My seven year old granddaughter is spending a few weeks of her summer vacation with us. She likes to make brownies and cupcakes as I suppose most little girls her age do. I suppose to know this and don’t really know this because when my own little girl was seven I was scarcely home long enough to get the grass cut let alone take time to bond with her. So since I am not beholden to any employer, and since I screwed up once and have no intention of screwing up again......I have priority number one......granddaughter. She loves the local public pool and running errands and going to the library. She surprises me by how well she can read and she’s really interested in learning to play a g chord on the guitar.
So our guest bedroom is basically dedicated to her play things except for the vintage turntable up on the dresser which caught her eye. I thought I was good at explaining things until I tried to explain what vinyl records were and how a needle could produce music. I took her over to my record bin and started flipping through albums. We traversed the Beatles, the Doors, Dylan, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Charlie Daniels, Marshall Tucker, Canned Heat, Miles Davis, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, LED Zeppelin, The Who, ...... she was fascinated by the artwork, the smell of vinyl and the physical act of placing a record on the turntable and dropping the needle.
Later I got to thinking about a quote I hadn’t thought about in a long time. “The Past is Never Dead. It’s not even Past.” William Faulkner.
Now there are certainly many many ways we can think about this but I thought about how the past directly influences the present. All those bands and musicians I listened to in the late sixties when I was not much older than my grand baby. And in the seventies I fed at the vinyl trough. I thought it was all in the past but is there ever really ....the past?
I ran across this ten minute article searching the Faulkner quote. It’s about MLK and racial equality and the recent Presidential election but it’s mostly about how the past is never dead. There is a counter balance between hope and despair. The belief that we are making improvements but the despair that it is taking a mighty long time. I think it’s worth ten minutes of your time to give it a quick read. It took me no more than ten minutes to share what a long play album was with my grand kid. I’m pretty sure it was worth every second.
https://medium.com/@sojourner1826/th...t-9b6c7642e60b