This, That, and the Other

When I was a young kid, my father would, upon occasion, come home from work and bring me a treat: rock candy. In case you’re not familiar with rock candy, it is a hard candy made by cooling sugar syrup into large crystals. Essentially it’s large pieces of crystalline sugar, and the kind he brought home for me was strung together with a string. It was so sweet and so good and I loved it when he brought some home for me.

One day I asked him where he got rock candy. He sat me down and told me about a miner friend of his who would periodically go up north to the Big Rock Candy Mountain, and when he got there, he would climb up onto the Big Rock Candy Mountain, take out his pickaxe, and start breaking off pieces of the rock candy that the mountain was made of. He would then bring it back and give a bunch to my father because my father had told the miner how much I liked rock candy.

Even at four or five years old, I was a bit of a skeptic and I told my father that I didn’t believe him that there was a mountain made out of rock candy. “Really, Daddy, where do you get rock candy?” I asked him.

He said, “Butch,” — he always called me Butch for some reason even though that wasn’t my name — “my miner friend brings a little back with him every time he returns from visiting the Big Rock Candy Mountain. And tomorrow I’ll prove to you that there really is a Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

The next day, when he got home from work, my dad had a record with him. He pulled the large 78 RPM record from its sleeve, carefully placed it on the Victrola turntable, moved the needle arm to the beginning of the record and lowered it. And this is what I heard…

I was so excited by this song, which immediately became my very favorite song ever, and from that day forward for a few months, I played that record over and over again.

I asked my dad if, someday, he would take me to the Big Rock Candy Mountain. “Sure, Butch, someday I’ll take you there,” he said. Of course, he never did.

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Written for Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, where she asks us to “think of a song from your childhood and just write.”