Yesterday we took the partying in the driveway to a national level, well sort of. As much as I love music I can't listen to it all the time and when I'm not rocking out to some kick ass Belle & Sebastian tunes I'm listening to NPR. I'll listen to just about anything they have on. During the weekends I primarily listen to KPCC because they don't play music like KCRW does. A few years ago they started airing short stories from the StoryCorps project. They were snippets of conversations from everyday people telling stories. The project travels around the country gathering these stories and archives them in the Library of Congress for anyone to look up. There's a permanent booth set up in New York City and two Airstream trailers that set up camp in a new town every few weeks. Just after Christmas I started hearing promos on KPCC about the Historias project and the Airstream coming to Los Angeles. I knew this was my chance to make it into the project.
There would only be 100 spots open to the public for the recording, they had many set aside for community leaders and people that had actually done something besides amass a pretty sizable collection of pin back badges. The morning the reservations opened was my first day back at work after a bout with strep throat. Lucky for me when you have strep throat no one really wants to come near your desk so I was left alone to secure my recording time. I was assigned a late afternoon recording time on what I'd learn later was the first day of the LA stop. Dede who is also a big fan was able to reserve a session for a couple of weeks later. I called my Dad and told him a little about the project, I didn't want to confuse him - Dad not using a computer really couldn't go look up the website and see what this was all about. After a couple of phone conversations he finally understood what we were going to do that day.
Yesterday was the appointment day. Dad arrived really early to the library and didn't notice the trailer was there and left me a message about only seeing people stealing cars and mugging old ladies - he was parked by the courthouse and this is a typical Dad message left. I left work and made my way through the horrendous LA afternoon traffic to East LA. When I arrived I found
Dad hanging out by the trailer just watching the ducks at the giant pond in the middle of the civic center complex. I came up to him and asked where his little bag of bread was then he pointed to the sign saying that the ducks are not to be fed. My Dad has everything in his truck and I'm sure he has an old bag of bread or popcorn in there for feeding birds. We still had about 10 minutes before our appointment and we went to watch a really cool duck fight that had just broken out by the edge of the pond. Just when the duck fight was ending it was our time to go inside the trailer. At first Dad seemed more impressed by the trailer then the project, he had never been in an Airstream before and told the facilitator about how the astronauts that went to the moon were quarantined in one of these after returning to earth. After his initial fascination with the trailer we sat down to record our conversation. I started out asking him about what it was like raising three kids while being an active military reservist and a police officer then we talked about him growing up and if what happened with him shaped his idea of what he wanted for our lives. As he does he did get off topic at times but brought it back to the initial point after wandering about for a few minutes. In the end I asked the most important question of all, the one that had been baffling me for some time now. That question - what is up with him and the Big Lebowski. Turns out its quite simple, Dad sees himself like The Dude. Just be yourself and let other people be what they want to be, just let everyone be. Here I thought it was Walter he liked the best, I'm glad we got that bit sorted out and the mystery will be solved for generations of Ojedas to come.
