From a Columbia Records Sleeve circa 1961

This was inside the Dave Brubeck Quartet's Brandenburg Gate Revisited album:
 

HERE'S HOW RECORDS GIVE YOU MORE OF WHAT YOU WANT:

1. THEY'RE YOUR BEST ENTERTAINMENT BUY. Records give you top quality for less money than any other recorded form. Every album is a show in itself. And once you've paid the price of admission, you can hear it over and over.

2. THEY ALLOW SELECTIVITY OF SONGS AND TRACKS. With records it's easy to pick out the songs you want to play, or to play again a particular song or side. All you have to do is lift the tone arm and place it where you want it. You can't do this as easily with anything but a phonograph record.

3. THEY'RE CONVENIENT AND EASY TO HANDLE. With the long-playing record you get what you want to hear, when you want to hear it. Everybody's familiar with records, too. And you can go anywhere with them because they're light and don't take up space.

4. THEY'RE ATTRACTIVE, INFORMATIVE AND EASY TO STORE. Record albums are never out of place. Because of the aesthetic appeal of the jacket design, they're beautifully at home in any living room or library. They've also got important information on the backs—about the artists, about the performances or about the program. And because they're flat and not bulky, you can store hundreds in a minimum of space and still see every title.

5. THEY'LL GIVE YOU HOURS OF CONTINUOUS AND UNINTERRUPTED LISTENING PLEASURE. Just stack them up on your automatic changer and relax.

6. THEY'RE THE PROVEN MEDIUM. Long-playing phonograph records look the same now as when they were introduced in 1948, but there's a world of difference. Countless refinements and developments have been made to perfect the long-playing record's technical excellence and insure the best in sound reproduction and quality.

7. IF IT'S IN RECORDED FORM, YOU KNOW IT'LL BE AVAILABLE ON RECORDS. Everything's on long-playing records these days…your favorite artists, shows, comedy, movie sound tracks, concerts, drama, documented history, educational material…you name it. This is not so with any other kind of recording.

8. THEY MAKE A GREAT GIFT because everybody you know loves music. And everyone owns a phonograph because it's the musical instrument everyone knows how to play. Records are a gift that says a lot to the person you're giving them to. And they keep on remembering.

AND REMEMBER…IT ALWAYS HAPPENS FIRST ON RECORDS.

Be A Dad

Your kid is hurt. Not badly or suddenly but hurt. It's her leg. She started running cross-country on a whim and probably ramped up too fast. Whatever the case, her left leg isn't right, the calf is tight even when she's just walking around school. She's in constant low-grade and occasional high-grade pain. Or, as she would say high-key pain. These things happen.

Your wife makes an appointment with an orthopedist. Your job is more flexible than hers, so you get to drive your girl to the appointment.

On the way, you say to her you're glad she's not a little kid, that it's good she's in high school. She shrugs. You explain: When you were tiny it was worse. You couldn't help yourself. You couldn't tell us what was wrong. This, you tell her, is still bad, but better. You know you're not explaining it right.

Okay, she says. She's nice that way. Knows when to throw the old man a bone.

You're her dad, so most of what you do is drive where she needs to go, try to be quiet and let her talk with the doctors, listen more than you talk, and head her off when she begins to spiral into anger or depression. You know about such spirals. Bet your ass you do. Trying to head her off helps head you off. Sometimes.

The orthopedist looks her over. Kick this leg up. Now that one. Stand up and walk across the exam room. Lie down and put your leg up. How's this feel? This? He figures out where things are at. He suggests an MRI.

She is nervous about that. He says, no sweat, but she says, isn't that the thing that makes you feel like the world is coming down. You smile. You know what she means. Claustrophobic, you say. The orthopedist says she won't go all the way in. Just her leg. He asks, is your leg claustrophobic? She smiles but only a little, like it's a dad joke. He smiles back. No sweat, he tells her.

And there's a job opening.

The job description: nod and make sure she believes him. Say, it's no problem. When she says it still high-key makes her nervous, nod again and say that you understand. Don't try to fix things. Just be there. Be a man. Be her dad.

You step up. You do the job. When she raises her eyebrows at you, that's when you know you've done what you were hired to do, what you were born to do, all you've ever wanted to do. And you both smile.

Sliced Bread

After a cup of coffee and Morning Pages, I came up from my basement office, showered, shaved, dressed for work. Breakfast I keep pretty light. A piece of toast with butter. This morning, I grabbed the bread from the fridge and thought about sliced bread.

You know the old saying, right? The best thing since sliced bread. A bit of searching reminds me that machine-sliced bread came about in 1928. Otto Frederick Rohwedder invented the machine. The saying came later.

I grew up with sliced bread. It didn't occurr to me to slice bread for a sandwich. Ridiculous, that. We had a weird, cheap bread knife, its serrated edge like a dull bow saw that tore the hell out of even the hard Italian bread we brought home for spaghetti dinners. Thank goodness for sliced bread.

This morning, I took the loaf from the fridge. The community center at which I work gets donations of bread, likely day-old. There's more than we can give away, so I grab a loaf each week. This morning I set the loaf on a cutting board and took hold of the good bread knife my wife gave me years ago. Its edge is fine and sharp enough to cut bread (and tomatoes) clean and thin as I like.

This morning I cut a thick slice — I was hungry — popped it in the toaster, wiped the knife clean and put it away, and uncovered the butter dish. Slicing bread was a moment's work. Using the knife was a joy like using any good tool. I waited for the toaster and thought about how slicing my own bread is just so much better than sliced bread.

Convenience is such a myth.

Sustainable Listening

I take the album from its paper sleeve which I had pulled from the cardboard sleeve in which it rested. The vinyl is forty-seven years old. I set it on the platter, switch the turntable on, and brush it. The amp hums. I swing the tonearm over the record and lower the lever. (My fingers were never steady enough to lower the needle on their own and now I'm even less steady.) Crackles pop in the speakers, then Neil Young sings about packing it in, buying a pick-up, and taking it down to L.A.

Across the room I sit at an HP laptop reading work emails going back and forth between a couple of the directors. I signed onto the job thinking I'd just write grants, but it has turned into something more interesting because I want it that way and the people who hired me encourage such things. It's a sweet thing. About as sweet as Neil's voice out on the weekend.

My daughter is teaching me about sustainability. Because of her I've committed to never drinking out of a single-use water bottle again. Small steps.

Records are sustainable. I can feel it. The paper sleeve. The brushing. The crackles and pops. Sure, vinyl is pretty nasty petroleum stuff, but it's forty-seven years old and I'll keep it the rest of my days (having learned the mistake of ditching the albums from my childhood).

The job feels sustainable too. My old one was like sitting in a running car in a closed garage. I wrote a note this morning to an old colleagues. I keep wanting to break a window, open the door, something before he suffocates. That's how it was with me. And the effects of that linger. That place was poison to me. I'm only now just beginning to recover.

Over coffee I read Neil Young's Lonely Quest To Save Music and his idea that the compressed digital music is doing something bad to our brains, kind of like the mind-suck of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and whatever else feels necessary but disconnects us. That ain't sustainable either.

The record's almost over. Even that can't go on and on. But there's the other side and there's another record and another after that. Just the feel of the record, the act of putting it on, and the restorative sound flowing across the room, yeah, it's enough to sustain me. It all feels so good.