Suburban Island: Music

Back at home this past weekend after my trip to St. Louis, I embarked on a project of mammoth proportions. The task was inspired by my 20 year-old daughter’s statement that she was going to organize her CDs. This has been one of those overwhelming tasks that has been cluttering up my personal To Do list for years now as well. How was she going to do it? I was intrigued.

She presented the concept to me cautiously – assuming I would find her solution a bit shocking. She knows her mother pretty well. I get distressed by something as simple as people putting soda cans on magazines in our house – kids, mama don’t like no rings on her usually yet-to-be-read magazines, covers of books that get bent from careless handling also disturb me, as do DVDs not in their cases on top of dressers and bookcase shelves.

She explained to me that she was taking all her CDs out of those plastic cases and putting them in nice compact CD storage binders. She waited for my reaction but I was thinking. Thinking a revolutionary thought… Could I do this too? It was a little daring. A little cutting edge. And it required that I let go of my compulsion to retain all media as close to their original state as possible. Could I toss away my tradition stance towards media and their containers? Could I actually bring myself to take all the CDs in the house and put them into a couple nice compact CD cases? Could I really throw away all those stacks of plastic cases without feeling the compulsion to fish them out of the trash and reassemble them in a fit of CD plastic case remorse?

Yes. I could. I had to. It was them or continued crystalline chaos – the shiny plastic cases had to go.

A year ago, I would have been resistant to this idea. I would have wanted to retain these disks in their original state come hell or high water. However, enough is enough. I had too many CDs floating around this house of ours – living room, bedrooms, office, family room, and cars. They turned up everywhere. There was no central repository of the CD in my household and there was not enough consecutive space to order them logically even if we could gather them all together. Looking for a particular CD was often just not worth the bother.

Worse than their uncontrolled proliferation was the fact that the cases and CDs sometimes parted ways never to join up again. I have uploaded many of my CDs to iTunes but there were many more that still remained adrift in our home – just longing to be played and yet denied the simple dignity of residence on my iTunes library. Now they will have hope again.

As will I.

By the end of the weekend it was done. My husband was a little surprised but happy too that we finally had created order out of chaos somewhere within our home.

Let the music play. Now that I can find it.