I'd Rather Be Knitting

We are rather Luddite-ish in our electronic audio choices. The iPods tend to get used for cleaning sessions and car entertainment and hence are filled with songs you can sing, or at least hum, along to. We still have a huge collection of vinyl (although we are turntable-less and have been for longer than I'm going to admit here). We were late to the CD parade. This last is what I've been struggling with the past couple of days.

You see, the CDs sort of snuck in. They slipped through the door in ones and twos. Sidled into the occasional Amazon box. Smuggled themselves into Borders bags in dribs and drabs.

As they entered so slowly, storage options were not much of an issue; a stack here, a pile there, part of a bookshelf dedicated another where. This trickle, however, continued. The stacks and piles grew deeper and the parts of shelves more numerous. We indulged now and then in CD storage, but never often enough to bring any sort of unity or coherence. In a word, nothing matched, nor was it ever adequate.

Eventually,we succumbed to the lure of a good, basic music system. Not an audiophile's dream. Not a needs-its-own-room, mega-woofer, spend the children's entire inheritance, home-theater. We're technophobes living in a condo, after all. Something better, however, than the one-box, tiny-speakered, shelf systems we had been going on with.

Now the trickle grew to a fairly steady stream, fueled in part by the closing of Tower Records here in Chicago. We acknowledged that we had to formalize the storage for our now-burgeoning (for us) collection. In what I can only, in retrospect, call massive denial, we bought a couple of low shelves that could double as speaker stands. They weren't enough, so we reverted to our rather lackadaisical ways. CDs landed in baskets, piled on the dining room credenza.

Last week, in growing exasperation and in an attempt at dealing with reality, I decided I had had it and ordered up a shelf that would hold what we had accumulated and still leave room for expansion. I have no spatial sense, so it was bigger than I expected, and the wall that I thought was five feet wide is four. I have reconfigured my dining room three different ways just since yesterday. I still haven't reclaimed it. On the plus side, there is not a single dust hippo, and the baseboards haven't been this clean since we refinished the floors.

If you remember the pantry incident, you already know the rest of this story. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."*

*George Santayana, 1863 - 1952.