Both the beverage and the folk star fulfill needs in our family, tea being at its best a salve to a cold and lonely day, Van being that melancholy/joy jumble that is a rainstorm. I have my dad’s brow and nostalgia and taste for rock `n’ roll. I have my mom’s freckles and neuroses and taste for tea. It is on those proverbial rainy days, when we slog through our stored-up caches of solitude, that I feel like my parents’ son. It isolates us from crowds and community it sequesters us indoors it leaves us bored and anxious. Winter, though, is crafted just so to inspire introspection. The subdued “Sweet Thing” is a rainbow-like pause, quickly washed away by the unrelenting “Cypress Avenue.” Winter is supposed to be stark, but, like Astral Weeks, it is really dynamic and fierce and repentant, not to mention damned beautiful. The layered production on “Beside you” trickles to fill cracks and puddles. It lets up and comes down, cleanses and muddies. It’s not an original opinion, I believe, that Astral Weeks was just made for rainy afternoons. I teeter between it and Astral Weeks as my favorite, though, if it’s raining, I have no doubt. My dad acts as though paternal pride is unconditional, but he couldn’t have been prouder than when I bought my first Van album, the gospel-tinged His Band and the Street Choir.
It is mediocre black tea, obvious and sweet, and I’ve long since grown out of it. I doubt Mom has been prouder than when I was eight years old, addicted to caffeine from my morning mug of Constant Comment. My mother gave me tea, my dad gave me Van Morrison, and if those were their only legacies they could still feel satisfied punching out and calling it a life. Were it ever to rain, I would be drinking tea, listening to Astral Weeks, changing my socks. When it’s raining, I’m driving on treadless tires, admiring the view from behind ineffective windshield wipers.
If it’s raining, I’m in my attic, where the impotent drizzle outside is amplified into an orchestral sonic flogging, like BBs fired at a denim pup tent.
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