mariness

So there's a small meme going around about the first record/CD/music compilation you ever owned. Which got me to remembering the first – and for a long time, the only – record that I owned: "Sing With Grover." (At least, I think that was the title, or something similar – I can definitely say that the record had Grover on the cover and that Grover said "Sing!" so let's go with that.) I loved the record because on one of the tracks, I'm thinking track four, you could do a somersault right along with Grover. My mother hated this record because on one of the tracks you could do a somersault right along with Grover which she objected to primarily because I was (and am) terrible at somersaults and rather than following along with the song I usually ended up crashing into whatever was nearby, which was not usually beneficial to either me or whatever I crashed into, especially when this just happened, by complete accident, to be a small brother focused on trucks which would be irreversibly displaced by this. ("Over! Under! and Through!")

But the other reason that I loved the record was that it was mine, mine; I was the only person allowed to take it out of its little record place. It was the only record I was allowed to touch at all, as it happened – my father had (still has, now I think about it) an extensive collection of records that I was not allowed to touch on the reasonable basis that nobody wanted, say, the Unfinished Symphony to become still more unfinished, but I'd watch as he carefully drew the record out of the rack, then carefully out of its folder/case and equally carefully on the record player, and then, if I were very lucky, it would be silly songs that we could sing to (he had a surprisingly large collection of Woody Guthrie songs, and when you are six, that counts as silly songs we could sing to) and if I were just a little less lucky, it would be nice booming Beethoven that I could read my books to.

The Grover record was handled about the same way: if I had been good (which was not, alas, a very frequent occurrence) I could go and ask permission to play it. Then, one parent would turn on the record player on while I took out the record, being careful to do so exactly the way my father would, and I would very very carefully hand the record up to whichever grownup was at the record player machine (it was too high for me to use) and then – then – I was allowed to touch the button, and Grover and I would start singing. (This was another advantage of the Grover record – unlike Beethoven, Grover actually ASKED you to sing.) For a small moment – a very small moment – I controlled the music. I was a grownup.

The record made it safely to Italy, safely to the second apartment – and then, to my great distress, was broken by our mildly insane maid, an ex-nun who had escaped from the Communists and was now apparently spending her time breaking children's records. My bitterness towards the Communists – who also kidnapped various people in Italy and occasionally set off bombs but who were, in their defense, responsible for introducing me to a small Ukrainian friend whose parents had also escaped – remains to this day, since if they hadn't gone around bothering nuns and making them insane I would still have my Grover record. In a small aside this was actually the second religious worker turned insane by Communists that my family was connected to – the first was my thoroughly insane Aunt Helen, who chatted with various invisible Communists, who'd gone nuts after witnessing and narrowly escaping the Communist Revolution in China and the later Japanese invasion, but that's a separate story. The combination of Mary and Aunt Helen did, however, leave me with the firm conviction that if I were to ever become a nun, I most definitely needed to avoid Communist countries.

We never replaced the record. We couldn't. Italy did not have any Sesame Street records at all (we looked) and although my grandfather and my great-aunt, back in Florida, kindly offered to search South Florida for Grover, we had not had a great record – er, history – of things getting shipped safely to Italy. (They usually made it safely to Ro me, then mysteriously broke or chipped on their way up to Milano.) A record might not make it, and we weren't going back to the States that year at all. And by the time we moved back to the States – well, I was well past Grover by that age.

So that ended Grover. And that also ended my ownership of the old records and L.P.s; when we returned to the states, I first bought cassette tapes, then CDs and DVDs, then iTunes. And so, Grover wasn't just the first record I ever owned; it was the only one I owned. And so, to this day, I remember it clearly – and sometimes, just sometimes, I'm five again, singing, or shouting, "Over! Under! and Through!"