Chance = Change

Today , I took some 100 or more LP records to an antique dealer to see if he had any use for any of them...he bought two out of the lot, for $25.00, because they were the rarest, as far as he was concerned, and so we are two records poorer, but $25.00 richer. GIven the rate at which we were playing those LP's throughout these years (try the rate of : NEVER), that $25.00 will definitely be more useful than the two records that money purchased!
However, I as I sat in Zephyr Antiques - a quiet, dusty place on Abingdon's Main Street, not yet infested with the usual tourist strollers out looking for the perfect Fall leaf - i watched Tim, the proprietor, flip through the three packed boxes of records, and memories floated out of the closed spaces between the LP's at an alarming rate: each record seemed an album of mental pictures associated with the time, the era, the places, I played the records..the various men who brought the records into my life...the age I was when buying that particular record seemed to be the most important thing in the world to me...the cover art alone, worth more than anything for some, reminded of places I have lived, sofa's, walls, tacky brick and board shelves in college, stained rugs where ardent college juniors made fumbling attempts at love, the smell of bookish dust, walls filled with black and white photos of sit-ins, lie-ins, rallies sweaty with passion and politics, reminders of youth: those records are the real diaries of our earlier lives...shared diaries of times and places filled with protest and belief. The music mattered as much as the war in Cambodia...for some, mattered far more....because the war only made us angry...the music made us cry.
So, it seems this morning's antique store run was a bit futile...because here we are stuck with the same old records...but, maybe that's the way it's supposed to be: maybe we are meant to remember, and not so easily sell or throw away what once mattered so much. Maybe we're meant to buy that new turntable in San Francisco....and enjoy the journey back into the richness of those black, shiny and thrilling memories.