past present future

My daughter and her man have been haunting the antique shops and junque stores of their adopted city of Portland, Oregon, snapping up rusty, dusty objects and treating them as the Catholics do the relics of departed saints. A week or so ago they found an upright Victrola in working condition, an essential object of veneration for any serious devotee of antique music.

After a two-day trip to the Puget Sound region, they were able to wed this holy artifact with the thousand or so 78 r.p.m. phonograph discs my mother left behind when she departed this world a year ago today. The Victrola plays only 78's -- that's all there were in those days, and you have to wind it up with a crank on the side, and keep winding intermittently lest the thing wind down, transforming, let's say, Enrico Caruso from a bright tenor into a gurgling basso profundo. There's no electrical cord.

I got pictures of this combining of precious ingredients today via the internet, and I imagine they were up half the night listening to Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers, Ukelele Ike, Tony Parenti's Ragtimers (with Wild Bill Davison on cornet and the never-surpassed Baby Dodds on drums), and the flapperish warblings of Ruth Etting, Annette Hanshaw, and Ethel Waters.

It's wonderful to be young, in love, and possessed of enough discrimination and aesthetic sense to know the difference between real music and ambient noise, between life and death.