Unforgettable

January 6, 2005

There are albums that wrap themselves into your life. You hear them, and they etch your consciousness with their notes and refrains. I won't presume to say that they give different moments in life meaning, but they can provide the spirit, and without them a great deal of emotional complexity would be absent from our biographies.

I look at the play of light vaguely illuminating the chunky pixellated black in the image above and remember being warmed by the plaintive tones of Dinah Washington's album of old standards. Sitting in a low-slung arm chair watching the reflected light swim across the wavy surface of the spinning LP I listened to This Bitter Earth:

And if my life is like the dust

that hides the glow of a rose,

what good am I?

Heaven only knows.

. . . and I thought that Dinah's voice was a comfort preserved. It was meant for me to find for a $1.00 at the local thrift store so that I could experience it while the January moon came out over the magnolia leaves.