storytelling and memory tagged posts

A Hymn to Memory, Mom, and Andy Williams, Whom I Still Remember

One of my clearest early musical memories is of using my paper route and yard work money to buy Andy Williams’s “The Shadow of Your Smile” album as a birthday present for my mother when I was probably 15. She and my dad had purchased one of those low-slung wood-framed console stereos that were becoming fashionable at the time, signaling a kind of tentative probe into the promise of American middle class life.

When one lifted up the hinged cover door to behold the turntable and tastefully designed silver control knobs below, there was a slot to the left that was prepared to accept maybe the initial 10 or 15 albums that would launch the owner’s collection. Andy Williams was among the early occupants of that slot.

But time and memory are tricksters extraordinaire, as any good physicist will tell you about the former and neuroscientist about the latter.

And there was that song he sang, not the cover so...

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