Mary Lucia: You can't put your arms around a memory
by Mary Lucia
October 18, 2016
You live in an apartment building and you go downstairs to use the laundry room. Normal day, maybe even a good day.
Trust and believe the last thing on earth you want to see is a handwritten note on the bulletin board, stating: "Whoever has the storage space #11, the water pipe overhead burst, possibly over a week ago. Check for damage."
With that one message, I knew my life had changed.
My lifetime collection of vinyl was now floating in sewage. I felt like I had taken a tire iron to the side of my head. I couldn't even bring myself to unlock the padlock and inspect the carnage right away.
I'm not Gandhi. I like my material things. I shed tears over a velvet 1930s fainting couch that my cat used as a toilet. In perhaps a very telling detail about myself, I have to get rid of whatever it is in my life that is ruined. There will be no trying to fix the problem, even if it means I will drag a 100-pound sofa down three flights of stairs by myself to get the object out of my sight. Rigor mortis has set in, the body is starting to stink, it must be buried.
Standing in a pool of dirty water looking at my mildewed record collection was more painful than viewing an open casket. Reality came sharply into focus: I had lost a huge part of my identity, plain and simple.
My first records bought with my own money as a kid, the inherited collection from older siblings and parents, gifts from friends, amazing thrift-store finds, expensive picture discs, imports, rare 12-inches, crappy music purchased solely for the album artwork … I was no longer the person who owned them and had moved them from apartment to apartment, city to city, for so many years. I know they were the butt of a joke among friends who dreaded helping me move each time. I may have moved around like a hobo, but I didn't travel light.
Like anyone who has lived through a fire, the thought of What do I do now? pounded in my brain. Starting over seemed out of the question and far too depressing. I did not have the will to recreate my youth.
Though this happened many years ago, I was still a grownup and had to make some impossible decisions. I called several record-store clerks in town with my sad list of inventory, choking back tears to hear their assessment of the monetary worth. To their credit, they were all very gentle with me and very understanding, even going out of their way to not make a big deal out of some of the particularly devastating losses. They were my grief counselors.
Next, I had to call the undertaker (my insurance company), realizing it a pointless endeavor to plead my case about the importance of owning a copy of "C*ck Sucker Blues." I listened to this square from the insurance company detachedly doing his job, and I accepted his woefully modest offer of compensation.
The double blow of all of this was that I was set to move once again and had just hauled all of my collection to the storage locker only a month before the tragedy. I gave my stereo to a friend. I locked the padlock to the vinyl crypt and I never opened it again. I left my entire drowned former life exactly as it was the day I found it submerged. I moved.
But I'm still unsure if I actually "moved on," as it still pains me to walk into record stores and see people flipping through crates, eagerly adding to their own identity as I did for so many years.
Not long after I started at The Current, I got an email from someone who had moved into my old apartment and had inherited my storage locker; the person was kindly — and I'm sure, confused as hell — asking me if I wanted to retrieve the contents. I couldn't even respond. I deleted the message, and with that, finally deleted a part of my history.
You can't put your arms around a memory.