Aside from my own reasons to simplify, my landlord, a good and lovely couple decided that my apartment was the next one for renovation of the kitchen. This is a great thing--but, with all the stuff I have, emptying the kitchen and the back porch (which is having tile put in) has become a herculean effort! The thing is happening in a bit of haste for a variety of reasons, and while it is terribly inconvenient, the result will inure to my benefit and so, this weekend is relocating what I am going to keep to the living room, closets and outdoors and culling out what I don't need anymore.
In the porch in an old bookcase, I found my old 45 case. And a bunch of 45's circa the 1960s and somewhat thereafter.
Here it is!
I don't think this has been cracked open, even for a look see, in about 10 years. And until today, I hadn't played any of the records in probably 40 or more years. A couple of years ago, I got a digital record player that allows you to convert vinyl to memory stick. I have been very slowly moving LPs belonging to both me and my father to the stick. It is time consuming and so, when I was working regularly, I had little time to do it. In the last few weeks I have probably converted about 25 albums, from Gordon Lightfoot to the Mambo with Tito Puente and such to the stick. It is a motley crew of music. I have enjoyed listening to music that used to waft around my original apartment with my mother and father back near Mt. Eden Avenue. I have badly down the cha-cha as the music played now in my Los Angeles venue.
But today, in my now fully messed up apartment, with towels, containers all around me, as I have begun to convert the 45's I removed from its dusty case, with its blue and green and white, square graphic, I was 12, 13, and 14 again. Lady Madonna, (the Beatles), Lady Willpower (Union Gap) and Alice Long (Boyce and Hart) oh, and Valerie (The Monkees), I played these over and over and sang along and danced in my room, door closed against the prying eyes of my parents who had tried to shield me from the music of my day (ultimately without success) and here I was in this living room, nearly an upper middle aged spinster feeling precisely as the pubescent kid I used to be.
Those were some happy moments singing along to those songs. It was a time when I had no idea where I'd be long down the road, and certainly never did I think I'd end up in Southern California in those days--people tended to stay in their neighborhoods from birth to death back then--but something about the music always intimated possibility. I was on stage of course performing, what kid wasn't. The roar of the crowd would follow and I knew where I belonged, I would be making my way in the world that seemed so daunting.
I don't worry much about my future any longer. Much of my future, well, it's my past now. I am learning to take each day as it unfolds, quietly, or as has been the case in the last couple of months, with lots of craziness and more agitation than I would like--with the confluence of all sorts of things that I might find easier to field singly.
I am about to take an old lap top and find a recycling place I found online. I'd prefer to toss it in the trash, but this would be inappropriate given the dangers of these old batteries. And then I have to pick up some prescriptions that remind me I am no longer a lithe (I was lithe until just about 15 and then the hormones seemed to have rendered me susceptible to well, the opposite of lithe). Later, or tomorrow, while I am still trying to organize the mess I have made to empty the kitchen, I will resume this pleasant walk down memory lane.
The people passing my window walking their pooches will no doubt wonder what is going on with the overweight definitely not a teenager belting out "I Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition was In! (Oh, that's the First Edition).
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