Young Girls They Do Get Weary

When she used to drop me off in front of the store with a list and a handful of cash it was because she had to go to another store, and that store was called “getting high in the parking lot and eating fast food until I got back”. I never suspected that my mother wasn’t being honest because I was 10 and I wouldn’t have cared anyway because I liked the errands. On a Friday afternoon I was dropped off at TSS my childcare/department store. TSS wasn’t like a fancy mall department store, it was more of an old style “We Carry Everything” type of store…a giant expanse of clothes, electronics, records, a pizza place, furniture and pets that I believe was a regional New York area chain. TSS was the perfect place to send a kid on a fool’s errand which for today was to compare prices on the TV’s and then to buy a record she was looking for, she would meet me back in an hour. So after carefully writing down all of the various TV functions and prices I went to the record section but I couldn’t find what she wanted. I didn’t even know where to look, I never heard of the artist but I was too shy to ask for help. Finally a girl came over and asked me if I was looking for my mother.

“No… I’m looking for the Otis Redding albums, but it’s for my mom she’s at another store…buying me a birthday present”

She took me to a corner and handed me two choices. I checked for the song my mom mentioned and selected the double LP Legend of Otis Redding.

Otis was a gift for a boyfriend who didn’t stick around; he left it behind but I don’t recall ever hearing the record played after he stopped coming by. Years later I inherited a box of records from her and among them was that double LP. It got a lot of play in my tiny first studio apartment and then it came with me when I moved to LA. Every time I played it I thought of my mom at 26 years old, sending me on errands so she could escape for a while, I’d have probably done the same thing. Eventually the record was left at someone’s house and I assumed gone for good, I had replaced it with various other Otis collections but I still missed the one that connected me, in my head at least, to where I came from.

Last Friday a bag was left for me and inside was the record I had been missing. The person I had left it with was leaving town and wanted to make sure that I got it back, I doubt she ever played it. For days the Otis record just sat in a corner, I felt like there was too much past attached to those songs but last night I realized that a lot of that history was pretty good. Sure, the record had once again been returned to sender but that’s no reason to pass up a chance to play it again. As the needle worked its way to “Try a Little Tenderness” I thought of what the record may have meant to my mother and what I knew it meant to me. Maybe she never attached much significance to it but for me it means a lot. It’s been played with mixed feelings over mixed drinks and it’s been played to dance and sing along to. Last night I didn’t drink or dance and I had no mixed feelings about the record, I still love it. I sat back and let it play in its entirety and decided that no one was going to get this record again unless they were willing to take me along with it. Otis and I are now a package deal.