Rewind
I found some tape storage drawers in my grandmother's basement and finally organized all my tape cassettes. This worked out great, two of them, one stacked atop the other, so now there is a little end table next to the bed that the person in the comfy chair can put their drink down on. This probably translates in the practical world as yet another horizontal surface that I can clutter up, but let me have the fantasy for now. Thank you.
Once the official tapes were taken care of, I went through the recorded ones. Why is it that none of the good mixes are the ones that survive? I wish that I could locate a copy of We Could Be Heroes or the original California or Bust tape, damn it! Those mixes were awesome, I used to play them constantly (although to be fair, much of California or Bust still exists, albeit in modified form, as my Drivin' album).
I did, however, find a fairly nice reduction of the Von Karajan Adagio series I made while working at Tower.
I took my grandmother to the accountant to get my taxes done, for real this time. When we got back to the house, she went through a few of my grandfather's things to decide what to do with them. She wanted to know if I would like his copy of The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. It had never occurred to me to take it. This copy had been in the same place in that house for as far back I can remember. It was on the shelf in the library (my mother's former bedroom) next to a chair by the window that he sat in all the time. It was the dictionary I used to look words up for my homework from when I was in elementary school all the way to when I graduated college.
An OED is something that I've always wanted, but as they are quite expensive I never thought I'd ever actually buy one. I also never thought that I would ever have this particular copy either. It is something I will use often, as I always have. But now it's mine, and it is on my shelf. While this is an item that I would probably never have gotten for myself, it is now one of the possessions that is most dear to me.
This was my grandfather's dictionary. My education was very important to him. He did not buy it for my use - it is, in fact, several years older than I am - but rather for his own as he pursued his various Master's degrees. As I grew up, however, this edition has played a very prominent role in my own education over the years. It is, perhaps, the thing of his that I associated most purely with him. The magnifying glass that came with the Compact OED was replaced by my grandfather with a more convenient one of his own design. It is unique among most of my belongings in that its utility - which is considerable, it's an OED, after all - is less important to me than what it represents to me.