of us as we pulled into the court and straight up the driveway. I still remember bringing my newborn son to visit Indiana, my dad holding him in front of the fireplace in a Notre Dame blanket. So many memories (times four) that each of us carries now as another phase of life comes to pass. 

My sisters and me, a few weeks ago were left feverishly packing up, salvaging or discarding countless remnants of our childhood, much of which was frozen in time in basement closets, the dusty attic or stored in every nook and cranny of our dad’s garage— vinyl records, vintage sleds and toys, pictures, clothes and costumes, keepsakes and mementos of places we can never go and people we can never see again, except in our memory. I didn’t get enough time there, I thought. I didn’t take enough from the Goodwill pile. I didn’t cry about leaving this place for the last time, even though I thought I would, or wanted to at least. We stood in front of the garage, the front window, the fireplace, just one last time, in birth order, like always. Maria. Lisa. Andrea. Carla. Now aged 56, 54, 50 and 48.

My eldest sister Maria, the only sister still living in town, finished all the packing this week, alone. She sent us pictures of our childhood home—this once vibrant and bustling house packed with decades worth of ‘stuff’ was now eerily empty, stripped of every indicator of the life it had once known as home to the Dominello gang since Jimmy Carter was president. The only thing left are nail marks in the walls from family pictures and crude furniture indentations in the 90s hunter green living room carpet that I remember being installed when I was 16.

My sister Maria will painstakingly hand over the keys to Kent Drive to a new owner in the morning. Someone who won’t know a sliver of the story that was lived here under this roof the last 48 years. 

For us, this was the home that built us. So much love and laughter, tears and heartache, so much noise and music. 

Long live hot dog songs.