While my apartment is cramped by the remnants of my “inheritance” there is in fact very little left of the things my parents owned. I have bits and bobs — small percentages of what used to fill whole rooms.
One of my mother’s favorite albums: Phoebe Snow’s Never Letting Go.
One of those collections is the vinyl albums of music that my parents listened too. My mother had shelves and shelves of albums, well over a thousand, back when a thousand albums took up quite a bit of space. I have I think about 100 left, carefully culled over the years as I have moved around, until the only ones left are the albums that were played regularly throughout my childhood. I would have kept them all but damnation, have you ever picked up a box of vinyl albums? They are heavy as lead, omg, you will break your damn back trying to truck around 15 large boxes of vinyl. Also, I lost the house and with it, all that extra space, so really I did not have much choice. I kept what I could.
What I want to do now is pull those albums into digital format. Maybe not all of them, but most of them. A lot I’m sure I could actually go to Amazon and buy and download, but forgive me for being sentimental: I want copies of the songs I listened to, the albums my parents held and set on the turntable they hovered over.
I’m looking for one of those “USB turntables” where it will record an album as it plays and output a digital file for it. My musician friend Bob P., a fellow Novo Collegian, has recommended the Numark PT01USB turntable, which I’ll probably be getting next month.
Can’t say I’m looking forward to the process, which will be an incremental thing I think. But I am honestly excited about hearing some of those songs that were part of making me into the woman I am today.