i'm going to tell you a story. a story that spans decades (well, one). a story of my younger sister and craig david's second album, slicker than your average. let's head back to high school again, shall we? but we're not going to stop at my senior year this time. no, we're going back to the days before the ipod: the days of the CD player. (if i remember correctly, i got my first ipod for my birthday in tenth grade. it was a green ipod mini and i loved it dearly. for the first month, it only had twenty-eight songs on it. but that's neither here nor there. the point of this aside is to show that this story starts somewhere in the beginning of tenth grade, or the year 2003 if that's a better reference point for you.)
my sister and i, like most kids our age with an hour and a half long bus ride to and from school every day, each had a CD player. my last CD player, and the one that i had during this story, was red and beautiful and didn't skip every time the bus drove over bumpy road which was kind of a big deal at the time. along with the CD players, we took turns carrying a small CD case that held about ten CDs, although we stuffed it with almost twenty. (we would periodically switch out these CDs with the ones in our collection so the choices never got stale.) and while other kids on the bus would ask to borrow our CD players from time to time, it was this CD case that was really the star. because who just wanted to listen to the same twelve songs day in and day out? and our music taste was (and still is) very eclectic so we had everything from maroon 5 to papa roach to jessica simpson to sheryl crow to ludacris. whatever you liked, we probably had it. and you can bet that people asked to borrow CDs all the time.
most of the time, people returned the CDs before they or we got off the bus. occasionally, though, people would forget and we would get it the next morning. this wasn't a big deal. especially since a lot of the times the people borrowing the CD would leave one of theirs in our case as they swapped out. one day, a kid forgot to give us back a CD before he got off the bus. that CD was craig david's slicker than your average. he didn't just leave it in his CD player overnight, though, and the next morning he forgot to bring it back. the morning after that was the same. and the one after that. aaand the one after that. eventually, he said that he had lost it. his younger sister was at that age, though, where she didn't know when you were supposed to shut up about things and loudly said, "you didn't lose it. you listen to it in your room all the time." my sister said that she could burn him a copy of it if he wanted (yeah, morals and ethics were a little foggy at that time), but he insisted that it was lost and refused to give it back.
over the years, we'd joke about the stolen CD, and every time i was near a place that sold CDs i would find myself absently looking for it. i never saw it. we never bought another copy.
fast forward to last week. my sister was graduating with her master's degree, and i thought that the time was now right to replace the stolen CD. i mean, a ten year mourning period is beyond sufficient, don't you think? so i went on amazon and ordered it. it was delivered saturday morning. (i was not home.) BUT sometime between ten:thirty-six, when the fedex guy says he dropped it off, and around six, when i came home, the package disappeared. "it may have been stolen by a neighbor," amazon told me. stolen. again.
and that is when i realized that the reason we had never replaced the CD was not because we were in mourning, but because it was not meant to be. somewhere deep inside of us, we must have known this. it was time to accept it. (except i didn't, of course, and amazon is going to replace it.)
*Slicker Than Your Average - Craig David
my sister and i, like most kids our age with an hour and a half long bus ride to and from school every day, each had a CD player. my last CD player, and the one that i had during this story, was red and beautiful and didn't skip every time the bus drove over bumpy road which was kind of a big deal at the time. along with the CD players, we took turns carrying a small CD case that held about ten CDs, although we stuffed it with almost twenty. (we would periodically switch out these CDs with the ones in our collection so the choices never got stale.) and while other kids on the bus would ask to borrow our CD players from time to time, it was this CD case that was really the star. because who just wanted to listen to the same twelve songs day in and day out? and our music taste was (and still is) very eclectic so we had everything from maroon 5 to papa roach to jessica simpson to sheryl crow to ludacris. whatever you liked, we probably had it. and you can bet that people asked to borrow CDs all the time.
most of the time, people returned the CDs before they or we got off the bus. occasionally, though, people would forget and we would get it the next morning. this wasn't a big deal. especially since a lot of the times the people borrowing the CD would leave one of theirs in our case as they swapped out. one day, a kid forgot to give us back a CD before he got off the bus. that CD was craig david's slicker than your average. he didn't just leave it in his CD player overnight, though, and the next morning he forgot to bring it back. the morning after that was the same. and the one after that. aaand the one after that. eventually, he said that he had lost it. his younger sister was at that age, though, where she didn't know when you were supposed to shut up about things and loudly said, "you didn't lose it. you listen to it in your room all the time." my sister said that she could burn him a copy of it if he wanted (yeah, morals and ethics were a little foggy at that time), but he insisted that it was lost and refused to give it back.
over the years, we'd joke about the stolen CD, and every time i was near a place that sold CDs i would find myself absently looking for it. i never saw it. we never bought another copy.
fast forward to last week. my sister was graduating with her master's degree, and i thought that the time was now right to replace the stolen CD. i mean, a ten year mourning period is beyond sufficient, don't you think? so i went on amazon and ordered it. it was delivered saturday morning. (i was not home.) BUT sometime between ten:thirty-six, when the fedex guy says he dropped it off, and around six, when i came home, the package disappeared. "it may have been stolen by a neighbor," amazon told me. stolen. again.
and that is when i realized that the reason we had never replaced the CD was not because we were in mourning, but because it was not meant to be. somewhere deep inside of us, we must have known this. it was time to accept it. (except i didn't, of course, and amazon is going to replace it.)
*Slicker Than Your Average - Craig David
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