Walking the Wall

When I was a young girl the two songs I remember playing over and over on my record player were Candle on the Water sung by Helen Reddy from Pete’s Dragon and Look to the Rainbow sung by Petula Clark from Finian’s Rainbow.

Now, I adore my iPod, it is, in fact, the single most favorite thing I own. I use it continually, I love to have more music on it than I can ever listen to, I love making playlists and having music just pop up at my finger tips.

Still, there was something so ritualistic about pulling the record sleeve out of the album, then the record out of the sleeve, setting it on the record player and then moving the arm over to touch down just perfectly in the blank space before the selected song. I loved the sound, at the end of the record, of the last few crackles and then the arm swinging back up and into place and the silence that followed.

I have a couple Helen Reddy songs on my iPod, but she really came back to life today when I slid a Helen Reddy record onto a record player I picked up today and heard that old familiar record scratching blend into her rich voice singing "I Am Woman". Beautiful. I even hit that blank space just before the song perfectly as if there wasn’t all the years of cassette tapes and cd’s and iPod’s between highschool and now.

Nostalgia is a funny thing; here we have reached a level of digital mastery that creates crystal clear sound I can play in my head phones, my stereo system, or my car and what I have been obsessing about lately is being able to put a record onto a turn table and hear the scratching sounds play out of small speakers.

Recently my husband had picked up some Beatles, Journey, Styx, & Queen at a neighbor’s garage sale and that had started the itch up again. Then in a fit of organizing last week I shifted, for the umpteenth time, a wicker basket of records that have moved around my room waiting for a place to stay.  A friend of the family had given me a box full of very old records, old enough that some of them are half an inch thick–gorgeous old black Edison records in crumbling leather albums.  I decided to stop shifting them and put them in my entertainment center where they matched my crumbling leather books given to me by the same friend.

Today while I continued to organize I came around some loose albums that came with the older ones, things more from the 70s–Christmas albums, a couple Barbara Streisand, and two of Helen Reddy. That’s when the itch became unbearable. So my son and I ran out and got a little system I’ve been eyeing for a year, it looks like an old style radio and plays the radio, cds, tapes, and records–nothing fancy, no extra functions, just playablity.

My 16 year old son was facinated by getting the old records out, seeing the chunks of songs circling on the black, trying his hand at hitting the blank space just so–it was the first time he’d ever heard a record play. Life is funny like that.