This was a song, which he had chosen from 48 songs, 96 counting the unfamiliar grooves on the backsides, their obscure spiral paths. And here was the silver throat, the pleasure when the quarter--for a moment--chokes the mechanism, a little. The nickelodeon gags. E-8 is too maudlin. C-4 reminds him of a fat boy from 4H camp. B-8 is danceable, aggressively so. No matter--walk, run, or crawl--the end was always the same: breathless, the sighs and whispers, the crackling circumference as the black plate spins, and the unnerving comfort in its repetition. Even the scratches contain rhythm and melody.
But this song was something else: an oxidized coin, an old letter, a man out of time; and it evoked the smell of his grandmother's moldering basement, the dusty sachets in her dresser drawers. This music was music his father--less than half the son's age now--would have sung and hummed and whistled in that little box on the prairie. (The radio did its best to plump up the rooms.) Respiration, windows open, allowed imagination to circulate, the spices from the baking inside going outside; the flowers now allowed to stealthily cross the sill into the claustrophobia of home.
"Everything absorbed through the wide-eyed stupidity of the wantonly naive..."
"Be quiet, Charles." I pause. The whiskey gives me manners. "Please," I add, "Just sit back and be quiet. Listen to this song."
He is still fidgeting. He had a point to make and its stuck there. Between the pulls on his cigarette and the sips from his beer, he looks everywhere except at me. Its not that he's "angry", just consumed with his own thoughts. Meanwhile, I can hear my father humming; I am dancing back near fifty years. This is a crowded fair filled with bustling associations, sounds and visions. Cotton candy melts in the summer's oven (easily) while the starched bouffants of the lipstick girls survive the heat AND the Tilt-a-whirl. And I am lost there for a while, til I realize, conclusively, that Charles would not have followed me here even if he could have. The black spiral maze. The gasping at the end of it. A few seconds of anticipation...Then, the soft clatter as the next 45 falls, and then a hiss, the prelude to...
Dominique by The Singing Nun
But this song was something else: an oxidized coin, an old letter, a man out of time; and it evoked the smell of his grandmother's moldering basement, the dusty sachets in her dresser drawers. This music was music his father--less than half the son's age now--would have sung and hummed and whistled in that little box on the prairie. (The radio did its best to plump up the rooms.) Respiration, windows open, allowed imagination to circulate, the spices from the baking inside going outside; the flowers now allowed to stealthily cross the sill into the claustrophobia of home.
"Everything absorbed through the wide-eyed stupidity of the wantonly naive..."
"Be quiet, Charles." I pause. The whiskey gives me manners. "Please," I add, "Just sit back and be quiet. Listen to this song."
He is still fidgeting. He had a point to make and its stuck there. Between the pulls on his cigarette and the sips from his beer, he looks everywhere except at me. Its not that he's "angry", just consumed with his own thoughts. Meanwhile, I can hear my father humming; I am dancing back near fifty years. This is a crowded fair filled with bustling associations, sounds and visions. Cotton candy melts in the summer's oven (easily) while the starched bouffants of the lipstick girls survive the heat AND the Tilt-a-whirl. And I am lost there for a while, til I realize, conclusively, that Charles would not have followed me here even if he could have. The black spiral maze. The gasping at the end of it. A few seconds of anticipation...Then, the soft clatter as the next 45 falls, and then a hiss, the prelude to...
Dominique by The Singing Nun
No comments:
Post a Comment