The Good Old Days, by Chris King

People always talk about the good old days. What's so good about them? I think they're good because you can't live them anymore. So yesterday was a "good old day" to me. Maybe I'll discuss it someday. And maybe not.
I used to share a room with my younger brother Jeff on the second floor of the house we lived in. Directly across from our room was the "playroom", so-called because of my other younger brother's toys that lay strewn about. Tiny Lego blocks you'd always step on, and not-so-tiny Tonka trucks that you'd stub your toe on in the middle of the night.
Our room had glow-in-the-dark stars plastered liberally across the ceiling. These were all my brother's stars, and if any were on my side of the room, it was because he let me put some there.
It was always a mess, because neither I nor my brother cared. The only time we did care was when we were threatened with grounding. In such an instance we threw everything under the beds and pulled the covers down to the floor so that no one would notice.
My father had a piano. It was a Hartman piano that he had bought from the local school for 200 dollars, because they had just recently acquired a new one. It was a good move on my his part. My father was musically inclined, having a better-than-average voice, and although he never practiced enough to make him great, he loved to play. He had told me once that he had had some lessons as a child, and I felt he had an affinity towards playing.
So there the piano stood, a grand sight in our otherwise lackluster living room. I really liked having it there, even though I couldn't play it, and made no effort to even try.
My father worked until 5 o' clock in the city, at a job he liked with a boss he hated. He'd get home around 7, sometimes 7:30, and hear how well Jeff did on a test, or get a note home from a teacher complaining about my lack of effort, or sometimes a detention slip. I was always scared of my father knowing these things, because not used to having him home, I wasn't always sure of how he'd react. My mother was an imbecile, because she didn't even let him relax before loading him down with this assorted news, and complaints of her rough day as a teacher.
After dinner, there was about a span of an hour before Jeff and I went to bed. Sometimes we'd talk, or sometimes we'd just stare up into the virtual solar system we had created. This was my fathers time. From upstairs, I'd eagerly await for him to play. In his failing relationship with my mother, the piano seemed like an escape to him, and I'm glad he had it.
Sometimes it would be Billy Joel, or Elton John, or Beethoven, or Bach, or "The Hands of Time" (Brian's Song). My father told me about Brian. He was a football player who died of cancer, I think. I don't even know if it was a true story or a movie. I knew about it from my father, and that's all I cared about.
Sometimes he'd play pieces from "Dr. Zhivago". I remember "Lara's Theme". I had never even seen the movie. I still haven't.
I remember cigarette smoke wafting through the house, under our bedroom door, invading my nostrils. It was my mother. I knew it was. I cried, because it was a tragedy to me. Not my parents crumbling relationship, but my mother's smoking. She blamed it on my father. She said that he "made her" start smoking. She only smoked in front of him.
I thought of my father, playing these sad, beautiful songs, sometimes he would sing along, and sometimes he wouldn't. If he hadn't played in awhile, it was choppy, and if he had, it was dramatically beautiful. I could care less if he had practiced or not, because it came from my father, and that's all that mattered to me.
I thought of him downstairs in the living room opening his heart to the piano, his only escape, as my mother sat there, smoking her hateful cigarettes in front of him as he played, and I cried. I cried as he played Billy Joel, and Elton John, and Beethoven, and Bach, and Dr. Zhivago, and "The Hands of Time". It was horrible, loving my father's music, hating my mother, and crying softly the whole time, but that's how it went. And looking back on my good old days, I'm glad it went that way.