And so I am off, moving—well, actually, often dancing— into a new day.
Although I am convinced that the quality, well, the quality of well-managed, pristine records surpasses CDs, CDs are what I now have, with five-inch-by-five-inch folded paper covers with teeny images and teenier print. Nothing like the in-your-face covers of the hundreds of LPs I own.
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I no longer play the old scratched records, but a few years ago I stumbled upon three album-sized, naturalwood picture frames. And so now I frame the album covers—three at a time, frayed from years of handling and stacking—and hang them on my living room wall.
You see, what I recognized a while ago is that my memories are always rooted in music: Every time I look at the Supremes in their lime-green shifts on the cover of Where Did Our Love Go, the numbers 1964 almost worn away, I am in Di and June’s apartment on Humboldt Avenue, figuring out all that one figured out in the ’60s (you fill in the blanks). I hear Kenny Loggins singing “Celebrate Me Home” whenever my children open the front door after a long hiatus. And I am transported to another time when Stanton Davis’ Brighter Days fills my apartment, because I used to go clubbing with him at the Sugar Shack in 1968 and the album had a song about tofu long before I ate it, or even knew that it was anything but a song lyric. The way his trumpet fills space always reminds me to “pay attention”—which is what I’m doing in these beginning days of the first full month of spring when music once again becomes part of the outside world.
Drivers crack their windows open, and tunes start to seep out, lingering at traffic lights and stop signs. Curtains fly out living room and bedroom windows, raised but not yet screened, with fragments of phrases, clusters of notes, rhythmic conversations juxtaposed with licks and riffs.
The violin instructor’s students send their notes through the open windows and float them out over the church steeple across the street, most would say, to then disappear, but I am certain that they become part of the collective sound bank, to be transmuted into something else.
This morning, I wake to the chatter of grackles as they mount the sky. They saturate it, blending their song with the music of this home they return to each spring. And I can’t help but wonder whether they carry a snippet from Stanton or Jack or Angelique, or that shy, young student with the long, caramel-colored braid who clutches her violin case as she whisks down Exchange Street.
Annaliese Jakimides is a writer and artist living in Bangor. You
can read more of her work in The Essential Hip Mama:
Writing from the Cutting Edge of Parenting, published by
Seal Press.
