Final Vinyl: The Five Stages of Downsizing

You’ve probably heard of psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ 5 Stages of Grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. That’s a time-tested and valid model. I’m adapting it to my current approach to downsizing. Looking ahead to the inevitable move from a house to something smaller in a couple of years, I’m confronting my accumulation. While downsizing isn't as profound as death, it does come with emotional tumult and challenges, so I'm serious about making the comparison.

Moves over the past 20 years winnowed a lot of furniture and electronics, but the core clutter remains very stable. That’s vinyl records, books (including “I Learn to Write” from 1964), shoeboxes of chronologically arranged photos, historical newspapers, binders of clips from my journalism days, Princeton reunions costumes and bags, hundreds of letters sorted by year, and folders of research materials for my saucy memoir and other book projects.

Let’s start with the “denial” stage, I always assert I don’t require THAT much space for my stuff. My statement always gets a big laugh from my partner and open mic videographer Naomi. But being at the point where I have to move boxes to reach other boxes suggests I need to face reality.

I’ve passed through denial. What’s next is not anger but resignation of necessity. Something’s got to give, or, more properly, to go. I’m starting with the records. My thinking: I can hear everything online. Plus, records are a royal pain in the tuchus to move.

Last week a representative from Hudson Valley Vinyl in Beacon, N.Y., came to scope my collection and make an offer on the albums he wanted. Before vinylmeister Chris arrived, I spent 30 minutes clearing space in the basement storage room to reach the records. Shades of “Hoarders!” Then I flipped through hundreds of albums to decide which to keep, which to jettison.

Ready to inspection.

The stacks reflected my evolving tastes. Obsessive compulsive that I am, I wrote the dates I bought albums on their covers. I can track the shift from rock and pop through BB King, Hall and Oates, Dinah Washington, Chet Baker, Cajun group BeauSoleil with fiddler Michael Doucet, Miles Davis and finally Brazilian, my obsession of the last 20 years. 

The “keep” stack represents the “bargaining” stage of the cycle. I’ll sell THOSE but not THESE. That elite list includes Simon and Garfunkel’s greatest hits, a gift from my mother on my 16^th birthday, a Coleman Hawkins album recorded the actual day I was born, the soundtrack to the movie Chinatown, which I got at the Virgin Megastore in London in September 1984 and lugged all the way back to Brooklyn. My Woodstock soundtrack, stuffed with clippings about artists who performed there. Their Satanic Majesties Request by the Rolling Stones, with the groovy 3D cover, is staying. I’m keeping the first three ZZ Top albums, the soundtrack of my high school years with songs like "(Somebody Else Been) Shaking Your Tree.”

As Chris methodically checked the hundreds of albums I would sell, I moved to the curiosity stage. What would he take. He found 60 LPs to buy, but he had to leave many others behind because they were scratched. I didn’t get all sentimental and misty over what he wanted, preferring to let them quietly slip to give joy to new listeners. The top album on the stack was a Billie Holliday collection from 1933-1935.

Going to their forever home.

Now what? Hundreds of records remain. Westchester has other record stores and I hope some would want classic jazz. Grand Funk Railroad and Iron Butterfly, probably not. And that moves me to the final phase: enthusiasm shading toward Kübler-Ross’ acceptance stage.

Downsizing, I’ve found, takes on a momentum. The first steps are hard, but after Chris left, I felt good about the progress, and the cash doesn’t hurt, either. Indeed, I’m ready to wheel and deal some more.

At this stage, I’m looking forward to a little less to pack whenever the inevitable next move comes along. I’m now starting the downsizing cycle on books. Naomi and I will took boxes of books to the  Goodwill store in Baldwin Place, N.Y.; I happily unloaded the car but I almost snatched back a huge collection of New York Times front pages. I finally I let it slip away. 

I’m now writing to see if friends are interested in books from my Judaica collection. Then I have my books on the Soviet Union that I scoured from New York used bookstores in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I knew what I was looking for. Some books cross the Soviet and Jewish genres, like a volume of poetry by the Yiddish writer Peretz Markish. At a library tag sale I found his poetry collection Foterlekhe Erd (Paternal Land), printed in Kiev, Ukraine in 1938, during the Great Purge. Markish was executed along with a dozen other Yiddish poets and public figures on August 12, 1952 in a Soviet attack on Jewish culture. 

That chilling book is history in my hands. I’ve got to keep it. But will I? I’m starting over at the denial stage so anything can happen. Make me an offer. 

Keepers, for now.