We drove to Fremont, a neighborhood my kids have never seen that’s in Seattle and just 35 minutes from our house, and when we got there and saw the stone troll under the bridge, the tourists pulling over taking selfies, I realized we were tourists now too and that was hard. We went to the Fremont Brewery because I thought it was okay for kids but it really wasn’t; there weren’t any kids, only hipsters with their pints and beards, and Lily standing with her purse and her hair brushed so put together, Charlotte by her side in some electric-peach track suit she just got that didn’t look like it’d been washed yet, no amount of Pacific Northwest in her at all, maybe Florida or Vegas…so we moved on to another place, where they felt comfortable: it even said KID FRIENDLY on the front…and afterwards to the record store by a book shop with all hardbacks so I said go there, they wanted to…and on the way back we drove by the last house Dawn and I rented and I stopped the car with the engine running but couldn’t figure out which was the right one, they’d repainted them all, they took out the porch and pushed the inside of the house out so it didn’t look like it fit right, it made it look smaller, and when I told Dawn later she was sad, the porch was her favorite part…and I went down the rabbit hole of YouTube videos trying to rectify the settings on my DJ quality turntable, the intricate explanations by these guys either geeks or stoners, guys who call it a vinyl community, with electronic scales to weigh the balance of the arm and some debate over the ideal range in grams for the counterweights…and I was about to throw it out the window and give up (Dawn even said OR YOU COULD JUST PUT ON SPOTIFY), but when I got it balanced and dropped it in the groove the first time it sounded really right, you could pick up the small moments in the songs that were meant for that, and it was 7:30 before I started dinner and maybe 9 by the time I served it…and I lay on the sofa after midnight, tried another record but it didn’t work, the anti-skating was off…the needle just wants to go right in the hole sometimes, the centrifugal force…so I put on the radio and turned out the lights and thought back on our day, tried to remember where we were in the week and what we did, decided it was good, and better if I’d write about it in the morning.

Categories: musings, parenting, writing

Tags: Fremont, pacific northwest, postaday, Presidents Day, record shopping, stream-of-consciousness, vinyl, William Pearse writer, writing practice