‘Year of the Cat’ – Vince Ruston

My dad wasn’t a particularly happy man, but you could tell when he was up by how the walls in the house that he built for us would be thrumming with music. Dad took meticulous care of his CDs, treating each disc almost like a wounded butterfly, keeping his fingers strictly to the edges to avoid leaving fingerprints on the silver side. If he was in an exceptionally good place, the vinyl cupboards would open and spill out his decades-long collection, almost complete discographies of the Bee Gees, Beatles, Elton John, and Glen Campbell, to name a few. He’d gently blow the dust off the record, wipe it over with a velvety brush, centre it in its cradle, and place the needle down with an almost surgical precision. He was so precious about his music collection and Hi-Fi system that I still approach a record player with anxious care, like he might be hovering over my shoulder to make sure I do everything right.

Another of my dad’s greatest loves in his life was the Geelong Football Club. I grew up surrounded by framed Gary Ablett Sr. (and later Junior) posters and an astonishing amount of navy and white paraphernalia. One of my first words was ‘goal’, learned from mimicking commentators on the TV, and though my parents claim they never thought of a boy name for me had I been assigned such at birth, I’m dead certain dad would have pushed hard for Gary. His loyalty to the Cats never wavered, despite how much their years-long bottom-of-the-ladder streak seemed to physically pain him. He even styled his ginger mullet and moustache after Ablett Sr.

Among the songs on heavy rotation when he was up was ‘Year of the Cat’ by Al Stewart, released in 1976. It must have been one of the first records dad ever owned, and as my mum once put it, the song is ‘practically in my DNA’. Like a lot of the music your parents listen to often, songs like that tend to blend into the background of your musical lexicon without you really noticing, so it wasn’t until I was thirteen that I remember fully paying attention to the song for the first time. It was, to be precise, the twenty-ninth day of September, in the year 2007, at around about five o’clock, when Geelong won their first AFL premiership in forty-four years.

It was a hallowed day in our house. My younger sister and I decked ourselves out in dad’s collection of merch; T-shirts, beanies and jumpers far too big for us. At thirteen and eleven, we hadn’t really paid that much attention to football up until this point, but our parents’ palpable excitement was contagious. We knew this was a big deal. As the game began, the four of us gathered in the lounge room, and barely let out a breath for most of the game. After years of disappointment, we couldn’t allow ourselves to get our hopes up. At least until the final quarter, when it became impossible that Port Adelaide could claw their way back. Geelong won by 119 points –a humiliating loss for Port Adelaide, and still the greatest winning margin in AFL grand final history.

That afternoon is without a doubt the most animated and elated I’ve ever seen my dad: between yells of ‘pile ‘em on, Cats’ and ‘you bloody beauty’ were ear-splitting whistles and cheers. At the final siren, he slid on his knees across the polished wood floor, twirling his scarf around above his head like a lasso and declaring it ‘the year of the bloody cat!’. Still in his fervour as the players shook hands and mum ceremoniously popped the cork on a bottle of champagne, dad went to the record player and pulled a 45 RPM from the cupboard. ‘Year of the Cat’ was barely given a chance to rest over the next few days, and one of the speakers blew out in protest of the volume.

At my dad’s funeral in 2016, we draped a Geelong scarf over the casket, topped with roses. As in his life, there was a lot of music throughout the service, and ‘Year of the Cat’ was centre among them as mourners approached the casket. Even at the length of six minutes forty, it still wasn’t enough time to fill the space, and those who lingered or waited were left in an awkward, subdued quiet. Mum and I later joked that we could have played ‘American Pie’ and ‘Hotel California’ as well and it still wouldn’t have granted everyone enough time to say their piece.

It was years before I could listen to ‘Year of the Cat’ again without being reduced to a sobbing mess. Though five years has dulled the grief, every so often the song will hit a nerve, and I’ll be painfully wishing he was still here, yelling at the footy with us.