Look Up at the Mountain.

Now, I'd thought my father had a copy of Tea for the Tillerman. I poked through his records last week, hurriedly, when I should have been getting ready to go to the next relative's house to sit on a sofa and eat more and different cheesy dips, but instead I remembered at the computer or mirror that I needed to find that record and then pack it in my suitcase for my not-yet-bought but oh-so-anticipated turntable.

Nope.

He has Teaser and the Firecat. I misremembered--for years. For, like, thirty years. I haven't done a record-shelf dig in his collection in a few years, and before I was amused, enthralled and then somewhat addicted to the series Extras, I didn't really need either album.

I like "Moonshadow" and "Peace Train" pff of Teaser and the Firecat, but the album doesn't--and how do I say this--ask the right questions that its predecessor does.

This means that I get the pleasure of searching for and finding an excellent copy of Tea for the Tillerman for my own collection. I cherish my handed-down records, but this excursion will...I'll make a nice excursion of it, no quick dashes up and down aisles, scanning A-B, F-G, trying, trying to remember what those two things I wanted to look for in a record shop the next time I was in a record shop. Maybe it will be at the Milwaukee Antique Center the next time I visit. Or maybe I'll walk a few blocks in my neighborhood, or a neighborhood that I like, in another part of the city. Get some tea.

I like making plans when time feels like it's starting, not ending. The Gregorian calendar is obviously arbitrary, but we, all of us, like it or not, hide and try to plug your ears but hear the fireworks and the drunken yells anyway, or the exhale of wind in a tree outside, are hours away from another line to cross, and beyond it--another mountain to climb.