"ON THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED:
Published in the Johnson County (Ind.) Daily Journal, July 8, 1998 ©
Though newly paved, the two-lane state road is an
old, familiar one, winding along as it always has from my old hometown to the county seat. I have been driving it a lot lately as I finish
up the business an only child must when his mother dies.
Halfway along, I drive down a hill into a small, equally familiar
town the phrase "a wide place in the road" was created for, the road only widening out long enough to allow parking along the few
blocks of the main drag.
On previous drive-throughs this year, I have noticed something unfamiliar
here, a store on one corner that labeled itself "Records." Before, my trips have run too late for the store to be open, but today I am early
enough.
A sturdy, white-haired man leans against the doorway like, well, a retired
bricklayer. So I pull off to my widened side and stop.
The leaning man shuffles slightly aside to let me in, with only a nod of
welcome. Inside, the front room of the store seems to be an unregistered museum of singing cowboys, with old posters promoting concerts by Roy
Rogers, Gene Autry, Rex Allen and others of that breed of performers who have pretty much blown out of the music scene like tumbling tumbleweeds.
"The store is through that door," he advises from his guardpost, motioning
toward the door along the back wall.
I push through the door into a dimly lit storeroom filled with shelves of
record albums, an awe-inspiring delight for anybody who believes that vinyl is the medium God intended for the recording of music. So I am
delighted, awfully.
Yet I am also confused. There are no signs, no marked dividers, no road maps
to finding anything in particular in this storehouse of musical yesteryears. Only a stack of cardboard record cases along the wall just inside
the door has any markings: "Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, The Beatles . . . "
I ask the man from the doorway, who has leisurely followed me as far as the
inner door, about the organization of the records before me. He only shakes his head and gives me a cordial non-answer.
"I don't really sell to people who walk in," he notifies me. "I sell mostly
over the Internet, to Europeans. Europeans'll pay $50 to $100 for something Americans won't pay more than $5 for."
"Oh," I respond, suddenly feeling like a stranger in a very strange land,
"I see."
"Lookin' for anything in particular?" my stolid host then asks.
I improvise the name of a Beatles single and another by John Denver. That sets
the store owner to looking through the labeled cardboard boxes near the door.
After only a moment, he pulls out a mint copy of "Yesterday" by the Beatles and
lays it on top of the boxes. "I wouldn't have John Denver down here," he then notes. "Hasn't been dead long enough."
"These aren't for sale to anybody," he adds, pointing to the only organized
treasures in this trove of dim recordings. "This is my personal collection."
He lets the Beatles 45 lie there for a while, like a cookie jar on an unreachable
shelf, before returning it to its case. "I've got another 18,000 records upstairs," he says, a finger toward the high ceiling.
As we saunter back through the front showroom and then the outside door, I ask
how he came to start this store where you can't actually walk in and buy anything. "I'm a retired bricklayer," he tells me, "and I found out that
retirement is one of those "honey-do" deals. You know, "Honey, do this; Honey, do that.'
"So I decided to do something I wanted to do."
And that, as Forrest Gump would say, is all he has to say about that. A sign in the window
lists the store's hours, six days a week.
"You can probably find those records you want at a yard sale someplace," he then counsels
me, "for 50 cents or a quarter."
I thank the store owner, who still hasn't told me his name -- or his Internet address when
I asked for it -- as I start back across the widest place in this old road. Later, I will check the Internet and find that his first name probably is Perry.
As I pull away, I glance one last time at the doorway and Probably Perry has gone back to
leaning, standing guard there, a monument to those who still believe in yesterdays.
By the time I am climbing the hill, where the road narrows down again to its natural width,
I acknowledge that I believe, too. That is why I won't reveal the exact location of the little record shop that doesn't accommodate shoppers -- and because it
would only invite more nuisances like me and maybe even thieves.
I drive on to the county seat where my mother spent her last days in a nursing home. A few
days later, among her vinyl LPs, I find a Beatles album with "Yesterday" on it. I smile, momentarily thinking I have beaten Probably Perry at his game. But I
haven't, not really. His troubles still seem so much farther away than my own.
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Copyright 1998 by Jerry Miller ©
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