Grasping at Grace Quincy Gray McMichael (bio) When I open the door of my father's truck, all I smell is hot banana. His Ford stays ripe with carpentry odors—sweat, sawdust—but he always has at least one brown banana on the dash, roasting in the Maine sun. I hold my breath as I scoot into the middle of the bench seat, arranging the belt across my lap, pretending to buckle my nine-year-old frame into the narrow center spot. My little brother Owen, still short and chubby at seven, steps onto the truck's [End Page 33] diamond-plate running board, grasps hold of the armrest, and hauls himself inside. My lungs beg for fresh air. "Dad, can you open the window?" I croak. My father—whom I call Choad, like his friends do—complies, cranking the window open with his left hand while roaring the engine to life with his right. The cassette in the tape deck clicks into gear, flooding the cab with bewitching syncopation, over which Paul Simon sings: "The poor boy changes clothes and puts on aftershave, to compensate for his ordinary shoes." Owen leans over, red-faced and triumphant after his ascent to the favored seat by the window, and yanks the heavy door toward him to latch. Before Simon can mention those diamond-studded soles, Choad is already harmonizing, slipping into an ooo-ooo-ooo falsetto alongside Simon for the chorus. As Choad croons, he buckles his seatbelt and looks over at us, his two unintentionally itinerant children, giving a quick glance to be sure we are belted and ready. He smiles his pumpkin grin and gives a little shake of the shoulders to signal that he is slipping into full vehicular boogie, with his flying fingers making a drum set of the dashboard and his rich voice catching every dip and flip of Simon's lyric rhythm. If the romantic incongruity in this song reminds Choad of my mother—or of that glorious lost monstrosity of a home built with his sweat and her money—he is hiding his pain like a master. I am too young to match the rich girl and the poor boy in Simon's song with the complicated landscape of wealth and want that fractured my own parents' love, and our original family. Instead, I pray for a breeze to cut the thick aroma of banana as I squeeze my knees tight to the right to avoid the gearshift. Choad breaks his percussive rhythm just long enough to nudge the truck into first and we begin to roll. [End Page 34] ____ Graceland is music for the road. Released just a year after my birth, Paul Simon's 1986 album, more than any other, has carried me from place to place. The title song urges the listener to get moving: even before the sincerity of Simon's vocals spill onto the track, the rolling drumbeat doubles as wheels on pavement, conjures the urgent rotation of guardrail spokes spinning past the window. In a recording created for the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Graceland, Simon acknowledged this, saying: "The drums were something like—kind of a traveling rhythm in country music; I'm a big Sun Records fan, and early-'50s, mid-'50s Sun Records you hear that drum beat a lot, like a fast, Johnny Cash-type of rhythm." Rolling Stone credited Simon with crafting "a finely wrought personal reflection on lost love." Graceland soon became the soundtrack of my life. Paul Simon's songwriting skill is no secret. Rolling Stone ranks him at number eight on their "100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time" list. I would probably inch him up a few notches, given Simon's ability to build the bones of a rich story in such few words while weaving "wit and literary detail" into the seamless telling. As he expressed to Village Voice contributor Robert Christgau: "I'm a relationship writer, relationships and introspection." Nowhere is this more apparent than on Graceland, and in the song "Graceland" itself. In this song, Simon shares from the perspective of an undeniably imperfect, road-worn narrator who hauls his nine-year-old along with him...
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Aug 4, 2022
Jinbiao Chen + 4
Open Access
