one of my favourite things is coming home to the sound of kenny rogers singing in the kitchen.
he is no lyrical or musical genius in my books.
but there's sentimentality to him and i'm a sucker for anything that tugs the heart strings.
and, when i hear him playing, if i'm careful, i can position myself just right on the front porch so as not to be seen through the blinds of the kitchen windows but with a good enough view myself of my parents, dancing together, softly swaying.
when i was younger, mum and dad would have dinner parties and mum always refused to go to sleep unless the kitchen was spotless and all the dishes and glasses were cleaned and packed up (or when we moved house, at least all in the dishwasher). mum always refused any help though, so dad would just sit and play music and talk to her while she cleaned away, stubbornly yet efficiently, alone. dad would play whatever his flavours of the month were at the time. my father has diverse taste in music so you never really knew what it was going to be.
there would always come a point in this clean-up ritual though, where mum would be in the middle of washing a glass or drying a knife, having just been asked whether she liked the song that was playing, and say something like 'what about that song by kenny g? the one about the years? i like that one.'
my parents are the definition of opposites. in an illustrated dictionary, a portrait of the two of them standing side-by-side could be there as the visual aid for the entry on 'antonymy'. but no matter what dad was playing, or how far through it they were, he would automatically press eject on the cd player and put in kenny rogers' 'simply the best' and skip to track twelve. it never took more than one verse before they were waltzing around mid-kitchen-clean-up.
my parents will have been married for twenty four years this year and they throw less dinner parties than they used to. but sometimes when mum is just puttering around the kitchen, she will make a comment about kenny g and dad will start playing old kenny rogers' track twelve and they will waltz, arm-in-arm, like they did late at night, when i was two, five, nine, twelve, sixteen years old.
and so i linger on the porch until the song comes to its fade-out end and turn my key in the lock and greet them with a smile, which they must think is some daughterly gesture of affection.
but as i walk up the half flight of stairs to my room, i know i'm only smiling because i know my dad won't have corrected my mum again tonight.
in all their twenty four years, not once has he told her she is wrong about it being kenny g.
