Unearthing old Treasures

Our new carpenter Eric arrived today to fix some woodwork in our sunroom. He is an actual craftsman because when he looked at the job he asked me if I wanted the room repainted or just the spot that he was repairing. I told him to do the whole room and he said that was the right answer to make sure it is perfect and therefore he would take the job.

As he got to work I went off to Garden Club at Anne Eberdt’s beautiful house. After the meeting I returned home to find that Eric had removed all the sofas, rugs, chairs, tables, lamps and orchids from the room single-handedly, including an antique blanket chest which held over 300 record albums. In order to move the chest he took the albums out in the alphabetical order they were in and placed them in piles in front of my fireplace.

Many of these LP’s are from my high school and college years. Well loved and deep-grooved James Taylor and Jackson Browne’s filled the chest. I had started storing these records in the chest back in the days that I still listened to albums on my turn table. When we moved to this house the chest was needed in the sunroom and the albums stayed in it, far from my old stereo.

So I took this opportunity of the albums being out of the chest to move them to the gathering room, next to the stereo that still works perfectly forty years later thanks to my Dad always gifting the best in stereo equipment. I have vowed to listen to one album a day until I have worked my way through this collection, then start on the other 100 albums that are already up by the stereo. I will be going in alphabetical order by artist so tomorrow I will start with Laurie Anderson. I guess when I get to the artists that I have multiple albums from I will have to put them into age order and start with the oldest ones first.

Every once in a while I will report the highlights and low lights. They say that music memory is the last thing to go. I can’t wait to relive my teenage years only in music. Who knows what angst I will bring up.