Sometimes, around the dim hours of two or three in the morning, I awake out of sleep. Though I can hear my husband, fast asleep, breathing rhythmically beside me, for unknown reasons, I can’t get back to sleep. My mind starts thinking beleaguered thoughts, despite counting sheep in my head. Or I might hear a noise outside that distracts me enough that my eyes fly open, and then, heaven help me, whatever I do, I try not to look at the ceiling. 

I try not to look at the ceiling because, in the middle of the night, the place above our bed murkily glows in certain spots with a very subdued, almost cave-like light. This light emanates from my husband’s shining new phonograph stereo, which he bought a year or so ago, and set up like a mini helm of the Starship Enterprise,  complete with captain’s chair, on his half of our room. He assembled this distinctive space, this non-basement ‘man-cave,’ with a satisfaction on his face approaching grim smugness. The smugness, which I’m about to explain, was sprinkled over with a distinct flavor of rebellious inflection both in his words and his actions. I understood his feelings completely, and stood aloof, in a separate part of the house, to give him space to create. I had my reasons. They were not good. 

Sadly, I must report, years ago, when LPs went the way of all the earth (following in the obsolete wake of the black, plastic-clad 8-tracks and their accompanying players), I covertly gave our old records collection we’d both garnered over the years (including my husband’s LPs he’d had since high school—sharp intake of breath!), to the local donation store. 

First, diabolically (yes, this is confession, here), I “moved” the LPs to our cavernous storage room in the basement. There are quotations on “moved,” because that’s the story I told my husband when he asked where they’d gone: I had just innocently “moved” them. In this first act, I told myself that my intention wasn’t to get rid of them, but to just ‘get them out of the way.’ But in the depths of my heart, I knew that if he hadn’t asked about them, after sufficient time had passed, then I had other plans for them, darker and more sinister.

Akin to a morgue, once something goes into the vault of our storage room, it doesn’t often come back out, except in an unwieldy, shiny-black, heavy-duty garbage bag that says to those looking: “Nothing to see here, just a lone, innocent garbage bag, please look away.” The bag gets taken noiselessly up the stairs from the basement, out the back door, and put into the trunk of the car and driven away, never to be seen again. This description matches exactly to what happened to all our old LPs. 

Honestly, I felt real heart-searching and regret while handling each naked LP one last time, admiring their colors, and groves, recalling the memories their songs had evoked over the years. Nevertheless, I slipped the cardboard sleeves over Blondie, Oingo Boingo, B52s, ELO, Bruce Springsteen and even my husband’s favorite—The Specials—along with large stacks of others, whose names I will not mention. Placing them into a black garbage bag, I took them all away. As I drove to the place where they would disappear out of our lives forever, I mourned them privately (being the only person who knew they would no longer be with us) though my troubled feelings were less of grief or loss than worry over possible repercussions if my deed was found out. This was not the first time I had committed such an act: over the years, numbers of our children’s worn-out toys, and other motley items, once beloved but no longer used, were dispatched in this same systematic underhanded way. 

To assuage my guilt, I found justification for my heinous actions in the fact that my husband had been buying all the same record titles in the exciting, newer CD format, and hadn’t listened to his records for a long time. Unused things seem to multiply in a house, like mice left unchecked. This fact rationally cannot be denied. But giving away a loved one’s old music LPs does not fall under the category of rational, at least not to them. It can’t be denied that I intentionally did not discuss this with my unsuspecting husband, because I knew that sentiment trumps rationality, every time. But our burgeoning storage room needed to be Spring cleaned and being struck by an overwhelming existential desire to not be burdened by things, and to purge all excess out of our house, I succumbed. Plus, those records seemed to call out to me to give them to someone who’d listen to them. At least, that’s what I told myself they were saying, and I didn’t ask for counter arguments. 

Forgetting any pangs from my deed, in truth, was not difficult. I shoveled over remaining regrets with clean thoughts of remembrance, listening to their CD equivalents whenever guilt, or thoughts of retribution (should my deed ever become known), threatened to surface. Frankly, I felt relatively justified in letting them go, something akin to when I weed out gone-to-seed, once loved flowers in the garden, at the end of the summer. Why does getting rid of stuff feel so tempting (especially when it’s not my stuff), and yet so satisfying? 

To assuage my guilt I ruthlessly purged our entire storage room that same week, tossing out myriads of my own things, in the same black-plastic bag manner. The joyful feelings upon looking at our decluttered, now organized space, would have made Marie Kondo proud. But this was before that expert of purging organization became popular. No, although this sparked joy alright, it also gave me a sneaking sense of guilt, that I’d disposed of a body of something I had no right to. The fact is, I had no excuse for getting rid of my husband’s LPs without consulting him first. It was despicable, I now admit, doing this deed on my own, without saying a word to him about it before, nor telling him afterward what I had done. 

