Old Vinyl

He wore his age on his face, that is, he had deep grooves in his face, and I often wondered whether I might hear the voice of all who he had met in the undulations when a record needle were run inside the grooves. My curiosity was even more piqued by his failure to voice or narrate his life, by his strict conservation of words . He wore a long white beard, the kind that reminded you of a Shel Silverstein sketch, loose and wild, jagged and long.

He wore a fisherman's beanie and a stretched shirt hung loosely on his bones, a pair of jeans and a pair of canvas high tops tied loose.

I worked at a lonely record store, sandwiched between a truck broker and a temp agency. On the outside, it was clean though the young hipsters that would come around would leave their spent cigarette butts on the ground in front of the record store where I would hang promotional posters advertising new releases on vinyl. Yes, we were that kind of store, the kind that bought and sold mainly records although there was a section in the back, a cd rack were sold the latest releases as well as the occasional used cd which came through the door. Behind the checkout counter right by the exit, a lone record player sat that had been connected to large speakers interspersed throughout the store.

The record player is my favorite part of the shop, and, particularly, the sound of the placement of the needle on the start of the record, the hiss and pop before the sounds of guitars or drums or keyboards or a voice, or some combination of those instruments. Life didn't begin in the record store until that

beginning hiss, like the creation of light from darkness, like the separation of land from the seas. The sound of silence in the record store was a time of anticipation, when customers and employees alike waited, held their breath until that sweet music flowed through the speaker.

And when the music played, a terrain of sound fell in and around the store.