One of the more enjoyable aspects of cataloging every book and CD and DVD (and eventually LP album) that came out of my parents’ house is discovering some odd-ball treasure you would never have expected them to own. Some oddities in the collection are expected. I’ve already remarked elsewhere on how many books by and about George Orwell my father, Ron, had amassed; my mother, Ethel, out-did him in volumes devoted to the needlework arts. (What she was doing collecting hardback tomes about counted cross-stitch Christmas ornaments, long after her fingers began to lose their dexterity, I cannot fathom.)
But this past week has been devoted to ploughing through the last two boxes of CDs. And what curiosity’s the harrow has turned up!
Item: Incredibly strange music. Two albums our friends at the Underground Martini Bunker would be proud to own: “The Exotic Sounds Of Arthur Lyman” and Morton Gould and his Orchestra’s 1956 “Jungle Drums.” I know, because I’m sure Timothy and I heard tracks like Drums of Hawaii (Lyman) and Hawaiian War Chant (Gould) during one of our regular Friday night sessions with the Retro Cocktail Hour. (Honestly, how do they get away with that show in Kansas?)
A typical Timothy gift: When I came home late from work, one dismal early-December night, he had an iced gin gimlet in his hand, the fire roaring in the James Bond fireplace (cat already in place), and the Cocktail Hour cued up and ready to play on my laptop.
Item: Railroadiana. “Daddy, What’s a Train” is a compendium of Songs Of Train Wrecks Rides & Hobos. (And it’s the third of who-knows-how-many recordings.) “Treasury of American Railroad Songs, Ballads and Folklore,” which includes such arcana as Greenlight on the Southern, Cajun Train and North Coast Daylight. And speaking of the Daylight, Greatest Hits of the Daylight (Vol 1) is 50-odd minutes of the “the most beautiful train in the world as it steams up hill and down dale, across the American West.”
When I was a tot, my dad had dozens of authentic steam train recordings on stereophonic long-playing albums. He could sit with a Grand Marnier after dinner for an hour or more, listening to the Reading Ramble, a steam train excursion recorded in November 1962, as attentively as he did Maurice Andre playing a Telemann trumpet concerto.
There was actually a lot of domestic humor value in this, because our Gordon setter dog, Windrocks’ Legendary Thane (Thane to his pals), would hear the mournful locomotive whistle from the other end of the house and come pelting full-tilt into the living room. Once skidded to a halt, he would cock his head, wiggle his expressive, tawny eyebrows, and — as the train crested its invisible hill — throw his head back and howl with the whistle as it blew far away across the dark land.