I got a record player! After dinner on my birthday there was the usual assortment of cards and books and music and I, quite content, started to clear things away so we could have the cake. "Wait wait wait!" said Allison, and Dad brought in one last package. By its shape it could only have been a record, and when I opened it I saw it was Woody Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant". (I'm not sure if we already had it or if Dad had bought it used, but in any case it's a terrific album.) "Wait," I said, the light slowly dawning. "This implies..." Everyone jumped up and dragged me into the living room, which had been quarantined all evening.

And there it was on the table. It was about sixteen inches by sixteen inches, oak, all self-contained. Mom opened the beautiful wooden lid. Judy Collins' "Colors of the Day" was there on it and she turned it on. I was, of course, flabbergasted. I had asked for a record player weeks before but I hadn't really been expecting one and had even forgotten all about it by the eighteenth. The stylus on our old one had broken years before, and even so you had to listen sitting down because it skipped whenever anyone walked across the floor. So when I discovered things like The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel and Judy Collins, I had to watch the scores of my parents' beautiful records sit on the shelf while I played tapes or CDs. Eventually I had moved my favorites onto a shelf in my room, where they sat looking very nice but collecting dust. In England last summer I bought a soundtrack to Shaw's St. Joan in a charity shop. I had heard an excerpt from the play on the Sound & Spirit program on Joan of Arc and loved it, so I immediately bought it. At the fall festival at school there were stacks of records for sale and I bought two more. But they were, of course, useless because I had nothing to play them on. (Sometimes I think I'm something of a massochist.) But here was this beautiful record player; there I was listening to the songs whose lyrics I had read but never heard.

They had ordered it from Plow & Hearth so it must have been awfully expensive and I feel bad they spent so much on me, but it's an awfully nice record player. I found a table in the attic to put it on so I've moved all my records onto it and when Mom comes in from the garden she's going to help me carry the turntable upstairs.

Last night I rummaged through my parents' records to see what looked good. It was very obvious where my dad's started and where my mom's ended because they went from having titles like "Workingman's Dead" and "Prologue" to "Barn Dance Two", "Paul McCartney", and "English Folk Dance for Primary School". Seriously, half her records had titles like "Fiddling with Joe and Donna Lamb" and "Contra tunes, volume IV." Also I think we've got every album ever put out by the McLain Family Band, although that makes sense because Mom was friends with Alice McLain. (Now Alice White. She's got this awesome wooden house on the side of a really steep hill in Berea and after they have Christmas parties Al has to go out and jack up the house because all the dancing makes the building sink six inches or so on one side.) And then there's this one ABBA album that nobody wants to claim. About a year ago when I went through the records for the first time I found that one and brought it down with some others. "What's this like?" I asked Dad. He recoiled. "Where did you find that?" Confused, I told him it was in with the other records. "You mother listened to that? I had no idea!" he muttered. When Mom came home we both came to the door, record in hand. "You listened to ABBA, Mom?" She looked puzzled. "Them? Of course not!" So no one seems to have any idea how it got in with their records. Either one of them bought it and forgot about it or it was someone else's and somehow got in by mistake. I still have no idea why everyone's so terrified of the band. Lizzy recoiled too when I told her about it. I guess I'll have to listen to them for myself and find out.

On the last day of school my French teacher was clearing out her bookshelf and was giving away a big box of National Geographics and a stack of French women's magazines. No one else wanted either, so I took them both home. I also had a lot of art projects plus a backpack and a lunchbox to carry, so it really wasn't very clever of me, but I was determined to get them all home. I took everything out to the bus in three shifts after my last exam, but I had no idea how I was going to get it all off the bus and into the house. Eventually I gave the teapot I made in the pottery unit to a freshman who rides the bus. When the boys on the bus heard, they all declared they wanted a teapot too and started trying to make Sarah give it to them. I placated them by saying they could have any of the National Geos they wanted, and we spent the ride home leafing through old issues. "I want the one from my birthday, Ben. See if there's one from June 1986." "Nah, these are all from 81 or 82." "Hey, look at the size of that pearl!" "Can I have this one on Ghengis Khan?" "Here's one from 64!" "Amar, hand me that one on the Scottish Highlands." "How are pearls made, anyway?" I think all Governor's School students have a built-in reverence for National Geo. It was a nice way to finish the year.

But in any case, I've now got a dozen issues of "Femme Actuelle" drifting around the house. French women's magazines have a lot more crossword puzzles than American ones. There are at least three in every issue. Also there's more nudity, although my French teacher says we only think it's strange because the US was built by Puritans. But there seem to be rules about nudity: you can show the full body from the back, for instance, but not from the front. And if the model is looking reflective you're allowed to see her breasts but not if she's looking happy. If she looks happy she's holding a pillow to her chest or something. It's quite strange.

June 18
July 18