Settlement and Restoration

 The past week has had its challenges, but it also has been more satisfying.  Barbara has rented the vacant room in the house now, so she is back under the same roof.  It is actually quite refreshing to have her back in the house, as we are close friends and it gives a dimension of normalcy to what has been an otherwise upside-down several months.  As Barbara gets settled, new routines have been established, as well as bringing back some old ones that benefitted both of us in the past.  It has been wonderful, for instance, to not have to commute on that cursed #21 bus to work every morning.  I still have to take the bus home in the afternoon, but that is much more manageable.  It also means being able to sleep in a half hour later than I used to.  Some other restorative measures have happened as well that in reality have made me feel a little more whole again, so I will get into those now.

My music collection, as many of you who have been following me a long time know, is a very integral part of who I am.  I have collected vintage big band recordings for the better now of 43 years, and for a time I amassed what was perhaps the largest collection I could have dreamed of.  However, with the sudden move last October, I lost a considerable amount of my collection although I did maintain my more important LP sets, which are safe in a storage unit in Martinsburg at this point. However, due to the shock of losing so much, I haven't paid much attention to my music interest over the past few months, as it was a devastating loss to not have a huge majority of the impressive collection it had taken me the better of 30 years to accumulate.  However, thanks to new 21st century technology, I have discovered a new format that allows me to recoup a lot of the old collection in a compact form - the flash drive.  A couple of days ago, I received in the mail a small flash drive containing over 4800 recordings covering a 40-year period between 1900-1940, and much of it was material I had once had in my massive CD collection.  I am able to carry what once was half my library in the palm of my hand, so that was a revolutionary thing.  I have four more of those coming the next week which will add some vintage radio broadcasts (including "Spotlight Bands," "GI Jive," and "One-Night Stand") as well as complete libraries of both Harry James and Guy Lombardo.  I also managed to obtain at a good price two Time-Life CD collections - one is the vintage "Big Bands" series that had originally been released in the early 1980s (I had the Glenn Miller volume on LP back then) and the other is a large collection called "Your Hit Parade" which covers essentially every significant song between the years 1940 and the early 1960s.  Along with the LPs I have in storage (including the two HUGE Franklin Mint sets I was able to salvage), I have a good start to rebuilding what was once an impressive music collection.  I think this time though I will focus on things I really want and not be as comprehensive, except on the drives maybe (I can create my own flash drives too of a lot of original stuff, as it is readily available on both YouTube and Internet Archive).  I may get a few more CDs of things I want outside the genre (namely some classical collections like Igor Stravinsky, as well as some Gospel and liturgical recordings like those I once had), but we'll get to that later.   This new incarnation of my music collection - the third - will be smaller but more focused.  I don't think it is feasible to recover every recording I had before, as I invested many years and thousands of dollars getting those.  But, I can still have a collection I can enjoy for years to come. 

A couple of trips to storage in Martinsburg - one this Friday - have also been reuniting me with much of my personal papers and other things that are significant, and now that I have those back, the challenge is organization.  Due to my smaller living quarters, I do not have near the space I used to have so I have some logistical challenges to overcome.  But, I have managed before, so this is no different.  With Barbara being here now, it means a lot of new opportunities including being reunited with so much of our stuff which we have had to resort to storing in a facility almost 100 miles away.  

As I conclude this week's reflections, I am still in a state of transition, but I am also starting to see some positives as I begin to settle for the first time in a while.  That frankly feels good, and I am hoping to see more of that happen as time progresses.  Thank you for letting me share this week, and I will see you next time.