I can’t deny that compact discs store easy and play pretty. Their studio-fresh tracks sound eternally new, scrubbed free of noise. Perhaps this is why I prefer vinyl records, because I’m not a tremendous fan of “new”. I like the hiss and pops of dusty wear. I like the way albums feel, the balanced weight of them. I like centering them on the turntable, pushing the start button, then listening for the click and whirr of motors as the tonearm levitates into place. The loud half-scratch of initial contact. A few seconds of fuzzy anticipation, then warm, full music.
It’s still magic, to me, how sound was trapped in those spiral grooves. How it stayed there, unchanged, during years of transport from home to college to apartment to duplex to home-of-our-own. How it reverberates–ringing off the vinyl, through the needle, and into a set of speakers that harmonize, that wail and thump. How it fills my house with acoustic contentment and electric excitement, with voices from my youthful years. I wouldn’t live those spent decades again, but it’s nice to hear such vibrant ghosts, singing their distant songs once more.
And it’s nice to preserve my ghosts on these modern discs and silicon chips, even if part of their warmth is lost in the process.
Navy jets are a fixture in the yard. Their roar punctuates life in Virginia Beach, which is home to Naval Air Station Oceana.
Today, one of the jets crashed. A fiery crash involving apartment buildings. I keep turning the news on, then turning the news off.
I don’t know this instinct, can’t name the impulse that forces me to look and look away and look again. It’s a sour, hollow place in my chest. Cold hands and burning eyes and a restless path from kitchen to television to yard to office to kitchen. It’s a dark weight in my mind, an unfocused pall of helplessness.
For lack of a better word, it’s grief. But why? The accident doesn’t belong to me. And yet I feel an urge to own it, to fold it into my life alongside all the other things that don’t belong to me but touch me anyway.
Nest complete, the blue jays spend hours on end in the wax myrtles. They defend their honeymoon suite with harsh calls and indignant attacks–innocent warblers fare no better than foraging crows. Rabbits aren’t allowed to graze in the yard, and the merest quiver of a squirrel whisker raises apocalyptic alarm.
Between these bouts of aggression, the lovers perch together and mumble softly to each other. They feed each other, public displays of “affection” that make me wonder about their behavioral chemistries. How does a body cope with such abrupt changes? They interrupt bonding with outbreaks of tumultuous fury, then switch back to bonding, over and over again in the course of a day. In the span of a minute, sometimes. The physiologic stress must be enormous, and yet it seems to work for them. How?
I’ve had my windows open most of the day, which means every surface in my house is coated with a thick yellow layer of pollen. The weather radar is turning yellow, too, with bright splashes of red…
Rae Spencer 