Tag: posthumous tasks

Cloister Commentary, Day 146: Fumes and Futility

Some mornings, I find these difficult to write.

Yesterday started out great. Nicole and I went on an early morning walk, and that’s always restorative. But I then proceeded to spend around two hours carefully watching an initially unmasked telecom tech install a new system for Mom, then about an hour emailing a benefits analyst with documentation about something involving my late father’s pension that’s moving like very molten lava, then around two hours on the phone with an excellent AT&T tech who after seeming like she was going to solve an ongoing posthumous problem for the first 3/4ths of the call found her own hands tied at the end.

Let me be clear: I’m happy to take on these tasks–it’s a part of life and death that we will all have to face, and since among my few actual skills is being able to communicate, I refuse to leave my talent buried. But after we realized the telecom tech didn’t leave a hard-copy program guide or program in the correct digital channel guide, and after watching the clock hands spin to no avail as I spent the afternoon with my smartphone, I was depleted. Music and books are my fuel, my food, my inspiration; in fact, records are like my holy texts–I listen to them as if they’re testimony about the truth of the world from all quarters. And I didn’t listen to a song or read a page (well, I squeezed in a two-page Liz Moore story just before bedtime) so I finished the day running on thin fumes. We’d hoped to watch Grand Hotel on Turner Movie Classics–that would have helped–but Mom’s new streaming package does not include that channel.

But guess what? The sun’s just come up. And I hear Lori McKenna‘s clear voice and resonant words in my headphones.

Streaming for Survivors:

This Book of the Musical Bible is–shhhh!–a peaceful, calming one.

Cloister Commentary, Day 120: Crates

Among the last things my dad made before he passed were two record crates. The guy loved to work with wood out in his shop, and lived to make things for friends and family. Despite my frequent recent attempts to whittle down my vinyl collection, it had returned like an enriching cancer and overflowed probably 100 or so outside its containment, so I’d asked him if he could knock a couple out for me. He carefully took the measurements of one of my existing crates, and a few months ago excitedly told me he’d finished them. This damned pandemic initially kept me from retrieving them, and I’d just loaded them into our trunk minutes before the accident that ended his life. Believe me, they were solidly and carefully built.

I’d put off sliding records into them until yesterday. Seems like an easy thing to have done quickly, but, see, I have a system: my stacks are fairly deep, so if I file new stuff into them, they can easily disappear before I’ve fixed them in my memory. Thus I have a separately alphabetized “new acquisitions” stack, the freshest additions to which I keep upstairs (along with regularly refreshed selections from the main stacks). Isn’t this fascinating? The problems had been twofold: one, the new acquisitions stack had grown larger than most folks’ total collection (if most folks had collections), and two, a symptom of my mourning has been I just haven’t felt like doing much other than what I have to. And I was just avoiding it.

Anyway, I decided to buck my ass up and make sure Dad’s work had not gone for naught, and chose to integrate the new with the old. Figured it’d take an hour or so; labored from about noon to 4:30, with a break for lunch–my back’s screaming at me right now. The record room is also “the kitten room” (I don’t have a choice), so Junior and Smokey were scrambling around discombobulated, especially since I was using their observation tower as a staging area. Of course, in the process, I came across items I’d almost forgotten about–Aura with Lee Scratch Perry, a live Wilson Pickett bootleg from the ’60s, two Slade albums–and somewhere a Johnny Bush album got swallowed up unalphabetically and resisted my strivings to locate it. But–’tis done, Dad, and your two sturdy ones are bearing the heaviest load. Thank you.

Streaming for Survivors:

Born in a favela, she just turned 83 and has a new single out, a musical middle finger extended at Bolsonaro whether she intended it or not. An international treasure. This is her most recent record.