Three Generations

My son Nate and I pulled up to Lunchbox Records, just five miles from my mom’s place in Charlotte, North Carolina. Mom had been tired, she said after we went out for Sunday brunch, so this outing was just the two of us: me, and my 18-year-old son, who had somehow become a minimum wage radio DJ practically overnight.

“John Carl’s Used Cars and Evershine Evangelical Church,” he said, laughing, when I asked him what he played on the radio. He was referencing the paid commercials, which in the modern internet age were so sparse they explained how someone fresh out of high school got this gig. “It was either this or Hardee’s” my mother had explained soon after my son moved in with her. “The pay’s the same but I dare say Nate’s happier at NRWE than he would be packing hamburgers. Vegetarian and all.”

My mother had been as taken aback as me when Nate, after she came up to Virginia for his high school graduation, suggested he might spend a gap year before college living with her down in Charlotte. Prior to this year they had mainly only seen each other at Christmas, watching Frosty and Charlie Brown on TV. I had stayed in Virginia, busy with work, until I decided I needed a vacation and Nate needed a treat. I was going to give him $50 to buy anything he wanted in the record store.

“I’m not cool, mom,” he was telling me. “Like, I’m not one of those cool kids who plays the guitar and memorizes obscure music.” He said he had little choice of what to play at work; it was top 40 pop and his main job was to make sure the same songs wouldn’t play back to back. “Like grocery store music,” he said.

The record store had walls of CDs, along with showcases of old-fashioned, recently manufactured, vinyl albums. “Baby One More Time” made it to the cart. “Brittany Spears?” I asked. “Nah, Leah Wellbaum, Slothrust.”

“It’s supposed to be a feminist kind of cover,” he added, and we agreed to play it as soon as we got out to the car.

There was something else he got with the other $25; I couldn’t quite see it as it went into the bag. But when we got to mom’s place, he took it out, and mom’s smile lit up the living room. It was Vince Guaraldi’s soundtrack to Charlie Brown’s Christmas, peppermint new vinyl, as in demand now as it was in 1965.