Scheherazade – VIII — The Family Songbook

The destruction of my record collection in a religious purge, a childhood in a musical brothel, girls spinning rose and lavender moons, Bob Dylan's harmonica rampart, and a twelve-foot Hawaiian wave.

I truck my father’s Heathkit hi-tech, hi-fi tuner and power amp downstairs from the attic along with a plastic, bubble-domed, multi-stack-record-changing, cassette playing, AM/FM receiving, 8-track playing, primary colored, mood-detecting light show face plate marvel of do-it-all late seventies sound technology.

I also lug two ancient but durable speakers downstairs, their wires clattering and trailing twenty or thirty feet behind me like dragon tails as they wind down behind me in the tight attic stairway, through my mom’s library, around the upstairs stairwell banister, and into my bedroom where I draw their tails in like deep-sea anchor chain.

These twenty-pound speakers have suffered through thirty Maine attic winters and may no longer work, but they have seniority and deserve first crack at the stereo team.

It turns out the Old Mastiffs have life in them. They are throaty and hoarse. Their tired woofers have lost much of their growl, but they wail out in their fashion, can still w…