It could have been the hours of plumbing repair numbing my brain and clouding my thoughts while standing in my Mother’s new house, or it could have been the anxiety of having to go back under the house and do MORE plumbing repair of an especially get wet variety, but I found this Jackson Five Cd and I put it in the CD player.

Standing in the living room on carpet the color of zombie brain (don’t worry it is going) I waited… all ears. My mother waited, I don’t know if she was ALL ears, but her ears were pretty prickled as well. The song started with that Jackson-esque fuzz bass and…the doo dah doos. “Mmmm it was OK”, I thought. I skipped to another track and my mom and I listened intently waiting to LOVE it. My mom was the first to comment, “why is this not feeling right? It is like I don’t know these songs”. So I went for broke and forwarded to ABC, the first hit on the disc I knew would be total pop annihilation and it would compel me to imagine little cartoon Jacksons sliding on their bellbottom Tuffskinned knees across the living room floor brandishing their respective instruments and harmonizing with achingly bubblegummy yumminess the likes of have which have NEVER been seen since. For a moment we both kinda faked it. We shuffled and felt the groove but we were outside of the moment. The Jacksons were lost to us. OUCH.

It sounded tinny and kind of boring. I poked at the boom box. “Maybe it is the speakers?” I commented.
“Yeah”, she replied.
“Hey check out this Etta James cd… and Here’s Sam Cooke!” I offered, trying to manufacture a moment, something I could hold onto and enliven the task waiting for me five feet below us. I wanted a distraction while I was under the house sopping and miserable with banged up hands terminating in the crushed and crooked fingers usually reserved for Hanna Barbara villians whose mitts were just smooshed underneath a cartoon anvil that fell from an airplane looking like a cross between a piece of paper origami and a stove pipe.

“Who is Sam Cooke again?” My mom asked.
“I don’t know”, I confessed quickly scanning the cd for a track I recognized but to no avail. (I just wikipediad him and he does have a lot of good stuff… that cd was junk!). I reached into the box of CDs left behind in the house and pulled out the Bobby Brown Millenium Collection, prompting me to take my leave and head under the house once more. Ugh. How could the Jacksons fall so far and how could Bobby Brown rate a vaseline-lensed career retrospective album? I do not like to plumb.


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