you are the things you don't throw away.
There are supposed to be six suites for unaccompanied cello inside this sleeve. The second and fifth movements are missing, leaving only two-thirds of a three-LP set. A sliver of scotch tape that once kept the torn protective material from falling apart has fused with what it failed to save. Now it sticks out like the stub of an amputated finger. Pointing. Accusing.
Before this album was mine, it belonged to my grandfather. In his eighty-nine years he was a failed inventor, a gifted writer and photographer, an unfaithful husband, a human rights advocate, and an emotionally absent father. He was a wonderful playmate to me when I was a child. Then I lost my baby teeth and became just another living thing that failed to live up to his ever-shifting expectations.
He was a poor custodian of his possessions. Almost everything I inherited carries the scars of his neglect. It took me hours to clean and organize his vinyl collection. Most of the grooves were gummed up with dust and grime.
We never really talked about music. We didn't talk about anything at all in the last five years of his life. He walled himself off from the world. His only confidante was a con artist. He told people she was his niece. She bled him for as much money as she could and disappeared before he worked out who she really was.
When I sat down and let my eyes scan the surviving records that belonged to a man I thought I shared nothing but a name with, I was expecting to find a bunch of easy listening and bland pop. What I got instead was great jazz. Bill Evans. Charles Mingus. Count Basie. Billie Holiday. Sarah Vaughan. Lester Young. Duke Ellington. Miles Davis. Music I'd come to love with no guidance or encouragement from him.
After all my failed attempts at breaking through that wall, I'd found our common ground. Something we could dig into without the conversation degenerating into another sermon about how I wasn't the grandson he'd hoped for. Something we could agree on.
It was a conversation we would never get to have. Because he was ashes in an urn.
I learned more about him after he was inorganic and inert than I ever knew when he was whole. His photographs offered an imperfect portal into another life he kept close to the vest. His private papers revealed an intelligence and depth of feeling he never shared with me.
His home-recorded cassettes are a series of doors I haven't walked through yet. I played part of one tape years ago. I had to stop when I heard him begging a stranger to stay on the line. They hung up on him after realizing they had the wrong number.
There were a few classical records mixed in with the jazz. The day I sat down to listen to the Bach for the first time, I turned to a turntable that was a glorified toy. Its plastic stylus was the only one willing to exhume the melodies buried beneath the scratches set deep in all that slick spinning skin.
I tried to imagine my grandfather. I saw him sitting in his disaster of an apartment. An old man alone with his music and whatever memories he hadn't lost or stashed somewhere they couldn't be called back from. Was he lonely? Or was he happy to be alone? What did he dream about when sleep wrapped its arms around his frail frame? Did he die with poetry still trapped behind his chapped lips?
The picture I painted gave me no good answers. But the wounded wail of those cello suites felt like an accidental microcosm of his life. Inside that small pocket of time, I felt something like understanding pass between us, in a place where words carried no weight.
The last image I settled on was of him smiling. Eyes closed. Lost in the music. And for as long as the thought was alive in my mind, he was too.