Songs My Father Sang To Me

"If you don't like my story, don't blame in on-a-me
for the one who wrote it is now far overseas."
As it turns out, the man who taught me the song is very far overseas. Like across the river Styx. But the synapses that hold the lyrics are still fused and they won't simply let go after all these years: "This morning when I woke up, I looked upon the wall. The cooties and the bedbugs were having a game of ball. The score was six to nothing. The bedbugs were ahead. I got so darned excited, I fell right out of bed." These words come to me in waves, and the tune follows close behind. Sometimes it comes when I think about breakfast. Sometimes it comes when I hear a sports reporter announce a score of six to nothing. Sometimes it just pops up because it's there.
"I went right down to breakfast, the meat - oh it was stale - the coffee tastes like tobacco juice from the old county jail." This may explain why I have never once had a cup of coffee in my life. "The Indian Rubber Beef Steak, the insulated cheese" were also on that menu. These are curious items, since in all the other versions I have heard of this particular ditty, my father is the only one to include them. The image of breakfast as a carnival of less-than-fresh food is one that has stayed with me for all of my days, and I hope that I won't soon encounter a "wiener doing a flip flop that lands right in the peas."
And this isn't the only melody that bounces around my head. There's the story of a cow that we once had us, oh the name of her was Gladys. The rest of the song explains why people used to stop and stare. And the ballad of poor Lilly White, whose teeth come out at night. They start to run into the bits I learned on the playground about Mary, who had a steamboat. The steamboat went to heaven, and Mary, she went to - Well, I hope my father is somewhere nicer than that, crooning along with anyone who will listen.
"He's fighting for our country, he's fighting for Uncle Sam
If you don't like my story, well I don't give a hokey-pokey-diddly-okey."