amazing similarity #342: The knuckle on both of our right ring fingers is enlarged from having been dislocated one year ago.

My friend Roman Stallone always tells me, “There’s only one Rosie. You’re one of a kind.”

While I have always taken that for the compliment it is, I always doubted it was true. I hoped it wasn’t. There must be someone else like me, I thought. And I was right.

Dad came over last weekend. I didn’t plan anything special, other than the congregation softball game on Saturday in which I actually played, to my own surprise. It’s amazing the confidence it gives me to know that my father is good at sports. In fact he’s great. He says if he hadn’t chosen music as a profession, he would have been a professional baseball player.

“That’s my daddy!” I yelled when he made one of several spectacular plays that day. “I want to be just like you when I grow up!”

As he coached me in throwing and catching, I laughed to myself at how trite that seemed. (Wasn’t there a seen in Toy Story II where Buzz Lightyear plays catch with his newfound dad, the Darth-Vader-like Zurg?) But I cherished it anyway. I wondered how many kids at school were good at sports because their parents gave them the confidence to do it, and how many were like me, always picked last because no one, including themselves, thought they could succeed. Now that I suspect I may be pre-programmed for sports (I always was the fastest runner in my P.E. classes), I am willing to explore the possibility that I may not stink at baseball after all. I didn’t do so bad on Saturday. I’ll keep trying.

We only had two and a half days together, and I wanted my father all to myself. He got here on Thursday night so we had all day Friday to do nothing but eat, breathe, and sleep music, and that’s what we did.

In the morning we sat outside on the patio and played around with some verses to a song Dad started about using your wings. We discussed it from its different angles, argued over imagery and word meanings, and yes, the dictionary was involved. This is our idea of a good time. In the end, though, he wasn’t satisfied with my interpretation.

“It’s too tidy,” he decided.

“Well, if you want a messy song, then write it yourself,” I told him.

So we decided to work on something else (if you can call it ‘work’!). I had written a song about my sister Lilly awhile back, and it needed to be recorded properly, the only existing recording being a made on a hand-held cassette recorder which sounded terrible. We worked out the chords and then put on the headphones and started recording.

When the headphones go on, time stands still. They are an escape hatch, a way to stop the world and get off for a while. When I got my first multi-track recorder, I spent hours, no, days messing around with vocal tracks, layering harmonies on top of eachother. Cameron would wait patiently for me to come back to Earth, but while in the process of creating music it is hard to remember even to eat. Death by recording studio is not inconceivable.

The only thing I love more than recording is recording with my Dad. We sat on the living room couch with our headphones on from Friday morning until Sunday, only taking a break for the softball game-otherwise the headphones would have had to be surgically removed from our ears. While we were bouncing up and down on the sofa, singing our la-la-la’s on Lilly’s song, laughter kept bubbling up inside of me. We were like two little gleeful kids playing our favorite game.

I have listened to so many sad stories of those who have found long-lost relatives, only to discover they had nothing in common and felt no connection. So what are the chances that my 15-year search for my father would result in finding a soulmate? Someone who knows how ‘wet’ or ‘dry’ and ‘cutting and pasting’ relates to music? Someone with whom I can swap “When I Got My First Multi-track Recorder” stories, who can spend all day with a microphone and a Mac and never get bored?

Of course, we are not unique. There are others like us with this passion for creating.

“We are a tribe,” Dad said.

A tribe. I look at the artists’ names on my iPod and see other members of the tribe, and when the names “Bob Reid”, “Betty Reid Soskin” and “Rosie Reid Funk” appear among them, I feel a sense of having claimed my place in the tribe. It’s a relief to know I’m not one of a kind. I’m one of a tribe.

 My song “Diamonds Are Beautiful” is available on iTunes. 
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