Those vinyl albums I had… the ones I dutifully gave to Goodwill, when we lived at Arden… they took up so much space, and we needed those crates to store the Playmobil toys for the babies that were coming…
It’s all digitized now… on CDs… they’re so compact and take up no room at all. Â And, they just look nice. All square and crisp and plastic.
Besides, those old albums were scratched… and why do we even need a record player? What is the point?
My son wants them.
He found our old record player in the attic, and says it’s pretty cool, on the high school kid scale. But I have nothing to play…
I can’t even tell him what albums I did have, and what I gave away, because it’s so painful for me to remember… The record club I was in, where you got the first 7 albums for a penny, and we traded.. I had quite a sweet collection that would envy any classic rock connoisseur today. Â And back then, the albums were works of art. The lyrics were inside the sleeve, along with photos, biographies and anecdotes of what happened during the recording… they were iconic pieces of art…Nothing like them exists today.
I walk into Barnes and Noble and I see the new album section, and I wince at the price $20. And I calculate what it would cost to replace my albums… over 100 of them. Back when I gave those albums away, I had trouble giving them away.
“Mom… don’t you have any of those left around somewhere?” Â He pleads…
I wince at the thought of this…