Shave Big Monkey in the Yard

“One, two, fisherman’s stew, boiled on timber and stirred with a broom.”

Dad’s in the shower, singing. 

“Three, four, pour it on the floor, feed all the beasties, cook up some more.”

He’s sung this one so many times, I know almost the whole thing by heart. 

“Five, six, mortar and bricks, weaker than iron but stronger than sticks.”

Isn’t it odd how we say a song is stuck in our head, but then say we learned it by heart? I saw a comic once where two characters were debating about that: a song stuck inside, playing on a loop, in your head vs. in your heart. Maybe it depends on whether or not you want it there. If the song is welcome, you want it in your heart. If it’s not, you want it somewhere besides your heart, and your head is an acceptable place for the song to squat.

“Seven, eight, lock up the gate, nothing to do but to sit and to wait.”

Whether the songs are in his head, his heart, or somewhere else entirely, they certainly seem to be stuck. As a family, the rest of us have come to the conclusion that this is because of Dad’s spectrum brain. My sister and I say that about 50% of everything Dad says is not original, instead being a quote or paraphrase of some kind. Movies, books, songs, memes—he repeats all of them, ad nauseam. 

Another snippet of song I’ve heard countless times is “Lobsterbacks attack the town again. Wrap all my things in aluminum.” I have a vivid memory of Dad putting away his socks while singing that, vigorously nodding his head to the beat. He was wearing what I now know to be a band t-shirt, but at the time, I regarded it as simply weird. There was an angry-looking blue-eyed robot wearing a red cape, standing on a city street with red-tinted skyscrapers. The words CLOSE YOUR EYES were written in white block letters below. The picture and caption on the gray t-shirt made me think of dreams and nightmares. Dad’s black t-shirt with the orange eye on it also used to creep me out. 

Now, he likes to poke fun at the graphic t-shirts I wear. I think he likes them, yet he laughs as he points and comments. One shirt, which I’ve since outgrown, he really did take issue with. It had an illustration of a Tyrannosaurus Rex on it, accompanied by fact boxes listing its height, weight, etc. Dad took issue with the fact that one line read Diet: Carnivore. Every time I wore that shirt, he would say, “Diet: Carnivore. So, it only eats other carnivores?” We beat around that bush almost as many times as I’ve told him that a Pteranodon is not a dinosaur; I’ve stopped responding beyond a look to both of those topics. That’s his word-focused spectrum brain. It runs in the family. My aunt, his sister, has a shirt that reads Grammar Police: To Correct and Serve. She’s a school superintendent. Guess which of Dad’s children inherited the word focus? That’s right, yours truly. 

I also seem to have inherited, or else learned, a head-shaking quirk from him. If Dad is getting distracted by his thoughts, he shakes his head to clear it. I do the same, for the same reason. I see him do it often when he’s driving. 

Another thing he does while driving is drum on the steering wheel, sometimes while singing “Peaches come from a can, they were put there by a man in a factory downtown.” 

If he’s not too busy singing, I’ll read aloud from a book. I’ve already read C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet to my family entirely in the car, and now we’re working our way through Perelandra, at least when my mother and sister aren’t asleep. Before that, I read Michael Morpurgo’s Kensuke’s Kingdom and Richard Adams’s Watership Down at the dinner table. 

Watership Down made Dad love rabbits; now, on summer evenings, he’ll sit outside in a camping chair with a beer, watching the neighborhood rabbits. 

We tried watching the Watership Down animated movie, but as a family, we agreed that it was not very good, and that’s putting it mildly. Halfway through, Dad decided he didn’t want to watch the rest of it, and went to bed. He missed the only part that possibly redeemed the terrible experience of watching that cartoon. 

The next time we watched Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, in the scene where Gromit turned on the radio in the truck while waiting for Wallace, a now-familiar song began playing—familiar to all present except Dad. “Bright eyes, burning like fire…” Once we explained to him that Bright Eyes was from the abominable Watership Down movie, Dad joined in our laughter at Gromit’s annoyed eye rolling. 

Sometimes Dad plays music that more than annoys the rest of us. If he’s singing snatches of something and proceeds to fiddle with his phone, I brace myself for the soon-to-be-blasting audio. On more than one occasion, he’s made us jump or shriek with his sudden musical assaults. We’ll ask him to turn it off, shouting to be heard, to which he almost always replies, “Why? This is a sweet jam,” as he rocks in time with the music. Then he’ll dramatically lip-sync along with the words. “I’ve got the time tick tick tickin’ in my head.” 

“At least turn it down,” we beg, and he finally relents. 

I think it’s not the time, but song lyrics, that run in his mind as constantly as the ticking of a clock. Once he hears something, he’ll repeat it, sometimes for days on end, often by playing it out loud. 

One of the more pleasant of these bouts of musical repetition began on a visit to Uncle Julio’s house. I was sitting on the couch beside Dad, playing Minecraft on my cousin Luis’s tablet. Dad had his headphones on, watching things on our computer. Dad started laughing, wheezing for air, almost falling over. A minute later, he poked me, gasping, “You have to listen to this.” I held my hands up, fending off the headphones. “What is it? I’m not sure I want to hear it.” “Just watch this,” he insisted, and I apprehensively allowed him to put the headphones on me. The words on the screen declared Seagulls! (Stop it Now) A Star Wars Bad Lip Reading. What followed was voice overs of scenes from Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. Most of the video was snippets of Yoda singing a ridiculous song in a falsetto voice. I laughed almost as hard as Dad did, and Seagulls! was played many times after that. We later discovered another Star Wars BLR titled Hostiles on the Hill, also from Star Wars Episode V. In that BLR, there’s a part where one of the Empire’s soldiers in an AT-AT says to the driver, “Don’t worry about it, Darius, ‘cause I’m a mile high, and I’m the scariest.” After that, a new piece was added to our family’s dialect: Dad would say “Don’t worry about it, Darius,” when we were concerned about something. This later devolved into simply “Darius,” and even Mom will use it. 

Quite recently, Dad got onto another song repetition campaign. While we were sitting in the car waiting for Dad to finish filling the gas tank, a song he likes came on over the gas station radio. “I like diggin’ holes, hidin’ things inside them, when I grow old, I won’t forget to find them.” “This is a good one,” Dad declared, bobbing his head to the beat. 

The next day, as we were sitting in the car in the driveway getting ready to leave, Dad said, “I’m going to play No Roots.” He held up his phone and asked, “You guys ready?” A moment later, the opening bass beats boomed from the car speakers. He’d finally gotten the car bluetooth to work.

“Now we’re one of those cars playing loud boom-boom music,” I commented, and everyone laughed. Then we all danced in our seats, waving to our neighbor as we drove past, enjoying the music stuck in Dad’s head. 

I love you, Dad. Keep being awesome.

Author’s Note: This story’s title is my father's joking version of the Menards jingle. “Save big money at Menards!”