No. 977 -- Iris

Performer:  The Breeders

Songwriters: Kim Deal

Original Release: Pod

Year: 1990

Definitive Version: No Alternative, 1993

I’ve often said that nothing good can come from a phone call that you receive at night. No one ever calls you at 3 a.m. to tell you they just had a baby or got a promotion or finally went out with their dream date, you know? So, if you’re awakened in the middle of the night, chances are it’s probably going to be bad news.

And so it was in January 1994 when I got a call at about 10 a.m., which, for me at that time—working the overnight shift in the Journal sports department—WAS the middle of the night. It was my first girlfriend’s mother calling me to tell me that her husband had died earlier that morning of a heart attack while shoveling snow.

I hadn’t been with Beth at that point for nearly 7 years, but this was bad news. Beth’s dad, Mr. Mac, was a good man, who had opened his house to me at a time when I really didn’t feel like I had much of a family center. Mrs. Mac (Beth’s mom), insisted that I didn’t need to come down for the funeral (which would have been awkward anyway), but I wanted to do something, so I wrote a poem about Mr. Mac to Beth’s new son.

I worked on it for a few weeks, and when I went to Columbus for an unrelated reason in February, I was able to hand-deliver the poem. I was listening to No Alternative a lot during that time, and this song seems as appropriate as any other to recall this.

I think I still have the poem somewhere on a floppy disk, and I have the original in a journal that I was keeping at the time. Beth’s son would be 17 now, I guess. I have no idea if he ever read it, because this was the last time I saw Beth. I hope so if for no reason that he should know from a former insider how cool the grandfather that he would never know was.