The ding of my typewriter bell

Thinking about living on Truslow Road, 2006. I'd ordered my boyfriend a 6 CD-set of folk songs from the Smithsonian Institute, which has archived recordings of every folk-movement you can imagine, and we were listening to it on our new record player, in our living room that had no television and furniture that we boasted was all second-hand.  We didn't have the internet. Or a laptop, yet.  I didn't even have a car.  Just rode a six dollar vintage bike everywhere, that I'd gotten at an auction in the middle of farmfields outside town.

It's because I am listening to Spotify, this nostalgia, to an Al Jolson and Benny Goodman playlist because Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris made me all romancy and wanting for the twinge of myth to sit in my hair.  But counter to the beauty of that film, the nuances of yesteryear and the wanting, the pure, lovely human wanting that it pigeons...what I am doing right now by thinking back is instead reveling in how satisfied I currently am.

I would love to hear some big band on a nice static sounding turntable, have no doubt.  I would love the tinkle sound background murmur of cocktail drinkers and laughter.  But I am equally thankful that my other option--internet streaming Spotify--brings a similar magic to my life.  The aesthetic is different.  For example, why I am willing to drive 25 minutes to Long Beach to buy medicinal herbs in bulk to make oils and teas and salves, instead of just settling for the already made stuff at the organic markets here in town.  There's an intuitiveness to that for me, the hands-on steps, the moment to moment allowing of the instinctive nature to lead the process.  In the same way I'd love to own a record player, breathe the dust of the paper album slip, feel the grease smudges on the cardboard while fingering the choices one by one.  Feel the easy way the vinyl latches on the spindle.  Hear the sound dust makes, settled between the grooves.  If I could, I would be typing this by twinkling lights on the grape arbor in my own backyard in this sweet small town.  That noise that just echoed...?  Permanence.  The ding of my typewriter bell.

But that means I'd miss the music right now, how it lightens my mood so that I have a small smile. The simple, practical beauty of writing right now, the discipline of using my craft, spending time with the words by just letting them out.  Hitting a button and instant audience.  The enticement of this.  Or the way the air from the open window on the skin of my forearm feels right now--dewy, cool, like the grass does at dawn--and too the way it smells just as sweet.

And that's the difference between now and then.  I struggled endlessly with being where I was, whatever that meant.  And much as I struggled with valuing the joy of the present, I too pitied and even righteously resisted change, and especially technology, which is what made me think tonight of back then on Truslow Road.  I was classically extreme, believed still as youth will that to be one thing entirely eliminated my capacity to also be something else.   Those folkway recordings--songs that were over fifty years old, on CD--were some of the only CDs, other than EPs released by our friends, that we listened to that year.  The funny irony, to be to snobbish even about CDs!  Everything was on album.  That to enjoy inspiration, to be moved by aesthetic or moved with a process, I thought it also meant I couldn't enjoy what was available through convenience.

Definitely not the click of enter on Spotify anyway.  I actually have an IPOD now!  Even if I'd been in Woody Allen's time travelling roaring twenties car and I came forward by just a few years and peaked my future myself, I NEVER would've believed that back then.  An IPOD would've meant losing my edge!  Ah, to value the integral overlaps of my own inner diversities.  This act of being still, present, to the all the parts of who I was and who I am.  It opens to movement and eases me naturally along.  This is delight, right now, in how I converge.