Student Chic

My daughter was recently accepted into a program at a college out of town, so starting in September she'll be living away from home for the first time.  We've been scavenging through the house for stuff to get her set up.  Good way for me to purge and a great life lesson for her:  you build a place with odds and ends and replace them as you can afford to.  Some of the best times of my life were when I first left home and moved in with two friends.  We didn't have the proverbial "pot to piss in" but we put together an apartment from hand-me-downs and flea market and thrift store buys.  And of course we had the best in student chic -- milk crates.

Milk crates were the foundation of any good student apartment and all the dairies left them piled outside, ripe for the picking.  They were sturdy enough with a pillow on top to sit on, a key component in shelving units, but most important and above all else -- they were the perfect size to hold our record collections.  Yep, I'm talking vinyl.  (Until one day they weren't.  I think the dairies finally clued in as to why they were losing so many milk crates and started making them just that little bit too small to fit an album.)

I still have a couple in storage under my stairs.  I have no idea what condition the records are in.  I no longer own a turntable and they haven't been played in years.  All my music is digital now.  What used to take several milk crates to store, now barely touches the space I have on a device the size of a match book.  Nostalgia is reviving the turntable but I have no desire to go down that road.  I'm betting I wouldn't even like half the music stored in those crates.  (I mean, raise your hand if you owned Bim or even heard of him.)

I don't know what I'm going to do with the records when I get to purging under the stairs.  They could stay there I suppose, but to what end?  I tried flogging them off at a garage sale years ago but the only ones that sold were the Beatles albums.  Felt bad about selling those for a long time but not anymore.  Sometimes you have to let things go.  I have all of the Beatles albums in my ITunes library now anyway and the music still brings back the time to me, no matter the format.

On another note...The Beatles Rubber Soul was the first album I ever bought.  Even now, when I listen to the white album, I expect to hear a skip at the beginning of Back in the USSR because that's where my record skipped...music, music, music skip "from Miami Beach" --  there was no "Flew in from" on my album.  That I still hear it that way all these years later is a testament to the power of music and memory.