Listening to my father's songs

When I was growing up, one of our family's prized possessions was a huge gramophone which incorporated a turntable on one side and a radio on the other. In between, there are shelves to keep the LPs and EPs.
My dad kept all his collection of his favourites in the shelves. Every other night after work, after dinner and while he was having his usual evening cigarette and lazing on his easy chair, he would put on Nat King Cole's Golden Hits or Chet Atkins Guitar Specials.
As children, there were five of us, it was a steady diet of the old evergreens. While we were upstairs doing our homework or just sitting around twiddling our thumbs, the strains of the songs like Rambling Rose, Autumn Leaves or even Johnny Horton's North To Alaska would be filtering through the rooms of the house.
This would go on for years. My dad has got a ear for good music. He liked them slow at times and jitter-bugging when he's in a dancing mood. After he left school at the age of 17, he was bumming around cabarets and pool rooms. He found friends in these places. One of them taught him tango and other classy moves of those days.
If I remember correctly, my dad was one of those of his generation who was greatly influenced by Gene Kelly, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse and other great dancers of Hollywood.
My dad loved the night life and his zest for life was reflected in his taste for music. My sisters, brother and I absorbed a lot of Jim Reeves, Peggy Lee, Doris Day, Slim Whitman, The Pretenders, The Four Tops, The Drifters and some others whom I have forgotten.
Decades later whenever songs of those days reached my ears, I suddenly found myself standing in the hallway of my old house. I was that little kid again, looking out of the window, watching the rain fall in the distance and wishing that I was all grown up and earning money so that I won't have to ask for some spare change to buy ice-cream.
These days I find myself rather surprised that sometimes some Hollywood movies used those old songs as theme music for their films. I guess my dad got it right. Those were the good songs that never die.
Even my sisters like those songs. We hear them all over again and somehow those old, forgotten, familiar feelings keeping seeping back into our lives. Evergreens, they call them. Now I understand the true meaning of that phrase.
My dad has gone to God's little acre years ago. So has my mum. But the memories of those songs linger on in my mind, and roam the prairie of my heart. And I am glad all over again.