Moving Into The Universe

My father and I are the only musical people in the family - Dad performed in cover bands and recorded a few demos, whilst I grew up to be a performer and businesswoman myself. My father instilled a fiery passion for music in me, his only daughter, when I was three years of age. If music were a religion, then John, Paul, George and Ringo were the saints. It is this influence that forms the basis of my very earliest memory.

As I sat on my father's workbench in the garage, watching him work on one of his many projects (on this day, I believe, he was gutting our old caravan), I helped him by selecting music from his bag of cassette tapes. I was the only one, apart from himself, that could touch this bag. It was a treasure that only we could truly appreciate. I pulled out a tape labelled "Demos - Talking Heads" and, not quite knowing what it was, put it into the tape deck. "And She Was" began to play, but it wasn't quite the original - it was his own demo recording of the song.

"This is you, Daddy!" I shouted over the music.

Dad paused in his work, set down his tools and turned to me with a grin. "No," he replied, "this is you."

With that, he scooped me up and began spinning me around in the vast space of the garage, singing the words to me and laughing.

I understood immediately what he meant. The enchanting creature described in the song, in my father's eyes, was me. I learned later that the song was really written about an LSD trip, but that doesn't matter to me. This song represents how my father looked upon me - the hopes he had for me and his firm belief that I was magical, that I could do anything I wanted to. I could even fly. That day, I soared.