(no subject)

The first and possibly only record I was ever given - a single - was by The J. Geils Band. Freeze Frame. I think I was about 5. We had other records, like The Monster Mash, but those were For Sharing: with this, my sister had been given the same one, so it was clearly mine. (I assume I liked the song when she played it but she objected so loudly to my parents about my touching her things that they bought me one to shut her up; I remember she'd gotten them to do that with her Blueberry Muffin doll that year or the one before.)

Till today I hadn't read that name in print since whenever I broke or lost the record - either also at 5 or not very long after. I know this because I'd had no idea his name was spelled that way when I read it just now. Very strange feeling. I remember being able to read the record sleeve, and that the J. was an initial and not Jay, so I was literate, but I think there was a bit more of a divorce between spelled and sounded words for me back then, where a word was itself and only secondarily a set of symbols one would occasionally need to process. The link between a sounded word and its spelling became a lot tighter soon after, meaning Geils was one of the last words in my vocabulary that wasn't in my lexicon, that I didn't think of as even having a spelling. Conceivably the very last. And now it's got letters inscribed across it like all the others.

Not a thing I'm sad about, and I'm not more than passingly sad about J. Geils dying since his music wasn't all that good. Just one of those moments of Proustian unrest, where you hear an object shatter in some subbasement of the self-house so distant and so long forgotten you're amazed you go down that far.