A dad in a dad bod, with Ray-Bans and a graying beard and a Wilco t-shirt, sized me up from the gas pump outside the mini-market where he was filling his Honda Odyssey with a carseat in the back. And it’s not like I don’t have band t-shirts, or even that I don’t wear them in public, but I was wearing the Boden wrap dress that’s seen me through postpartum, breastfeeding, and I-guess-this-is-just-my-torso-now, and my sense was that the Wilco t-shirt was part of his aesthetic the way it wouldn’t be part of mine. I’d stepped out to pick up some more ice and Cokes, left my husband and daughter at the backyard barbecue where she was blowing bubbles and commanding everyone’s attention, where no one would miss me, and there was Wilco Dad watching me from the pump.
Without hearing a word from him, I knew that both of our first cars had tape decks. Later we got those cassette adapters that you plugged into your Discman, and those nylon wallets that clipped to the visor and held your favorite CDs. I didn’t really get into Wilco until Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but Wilco Dad had Being There and A.M. and maybe a couple of Son Volt and Uncle Tupelo CDs too. We listened to college radio at the same time, maybe he got into Belle and Sebastian or maybe not, and then we stopped, embarrassed all of a sudden, maybe with enough extra cash on hand to trade in the cassette adapter and Discman for the seemingly infinite capacity of the iPod.
I have a new name and a belly to match it, but still I’d have given Wilco Dad my old name if not my belly. I’d like to have asked him some questions: What’s your favorite Uncle Tupelo song and why is it “No Depression”? Do you like Neko Case and do you just like her noir-country stuff or also her more experimental later stuff, and what about all her songs with New Pornographers? You love the Mermaid Avenue album, right? I played it once when I went down to Coney Island and my ex thought it was corny. My friend Meg put “Outta Mind (Outta Sight)” on a mix CD for me once and I thought it sounded like the Sesame Street song—yeah, you too, everyone says that!
This is what I meant when I said “nice shirt,” which I did, a bag of ice in each hand on the way back to my own car with a carseat in the back. It meant that I survived the inexplicable, baroque bullying of “alternative” kids of the ‘90s, when drawing the Pearl Jam stick figure on your algebra notebook invited an interrogation as to whether you knew all the words to “Yellow Ledbetter.” (No one does.) It meant that I want to talk to someone, even just for a moment in broad summer daylight, with a connection to the last days of blowing one’s babysitting money at the record store or camping outside the Ticketmaster desk until the fateful hour of ten a.m. It meant that I hoped a Wilco t-shirt represented that connection, even if it didn’t, even if we both had to get back to the kids who belonged in our empty carseats and the spouses looking for more ice and Cokes.
And so I said, “Nice shirt.”
And he nodded and grinned. “Thanks.”
Abigail Myers writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction on Long Island, New York. Her fiction has recently appeared in Milk Candy Review (Best Small Fictions 2024 nomination), Rejection Letters, Roi Fainéant, and Stanchion, and is forthcoming from Tangled Locks and Cowboy Jamboree Press’s MOTEL anthology. Her essays have recently appeared in Variant Literature (Best Spiritual Literature 2024 nomination), Phoebe, Pensive, Tiny Molecules, Willows Wept Review, The Dodge, and The Other Journal. Her poetry has appeared in Icebreakers Lit (Best of the Net 2024 nomination), Amethyst Review, Full Mood Mag, Sylvia, Hearth and Coffin, Resurrection Mag, and more. Keep up with her at abigailmyers.com and @abigailmyers on Twitter and Bluesky.
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