My dad gave me a double album of Groucho Marx live shows when I was just a kid

Boston Globe

28-02-2025

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You wouldn't think that listening to Groucho shakily sing 'Lydia the Tattooed Lady' or talk about his chiropodist Uncle Herman would require the same uninterrupted attention as Stravinsky's
Petrushka
or even Bob Dylan's
Blonde on Blonde,
but think again.
Christmas Day, which was made somber by a serious illness that would send my mother to the hospital just days later — and was further burdened by hideous sweaters my grandmother had knitted for us — also involved a 90-minute Groucho listening session. If anyone wanted to speak, they'd leave the room, and my mother was unceremoniously shushed when she, between albums 1 and 2, suggested we might want to think about eating. My sister headed upstairs after a few tracks.
Despite my restlessness and sense of duty, the outcome of that shared deep listening was that my father and I had internalized, between us, a repertoire of bawdy, absurd songs and bits that lasted our whole lives.
On Father's Day each year, I would sing him this one:
Today, Father, is Father's Day, and we
are giving you a tie.
It's not that much, we know, but it's just our way of showing you,
We think you're a regular guy.
You say it's very nice of us to bother, but
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it really was a pleasure to fuss,
For, according to our mother, you're
our father…
And that's good enough for us, yes that's
good enough for us.
Until the day he died, my father was an almost otherworldly listener. I have an attention span that grows shorter and shorter by the day, and when I look at our collection of LPs, many of which he'd given or left to me, I feel overwhelmed by the challenge of sitting down and quietly absorbing an entire album, A side and B side, as we used to do so regularly.
The writer with her father in 2009.
from vivian Montgomery
When he was in his last weeks, he stopped wanting to read or watch movies, but he was happy to take in any amount of recorded music. His gaze would settle on the wall or window, ambient hospital sounds falling into the background for those 7 or 16 or 23 minutes.
And when he was in and out of consciousness, his more lucid moments took on an almost crystalline attention, his memory sharpening. In one of the last such moments, I came in for a short visit and he sang, in Groucho's nasal tone:
Hello, I must be going, I cannot stay,
I came to say I must be going.
I'm glad I came but just the same I must
be going…
I'll stay a week or two, I'll stay the summer through, but I am telling you
I must be going.
Vivian Montgomery is a writer and musician in Maynard. Her father died March 8, 2024. Send comments to [e-mail]. TELL YOUR STORY. Email your 650-word unpublished essay on a relationship to [e-mail]. Please note: We do not respond to submissions we won't pursue.
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