(we get there when we do)

My mom cleaned a mess of cds for me from the house and I brought a bunch of them back to NYC with me from NOLA after a whirlwind trip home to see the empty lot that used to be my house and to attend my ten year high school reunion. One of the albums is Suddenly Tammy!: (we get there when we do). It's an album I discovered while reading "Pulse" magazine, which was a free monthly periodical from Tower Records which I read religiously from puberty onward. I discovered a lot of music that way, but this one album always seemed like one of those rare finds you don't otherwise stumble upon. There are a number of songs on the album that resonate as strongly as they did when I was in high school. Listening to the album again, especially after just spending time with old friends who knew me in nursery school, I feel this odd comfort. As though everything that we've been through over the past year was just a way for me to better appreciate my life.

Listening to this album reminds me of "Weeztie Bat" books, Sunday afternoons in the treehouse, listening to cds on a boombox, doing AP History homework and completing lab reports before dinner. It reminds me of Sunday mornings at Croissant d'Or and spending my babysitting money at Bookstar and Tower Records, Kaboom Books and the Acorn Shop.

I still have all these memories. Over the past year, I've realized that the hard part about everything post-K is that it's shoved all those memories into a shoebox that I felt molded over and got tossed out with everything else in my house. Listening to these salvaged cds continues to amaze me. The memories pour out like milk into iced coffee, with swirls of unexpected twists.