Vintage

Jane has a mechanical mind. That’s not right. Her mind is Yankee. She can fix it. My mind says first read the manual . Jane’s mind says reach for it, it won’t bite. Jane’s mind has no fear or little of it; my mind sweats anxiety. In The Longest Day, I believe, Cornelius Ryan (I hope I have his name right) writes of the Allied infantrymen coming up against natural hedgehogs (defensive systems)in the French fields, or wildy overgrown growth made thickly of briar and bushes, impenetrable and a perfect place for the Nazis to install their machine guns and snipers. What to do? An American serviceman welded a  blade-cutting contraption of his own device to the front of a tractor, perhaps a tank, that simple chewed up the hedges as if they were being roto-rooted. American ingenuity on the spot.

Similarly Jane is the hedgehog immolater here, and I am the scarecrow in the field, abandoned to phobic space, self-fearful of the inanimate world. And so Jane took my “new” vintage stereo system – collected over one month from eBay, consisting of an old Pioneer turntable from the 70s,80s or 90s combined with a vintage integrated amplifier from the same period (Harman Kardon), adding two new speakers which makes sense because the foam in old speakers can rot out, wired the system, jacked it in and made it playable. For awhile, I thought the turntable wasn’t working. So I jacked in a clock’s wire plug and it did run; the amp was getting power. I left it at that stage until Jane tells me offhandedly that she has the turntable playing. She simply futzed with it and figured out how it worked. I would have emulated Rodin’s “The Thinker” and still remained befuddled.That’s Jane; That’s Matt.

I now know when to step back and let Jane step forward, for is quite handy. I surrender in those areas I know I am befuddled. I am very good at strategizing but I leave the field tactics to Jane. I see the world panoramically, in vista-vision; my sensibllities are global, macro, not micro; I relish the overall picture, the big picture, and I feel inept in the alleyways behind the housing project. I see all this and that, as this and that; particulars are annoying to me unless they are particularly intriguing, worth my concern and interest. Jane is out of this paragraph now because she can account for herself. When I practiced as a therapist, I tried to get the central organizing dynamic of the client, the total gestalt, the clothesline strung out between the poles so that interventions or interpretations that I might give would be integrated by the client, be true to who he or she was — that they would adhere and belong to the self-image he had of himself. I was involved with the whole person, details came last, unless critical or consequential.

I puchased  Sennheiser ear phones. Jane can now listen to the violin records privately if she so chooses, although upstairs I enjoy the music on the vintage system as she goes about cooking, et al. She finds it pleasing and so do I. I feel there is an enjoyment in that the system is inherently imperfect, scratches, pops, static flares as opposed to the perfection of CDs. How we often buy profoundly into present day change concocted for us by the hidden persuaders, that old term  coined by Vance Packard in the 50s. We are subliminally betrayed by the empties we are surrounded by in this “culture.” The serendipitous surprise has been the quality of records that are at least 30 years old, often near mint or mint. Sometimes they are sealed (and what fun that is to break into something that has stood the test of time for decades, new and unused). When I go to remove the shrink wrap and handle the record itself and its sleeve, I can imperceptibly, for certain records, smell the must from aging, although the record plays beautifully and imperfectly!

I’ve purchased classical, rock and folk records off Ebay, sometimes in job lots, sometimes singularly. I thought back to the70s and 80s and ordered the Fifth Dimension, Judy Collins, Tracy Nelson, Simon and Garfunkel, remembrances of things past. Classically, for Jane, violinists — Stern, Kreisler, Heifetz, Sonnenberg; symphonic music by Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, Ravel. all making me think of the early college course I took in music appreciation in which the instructor shared his love for the music he played. In those days he had a turntable and a supply of records which he played. Imagine? And how wondrously tactile and very feeling, it seemed to my 18-year-old eyes, as he caressed the records with affection. Records have a precious appeal, it seems to me, for they are handled in a very specific way, cared for with diligence, and their album covers are an art genre all by themselves. Name a cd in which you can read the lyrics with ease. Records were always stored on their sides, never in heaps. I recall how the titles and numbers of the records were on the spine and how we would go to the Schwann catalog (Was that its name? So long ago) to look up all of Sinatra or Sibelius. In 1958 I had a summer job in S.J.Klein’s in Hempstead which my father got for me. I worked in the record department and the manager was a Sinatra fan and that’s what he played all day long. It is a decent memory of an age long ago in a faraway place in my mind.

It is all a big circle, is it not? We return to the magic of youth, but I believe that we were unaware of the magic at that time. We turn it into magic after we age, for it is a kind of tenderness we bring to our younger years as if we are imposing a kind of sweet order to the world which at that time was fraught with as much ancxety as we have today. To reinvigorate that which is vintage in my heart and soul, in my being, only serves as a way of being kind and gentle to the youth and the playthings, interests and concerns, I had so long, long ago. After all, at 70 I can cradle my life’s experience, at all the different ages.  Yes,  cradle it, for I might as well as no one else will ever have this soft and gracious chance.