What my husband said about all of this, when he eventually found out (which found-out he must—sigh!), upon going to our storage room to look for his records, around a year or so later, I would like to pass over with respectful silence… 

…However, silence was not the actual outcome. No. Though he did not yell, suffice it to say, my husband clearly expressed his grief over what I had done. Happily, after a period of his mourning over the loss of the LPs, life got back to pretty much normal in our record-less household. 

And this is why, decades later, after LPs have made their comeback, I often now lie awake in the middle of the night and try not to look up and watch our ceiling glow. That ethereal light, cast from the many glowing orbs, panels, knobs, sliders, and other instruments needed to power-up an impressive array of new record-playing stereophonic paraphernalia glows conspicuously above me. In the half-light, next to all of this, quietly stands two tall heavy-laden record racks, distinct and immovable in the gray darkness, bulging with LPs which my husband has meticulously re-collected. Yes, LPs have returned to our bedroom to stay. I lie in bed, my husband sleeping peacefully next to me, a contented smile on his face as he dreams, which I can see, thanks to the hard-to-ignore glow. 

All of this is silly, isn’t it? Lying awake all because long-ago I donated my husband’s old, no-longer used records, because he wouldn’t do so. Things can be silly: they don’t feel, they’re not alive, though they can spark a pleasure of nostalgia, just knowing somewhere in the house, they’re ready to be looked over, when one wants to walk down memory’s lane and remember where we were back when we bought them, or the events we went to which the records invoke. Yes, there is pleasure still in the music. But that can be had without the bulk of records piling up or the effort of placing a LP on a turntable, and hearing the static clicks, pops and whirs as it goes round and round. How are things that we value susceptible to fads and ads, to the drive of consumerism and the constant pressure to accumulate more of what we don’t need, or add to what we already have? LPs have resurfaced with the new spin. Proponents say that they are organically purer, with a new vibe of authenticity, compared to digital music, which is so easy to acquire, and takes only digital space in an unseen cloud. 

Several years before LPs came back with a vengeance, my husband got a hankering to relive old concerts, and since then, so many of our vacations have been taken around where the Specials have been playing their come-back concerts all over the planet. There’s a drawer stuffed to the breaking point with concert T-shirts that I dare not touch. Sadly, Terry Hall, the Specials amazing lead singer has recently passed away. 

My husband sits in his captain’s chair and listens to music from our youth fill our house, but not excessively so. This essay is about getting rid of stuff, and why we do and don’t want to, and why it’s so hard and cathartic and satisfying and sometimes guilt-laden and sometimes needed to do, not about the worth of the music on the LPs or the memory music sparks in our minds. 

Or maybe that’s exactly what it’s about: our mind and its need to grasp things close to us, both alive and material. To hold on as things age, become obsolete, and are gone. Our gone. I’m not sure but it feels like this is approaching closer to what my mind grapples with, in the semi-darkness of our LP laden room. There are grooves in the LPs and grooves in our faces and grooves in our bed where we’ve lain next to each other as the years go by. The sound of the music continues, no matter how it’s played, either on a phonograph or in the dreams of our minds from all the experiences and time and things and loves that have been accumulated, kept or discarded, over the decades of years we’ve been together. There are things I hope will never be discarded or forgotten, though I know, someday they must be, even though I will not know just when. 

What I do know is that it's been a while since all this came out, and LPs returned to our home to stay, or at least until my husband is ready to let them go on his own. Since then, my guilt now only comes back when I wake up and remember just why our ceiling is glowing. But how does this all explain my continuing to stay awake, thinking of the LPs, when my original remorse has finally gone the way so many possessions have gone, to that great stockpile of obsolete stuff that the decades have discarded? Especially when I didn’t junk our records in a landfill but responsibly sent them away for other LP collectors to enjoy. 

Because the other day, I looked up at the ceiling of our home office and noticed, on the highest corner shelf, stacks, and stacks of music CDs, no longer listened to, all but forgotten. Since then, those diabolical, pure polycarbonate plastic discs have been calling my name. So that’s why I now lie awake in bed anew, staring at the ceiling, striving hard to suppress nagging thoughts of things accumulating in our basement (or elsewhere) and try to go back to sleep by counting sheep, not records—nor CDs—heaven-help-me! —going round and round in my beleaguered (but not-too-eager to be a totally uncluttered) brain.