the fall

From the world that is only electronic to the realm of the physical, everyone I know seems to be driving toward splitsville or otherwise made panicked by some strange and unpredictable circumstance (distemper... flooding ... rehab).

It is a decaying season. Moldy things are tumbling down. The rain has washed up lost shirts and revealed strange stains (lipstick . . .grease . . .)

This morning, on the walk to the subway, I discovered hundreds of albums thrown out with the trash. Not one or two bags, but a stack four feet high that stretched halfway down the block. I was late and felt rushed (new position, people to impress, etc) but I had to stop. I didn't think they could be salvaged for their sound; they were wet, sitting atop concrete, many stacked without jackets. But because they seemed so precarious there, so sad. Many of them were topped with cobwebs and dust, but others seemed more loved, with jackets worn through from thumbing, from being removed, from listening.

I grabbed a stack of seven inches with the intention of making something from them. Cheap wall art. Ashtrays with enormous holes in the middle. It was an abstract thought (fueled by the memory of financial gains at a college craft fair) but my only regret was that I couldn't take more. I couldn't take the twelve inches; I couldn't carry more than thirty small records in the plastic bag I scrounged from the bodega. And I couldn't come back later -- the garbage man was thundering up the road even as I stood gaping at all the stacked vinyl, someone's collection, some life.

And then it struck me. This was too huge a thing to throw out because you were purging or because you were clearing out room for your new records. Some of these were old, worn; they had been stored for some time. Not in a basement, they weren't all ruined; they had been in a living room. They had lined the walls of an apartment, taken up a large space in someone's life -- which meant that their owner, their collector, was most likely dead.

After that, my hands were covered in the dust of a dead person's records -- which I wanted to string together or melt in the oven or make invitations out of for some small party. It felt so sad, the garbage man approaching, the records shining in the sun, the leaves in large piles all along the curb.

A favorite used to claim (do you still?) that this part of the year always brought something awful. She called it her "autumnal crisis" -- which is one of the prettiest phrases for awful incidents anyone every coined. It was a bitter thing said with "that's is how it goes" assuredness. A resignation although not entirely a retreat.

So in the midst of this time, this time of rotting and preparation for hibernation (cleansing, clearing away, paring down, hurt) I just wanted to say:

I got some of your records out of the trash this morning. And the rest made a gorgeous crash when they tumbled into the back of the garbage truck.