The Only Thing Different

Sitting on your heels, you'd plant yourself on the worn wooden living room floor--sometimes with your shoes still on, sometimes in your white crew socks--in front of your record player. Your fine dark brown hair would fall down across your forehead as you worked at your task, your glasses slipping down your prominent nose, the one you passed down to me. Your shoulders were a bit hunched as you assessed your loot. Records stacked or sitting up in boxes surrounded you. You sometimes sorted them by artist, but often you just seemed to be on a roll with listening to your favorites or locating all of the different versions of the same song. How can I forget old Rolling Stones followed by the later Patsy Cline? I wonder which version of "I Forget to Remember to Forget" you were searching for, now that I know you loved that tune as a young man.

Your reel-to-reel was next to you sometimes too--when you were searching for a memory that must have popped up in a dream or in some passing thought that startled you into pulling out those square boxes, the discs inside holding hours of notes and voices, some of them homemade. Maybe some of them are the recordings you forced your sisters into, orchestrating from the status of eldest brother, playing a role you weren't sure of in most other settings. Now we know you were also in the Radio Club in high school. I wonder who you talked to the most about music and if you fell in love to certain songs. When I think about all of the questions I have stored up, it seems even less fair that I can't ask them.

The living room floor is refinished and a framed photo of you sits on top of the record player. We still think of you there and it seems impossible that four years have passed without your laughter warming up a room and without your deep voice singing along to your favorite music. Four years is too long to be without you so we try to take you everywhere we go. Music seems to be the best place to find you.

-ATP