Who Chooses the Music?

Today, I was contemplating writing about the first (and last) time I ever got drunk, but instead decided to write about something entirely different. When I picked up Willow from her mom's house earlier, she walked out to the car with a CD. I'm usually pretty selfish when it comes to who gets to play music while I'm driving (as in, "the driver always gets to choose"), but today, in honor of it being the day before her birthday, I relented and we listened to One Direction all the way home.

This spurred a memory of a long-ago family vacation at Stanford Sierra Camp (does it even still exist? - let me check - yes! It does!). On the way there, as we navigated the narrow road around Fallen Leaf Lake, it was my turn to pick the music and I was, naturally, listening to Celtic Frost's "Morbid Tales", which would indicate that the year was probably 1984. My dad, not even remotely a fan of Celtic Frost, threw a mini dad-tantrum about it. I'm not sure why this sticks in my memory, but I was actually laughing about it as I inserted the One Direction CD into the CD player today. Willow asked why I was laughing, so I told her the above story.

I guess it is the sacred duty of the child to find music that the parents don't like. The torch has been passed.

I have many fond memories of Stanford Sierra Camp, and might share some of them before the month ends. To keep this post somewhat thematically consistent, I'll close with another memory of my dad at camp. If memory serves, he often seemed more interested in heading over to nearby Reno to gamble This may have been an early indication that all was not well in marriage-land. It was, after all, only a couple of years after this that my dad moved out.