Little Bit Of The Past

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Yesterday I was all sorts of behind. I woke late. It had snowed. I needed to shave, shower, write Morning Pages, dress, shovel, pack lunch, eat breakfast, and get to work. No way could I get it all done and still drive my daughter to school and myself to work on time. Damn it.

My wife rescued me by taking our daughter to school. I paused Morning Pages halfway and shoveled the snow, shaved, showered, threw some lunch together, ate a bit of toast, and walked to work. Fifteen minutes early, I finished the last Morning Page and a half. No harm, no foul, but I knew I had to get up earlier, if for no other reason, then to feel better.

Last night, after Syracuse Women's Basketball in the Dome, we returned home to an inch or snow of new snow. Despite the late hour, I shoveled to save having so much snow in the morning. I considered shaving and showering to get them out of the way, but my daughter was in the shower and I was too tired.

This morning, after a couple snoozes, I got up earlier. I wrote all three Morning Pages, shoveled off a dusting on the driveway and sidewalk, shaved and showered, dressed for work, made lunch and toasted bread. By seven I was ready, but my daughter doesn't need to go until 7:30. Which sent me back to a little bit of the past.

I'm typing in the living room while side three of Genesis' Seconds Out spins on the turntable just like it did most mornings while I was in high school. Side three is comprised of one twenty-four minute song, "Supper's Ready." Each morning I got up at least twenty-four minutes early to listen to that song. It was a comfort before high school, which I thought of as a kind of prison. I'd sit in my room alone with the music playing and...well, I don't even know. I'd just sit and listen. That was good. It was enough.

This morning is a nod to that past. I no longer go to school. The last ten years of teaching were far worse than the years I spent as a student. After dropping off my daughter, I'll go to the community center and it isn't just that I don't mind, it's that I kind of can't wait. I'm happy.

Today is Dad's birthday. He would have been 81 and last night would have gone with us to the Syracuse Women's Basketball game. He would have been happy about my new job. And this morning he would be up early to watch the plow guys do his driveway, have his coffee, and start the day. I'm in the past enough this morning that he's here with me just a little.

Being up early, going back to the past, and Dad's birthday are happy things for me. I doubt it's the same for my mother and brother who wake and remember in their own ways. Me, I'm up early, Seconds Out is into the "flute" solo just before "the gods of Magog," it's Dad's birthday, and soon I'm off to a job I love. All that and I've spent twenty minutes typing this. What a day.

You should see the smile on my face and hear this album. Both of them out of the past and into the morning. Both of them just right.

Bootleg Records From Long Ago

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I stopped at a used record shop for an old Genesis bootleg I had seen there last week. If it was still there, I'd count that as fate saying I just had to buy it. There it was and so I bought it. Of course I did.

I buy mostly used records. I buy some new albums, but used stuff is more interesting. Most shops are poorly organized, so I hunt for the good stuff. That's fine so long as I'm on my own. Anyone with me wonders, as the first half hour passes, when they'll be released and when I might look up and rejoin the world. Flipping through, I'm somewhere and some-when else.

Anyone who thrifts for clothes, old car parts, or what have you knows this feeling of drifting away, of solitude that is all too rare these days. I even switch my phone off while in the temples of vinyl. There were no mobile phones back in record days.

Records are things of the past. They're making a comeback of sorts but won't ever be mainstream again and so they harken back to another time. I won't say it was a better time we should go back to. That nonsense leads to racist red baseball hats. However, like cherry picked classic rock, I go back for some of that era's greatest hits.

I'm alone in the house with the bootleg record on the turntable. The recording is terrible (the audience member's microphone seems to have been incapable of recording bass), but the experience is as close as I can get to being back in tenth grade. Then there was no YouTube filled with every bootleg known to fandom. Instead, I dug through bins at Desert Shore and hoped for the best when I brought one home where, by myself or with my best friend, I'd put the record on (often with a fresh TDK or Maxell tape recording it) and listen carefully. I remember hearing this bootleg back then, imagining myself at the concert that had happened ten years before, back when I was only seven. It was a bit of magic. Now, rather than imagining the concert I never saw, I recall the red and black rug, the Technics turntable, the view out my bedroom windows, the scratched and pitted recording that is my memory and which is much less clear than the audio on this bootleg.

Flipping through records I recall my younger self trying work through the store methodically but drifting from jazz to rock, working through A, B, and C but then jumping to G and finding the bootleg I didn't know I had been looking for but which felt just right and so full of possibility. There I am, paying the bill, catching the bus from the SU Hill back home. Up in my room, I open the turntable, slip the record from its sleeve, and set the needle in the groove for a listen. It comes back to me across four decades, like an old song whose words are all still there, whose every melody is etched into me.

That terrible bootleg record sounds awfully good to me.

Remembrance Of Albums Past

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School is closed in observance of Memorial Day weekend so I'm going to my new job for the whole day. My morning schedule has for decades begun around five with me writing Morning Pages, packing a lunch, grabbing a bite and some coffee, then hustling to school at seven. This new job doesn't begin until nine and so I'm home with time on my hands. It feels lovely and has me remembering high school.

Back then I got up early to dress, have breakfast, and get my books together, but really I got up to have time to listen to "Supper's Ready" from Genesis's double live album Seconds Out before school. That song plays for just over twenty-four minutes, so I got started early and, for at least one school year, listened to that song almost every morning. It was a reliably happy beginning to the day.

This morning I have A Trick Of The Tail on the turntable. My wife and daughters have left for their schools. The cats and dog are asleep and I'm almost back in my childhood bedroom, the door closed, the world contained inside those walls and the song on the record, the world enclosed in the wide pastures of my mind.

What I did I do back then while "Supper's Ready" played? I wasn't writing. Maybe I just listened. Probably I sang along. I know I was happy. Going to school wasn't my favorite thing but wasn't terrible either. Especially at the end of my senior year it could be wonderful. Some days I had to go before the song ended but I hardly remember those days and recall mostly feeling like I was on a lake in the still of morning under a brightening sky.

Teaching school hasn't been good for a long time. Yesterday it was dangerous. I was threatened by three different students and thought I might for the first time take a punch. It took a while to calm down from that and remember there are only twenty school days left for me in that awful place. Thank goodness.

Today, instead of school, I'll go to a new job, one that so far feels good and full of possibility. This morning I've got Genesis on the turntable and plenty of time. Side one of A Trick Of The Tail is almost over. I know what song to play next.