Chapter 18

Not the birthday gift I was expecting. Singing Harry Chapin in the dark. A bell that had my name by the mailbox.

My father gave me very little that was good, but he did give me one gift I treasure. During the few years that we lived together as a family, Carl Cassidy was in charge of bedtime, when he was home. And when he was there, my Daddy would crawl into my little twin bed next to me, stretch out his long cowboy legs, and sing to me in his clear tenor. And what he sang were Harry Chapin songs.

Harry was a folk singer, a storyteller. He sang about lost love, and quiet, ordinary lives, about betrayal, and broken dreams. About the ways fathers hurt their children, and children break their parents’ hearts. And sometimes, he sang about a truck full of bananas.

My father loved Harry Chapin. One of the only times I remember hearing my father cry was when Harry died, in a car crash on I495 in 1981.

My two favorite Harry Chapin songs are Taxi and Sequel. In the first, a stoned, depressed, down on his luck Harry is driving his cab through San Francisco in the rain, when a lady flags him down. She turns o…