Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [38]
Perhaps allowing the devil a toenail in the doorjamb, Mom kept a phonograph in the house, and with her permission we were allowed to play it. The cabinet contained albums by Pete Seeger and the gospel singer Evie, a Reader’s Digest Presents 50 Beloved Songs of Faith collection, and five or six mariachi albums from her time in Mexico, which would explain why someone passing through rural Chippewa County in the early 1970s might have heard the sounds of a guitarra and our preadolescent Scandihoovian voices yodeling, “Ai-yi-yi-yiii!” These were the only words we knew, although my brother Jud, whose mental disabilities were leavened with certain savantisms, including the ability to memorize entire record albums after just one or two listens, sang along in phonetically serviceable Spanish. When we put on Stan and Doug albums, Jud switched effortlessly to a Scandinavian accent and recited the goofball tunes word for word. We had a smattering of 45s—I remember distinctly “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis and “Green, Green,” by the New Christy Minstrels. Many of these were leftovers from the day my teenage Aunt Sal brought her shotgun to the farm and practiced skeet shooting, using a stack of her “old” 45s in place of clay pigeons. I know there was more Elvis and plenty of Beatles in that stack, and shudder to think that somewhere in the subsoil out behind Dad’s barn are the irretrievable shards of an eBay bonanza sufficient to finance Amy’s pending orthodontia.
We also had six albums by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. They were easily my favorites. My father still had the trumpet he played in the Eau Claire Memorial High School band; I would pull it from the case and blow air-trumpet in sync with “A Taste of Honey” and “Bittersweet Samba.” I have those albums now, and sometimes I load them on the old console stereo I keep in my office just for the pleasurable rush of memory the vinyl gives—“Green Peppers” puts me back in the old farmhouse, the brass notes echoing from the cool plaster walls, as the barnyard lies still beneath the noonday sun. I note that all three of the songs I cite are from the album Whipped Cream & Other Delights, which featured on its cover a lady wearing nothing but confection. The album was released in 1965, and millions of young boys have yet to recover. It was quite a deal to be riffling past the original cast Sesame Street Book & Record album and Mitch Miller’s Sing Along with Mitch only to come face-to-face with such dairy-based profundity. If you held the cardboard sleeve at an angle you could make out just the hint of the curve of one of her mysterious naughty bits, and the naked implications blew my youthful fuse. I’m surprised Mom didn’t cover the woman in duct tape, because when she discovered that the version of “Bill Grogan’s Goat” included on an anthology of train songs featured a mild expletive, she took a stick pin and cut a groove from the beginning of the song to the end so when the needle hit that track, it skidded right past with a scratchy rumble. If you were to confront my mother and accuse her of censorship, she would reply, “Exactly.”
Still: Whipped Cream & Other Delights. When I learned some thirty years later that the whipped cream was actually shaving cream, it did absolutely nothing to cool my jets.
Dad didn’t care for the music, and when we heard the porch door open we turned it off, but he did sit at the upright piano sometimes after milking to plunk out hymns and then send us up the stairs with a remarkably groovy interpretation of “On Top of Old Smoky.” For several years I rode my bike two miles