Journal of a Sabbatical

January 1, 1999

vinyl

Fuddy duddies that we are, we spent New Year's Eve cooking a simple (but really good) meal and reading aloud to each other from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Nancy fell asleep long before midnight. Thoreau's diatribes about the Sabbath and about what makes good writing have that effect on her I guess :-)

A leisurely and festive breakfast with lots of organic French roast coffee (in SFOR coffee mugs of course) to the sounds of the Oyster Band and the Bobs put me in a mood to hear Coltrane for some reason. Nancy's been bugging me to see if my turntable still works. I haven't used it in so long I forget why I stopped using it. Was it because there was something wrong with it or because I made some emotional commitment to CDs?

The Coltrane album I wanted to hear, I possess only on vinyl. I never got around to replacing all the vinyl with CDs in one fell swoop as I'd vaguely intended. How I've lived this long without replacing all the Coltrane I'll never know.

I replaced both the Yo Yo Ma and the Pablo Cassals recordings of the Bach cello suites the instant they came out on CD. Not surprisingly, as I once made a list of reasons to go on living, which had the Bach cello suites on it along with cats, baseball, and espresso.

Now that it's 1999, Nancy expresses a sense of urgency. She doesn't want to go into the next millennium unaccompanied by her LPs. Her record player type device (what do you call it? I've forgotten - it's not a turntable component of system - it is a complete system that only plays vinyl) ceased to function long ago. We had hopes that maybe she could play her LPs on my turntable.

I located the Coltrane Live in Japan album, put it on the turntable, pressed all the right buttons, pressed the lever to lift the tone arm and start the table turning. Nothing! It no move. I tugged on all the wires, disconnected and reconnected everything, in the process locating the missing June Tabor and the Oyster Band Freedom and Rain CD I was looking for last week (it slid down behind the cabinet). Still nothing.

All Egans are programmed to fix things. In fact to fix them immediately. I tried various things and got impatient and that creepy crawly feeling started in my hands and arms. The one I get when I feel crowded and don't have room to maneuver or feel pressured and start making dumb mistakes. The harder I tried to fix this turntable, the more havoc I wreaked on my living room and the tenser and clumsier I got. Finally, Nancy switched into therapist mode and got me to give up on the turntable for now and go to the beach or retrace Thoreau's week on the Merrimack by car or something.

We settled on driving along the Merrimack to the beach at Plum Island. Large stretches of the river are frozen, but there were places with miniature icebergs floating in open water. The entire wintering Canada goose population of the greater Newburyport area was concentrated in open water in the river between the boat ramp and Joppa Flats. Nary a goose stuck its little head up in the marshes and hayfields on the island, but there was practically a rush hour traffic jam on the river.

With the temperature in the low teens, we couldn't stay outside long without long underwear, which we hadn't brought, so we adjourned to Fowle's for coffee and mushroom soup. We sat at the counter and read aloud from Thoreau between mouthfuls, and planned our pilgrimage to New Bedford this weekend for the Moby Dick Marathon.