Woo! After months of fussing, I have finally completed a brief book of essays inspired by an old CD case I found after my car was totaled last May.
Here’s the introduction:
A few days after the accident, we drove to the auto body shop to say goodbye.
The adjuster had totaled the car—the repairs would cost more than the value of an equivalent 2009 Subaru Outback. He sent over papers to sign and said I would have a few hours to claim personal effects, before they picked up the car.
The Subaru was my first car. It was with me through three years of college; it carried my wife and me across the country when we moved to Colorado; it brought our first son home from the hospital.
There wasn’t much in the way of personal effects: two road maps, a roll of paper towels, a fleece pullover, jumper cables, a window scraper, a faded Polaroid of our cats.
And a travel case of CDs.
I couldn’t remember the last time we’d played a CD in the car. (We’d gone the aux cable route long ago.) When we got home that evening, I unzipped the CD case and flipped through.
The case contained the odds-and-ends of my once sizable collection of 200+ CDs. A decade had chipped away at this collection—donated, stolen by my brother, tossed in the trash.
What was left was a strange brew—some old favorites, freebie albums from college music shows, and many, many mix CDs, and a handful of old favorites.
Before giving the travel case the heave-ho, I wanted to create a little memorial to the music and the moments in my life that it soundtracked.
What follows is 26 brief reflections on the CDs I found in the case. Some about music, others about how I listen to music, and others about the memories that surfaced when I flipped through this travel case in the days after the accident.
Taylor Coe 