My sister passed away in 2008, just one year before I started posting here (there's a connection, but it's a long story). It's taken my mother until this year to start sorting through my sister's things, discarding some memories, cherishing others before discarding them, choosing to sit with artifacts and pieces of my sister and let her breathe through physical objects. The next time I met my mother, she handed me a plastic shopping bag with a few cassettes from Carrie's room....the
ALABAMA tape that was my first ever purchase, when I was still an only child. a TOM T. HALL tape that for whatever reason reminds me of a photo of my mother with HOYT AXTON taken at
Austin City Limits a lifetime ago, CHARLIE RICH's
Behind Closed Doors that is going to make me cry buckets when I listen to "The Most Beautiful Girl In The World" for the first time in a (new) lifetime and a destroyed Neil Diamond cassette. There was an Alan Jackson tape that Carrie must have bought herself....but then there was the karaoke tape of her practicing "Achy-Breaky Heart" for some church talent show or some shit. Another tape with her name, written in her hand.....I can't listen to those yet. I will. But until then, here's a rip of the copy of a HERB ALPERT & THE TIJUANA BRASS Greatest Hits tape that I listened to with my parents when I was a child....not sure how this ended up in my sister's things, but who the fuck knows why anything happens anyway?
