Sometimes it doesn’t pay to throw things out.
Seriously, in spite of what my kids say, I do struggle to get rid of stuff. I do truly believe less is more.
It is true I have kept a few things from days gone by; things that are purely sentimental and not practical. I still have my girls’ grad dresses and a wooden poster my son made me when he was very young that has a picture of a very young me stuck on it.
But what I don’t have is records.
“We might as well get rid of those,” I remember saying to my husband many years ago during one of our many moves. “They are scratched. They are old. Nobody plays records anymore.”
And so we did.
But who knew it would happen?
Vinyl came back!
I was totally shocked the other day when I stopped by a local retail outlet. Among the usual latest gimmicks in technology that filled the shelves was a record player complete with a needle and a turntable. It was actually for sale.
“Oh my goodness, when did that happen?”
I remember when CDs first came out and I innocently said to my daughters “how do you turn them over?” Of course, the girls broke into peals of laughter and I was immediately pigeonholed as completely hopeless and not at all with the program.
It’s weird how things change.
They say you remember moments. And it’s true.
I remember a tiny blonde girl wearing a pale blue dress clutching the top of our record player and moving her little body to the crooning music of Neil Diamond.
She was barely one, then I turned around and she was two and then before I knew it she was all grown up. And now she is a wife and mother and from what I understand her kids and my grandkids will listen to vinyl and it will be cool.
When records were popular my husband and I were very young and knew a lot more than we do now.
In those days we thought we were truly in the groove because our record player rocked.
It is true we didn’t have much. We had to push our car down a hill to get it started and we ate a lot of macaroni and tried to ignore student loans but, still, we did have this really cool record player.
Our record player wasn’t just any record player. No siree. It was huge. I think it took up one whole wall in our living room.
I remember the day we proudly hauled it in and set it down carefully on our bright orange shag carpet. It almost makes me shudder to think of that carpet now, but at the time it seemed bright orange shag carpets adorned everyone’s living rooms. At least everyone who was anyone!
I’m pretty sure we had a record stand beside our record player so all our friends could see all our long playing albums and be impressed.
My brother and I both claimed ownership of Elvis Presley’s Blue Christmas Album. He said it was his.
I said it was mine.
I miss my brother more than words can say and if I could have just a heartbeat of time back again, I would gladly let him have that record if I still had it.
Yes, vinyl’s back and for some of us that fact is quite poignant.
It’s kind of like a rewind of what used to be!