Tapestry, 1971

My sisters and I had our own collection of LPs that made up our soundtrack: Janis, the Stones, Sly, Marvin, Gladys and her pips. The first we heard of Carole King, though, was when Mom brought home Tapestry.

What’s this? we thought, suspicious in the way of dickish tweens and teens. Mom drew the record from its sleeve to put on the stereo. We nabbed the cover, studying the young woman in jeans sitting with her cat in the window, her long hair, her bare feet. She looked more like us than like Mom.

Bright piano chords pounded from the speakers, and then a young woman’s voice, raked over and determined, loud and insistent: I just got to have you, baby. We spread ourselves out on the olive shag to listen through each song, riveted, recognizing ourselves in these three-minute stories. The last song on the side started out quietly, just piano and that resolute voice, sad but believing she was bound for some place better, easier, full of peace. I wanted to go with her.

We found ourselves in her songs, each of us in some way, including Mom: loving a boy, losing a boy, commiserating with troubled friends who would then commiserate with us, trying to love ourselves, wondering where it was all leading. Tapestry helped us, and millions of others, figure out womanhood.

We wore it out, memorizing every note and word, along with those on Mom’s Joan Baez record about her divorce from Bob. And because I still loved Elvis, I tingled with pleasure when she played his gospel album, You’ll Never Walk Alone, at full blast while vacuuming the house. The songs brimmed with dramatic tension, and were all about love. It never occurred to me that they were religious. I thought the implied other was a mate, a lover, a special someone. My special someone, who’d come and take me with him some day.

When Carole King came to Red Rocks in concert that summer, Mom bought tickets for all of us. We sat on open stone benches inside the earthen amphitheater, the sun sinking to ignite the red sedimentary walls in front of us. Beyond them, the lights of Denver winked on in the twilight. Carole emerged on stage and the crowd erupted, then settled quickly as she sat at the piano to sing our songs in a circle of light.

Before long, a thin, damp joint journeyed hand-to-hand down our row. Mom’s neighbor, a shirtless blond guy trying to grow a beard, handed it to her. She took it and handed it to Marie, who handed it to Anne. Mom kept surreptitious watch as we each pinched the soggy tip of smoldering contraband, passing it on until it was out of our hands. She let us feel cool by not making a big deal about it, like maybe she and her four much younger friends were all just hanging out.

I loved my mother with no reservation or memory that night.

An excerpt from a memoir in progress.