I Can Hear Music

I spent most of this afternoon on the shed roof. First I raked off the sticks and leaves, Then I swept off the dirt, then I scraped with a steel brush, then I swept again. Then I painted the bad spots with killrust fisholene oil. I had my small transistor radio on the racing channel, and I was half listening in between the noise of brush and broom.

I had done this cleaning of the roof six months ago, but didn't have any fish oil, so I purchased a tin of it but didn't get around to applying it to the roof and the leaves and sticks built up on the roof again. I knew it would be a job requiring a number of hours which is why I hadn't managed to do it.

So it was good to get at it, after trips to Fiji, Wangaratta, Lakes Entrance and numerous storms adding to the litter build up on the roof, even if it was at the expense of cutting grass and getting vegie seeds in and constructing rabbit barriers which is also pressing on my to do list.

For some reason I had two songs going through my head all afternoon, Beach Boy music, 'I Can Hear Music', and 'Wouldn't it be Nice'. This evoked strong memories of my youth. I remembered a carload of us driving to Ballarat to get some Ballarat Bitter which wasn't available in Melbourne. It would have been in 1969 I think, and it must have been a Sauturday as the pubs weren't open on Sundays back then. We were in Laurie Mitchell's Zephyr sedan. It was hotted up with twin carbies and extractors and supposedly a racing camshaft but this may have been bulldust. The car was previously Laurie's older brother Andy's, after previously being their mum's. Andy became engaged to one of the Cantillon twins who lived in our street, and he moved on to more sedate and appropriate wheels.

There we were coming back from Ballarat all necking from bottles, including the driver, big bottles, stubbies were not yet invented. There was no 0.05 law. The rest of us were not yet at driving age and of course did not own cars. The Mitchell's were quite wealthy. Their father Mort owned Spaceline Homes, a  prominent building company of the time. We had a billiard table at home and both my parents worked which was unusual then, and many of the neighbourhood youths congregagated at our house as a base. We played pool and billiards, cards, watched TV, drank coffee and tea. Everyone smoked and boozed at every opportunity. The boozing was not done at our house. My parents were wowsers and disapproved but were working long hours and frankly we had little to do with them. It was a bit of a wild time.

It's funny the things you remember while working on a shed roof, thinking back more than forty years ago. There was a certain freedom of youth, the Vietnam war was in full swing, all of us youths faced the marble ballot, I think that added to gungho attitude we had. Laurie did get called up later. I haven't seen him for more than forty years I'd say. We all sort of got scattered about as you do as you become adults. I met Andy and Mort one day in the Austin hospital, must have been 1985 as I was visiting my father after his heart bypass surgery. They were doing a bedside vigil, Mrs Mitchell was dying and not expected to live more than a few days.

The Beach Boys seemed to capture the zeitgeist of the late sixties early seventies. It was freedom music to my generation.