​A few words about sixty. But first, a story.

During internship, if I was fortunate enough to have slept during a Friday or Saturday night on call, I'd bike across the park the next day, to 65th and Broadway. There was a theater on the east side of the street that ran Eric Rohmer and Stephen Frears films. Shakespeare and Company was a few blocks north and Lincoln Center was a few blocks south, and right across the street was an enormous Tower Records where you could lose yourself for hours, in rock or Broadway, pop or jazz or classical, each type of music in a separate area, arranged with glass walls and sliding doors and on different floors, so that one type of music never drowned out another. Bernstein's quartet from West Side Story here and Talking Heads there. Classical downstairs, the cello solo from Brahm's third piano quartet, the CD box on the counter underneath a cardboard sign with "now playing" written in black magic marker. On a Saturday afternoon I could discover REM or hear Chopin for the first time, or rediscover Billy Cobham or Larry Coryell until fatigue sent me to the cashier and back out onto Broadway where I unlocked my bike, reattached the front wheel, and pedaled back back to York Avenue, where I carried the bike on my right shoulder into the elevator, a bright yellow plastic Tower Records bag swinging from my left hand.

There was one problem. 1980's compact discs sounded terrible, their highs clipped indiscriminantly, the sizzle of the cymbals traded away in exchange for the disappearnce of a little background hiss that we had already trained ourselves not to hear. They were also too small and too shiny, so we hid them on little mechanical drawers that disappeared into the front of the CD players. And they only had one side, with no break in the middle.

We made a bad trade when we switched away from record albums, which we rightly encased in artwork, handled with an almost religious gentleness, touched only on the edges and not on the grooves, cleaned with velvet Dustbusters and D3 fluid. Watching the record spin was as much a part of the experience as hearing the music, the tone arm balanced, barely touching the vinyl, the signal whispered from needle tip to cartridge to preamp to amp to speakers, every tone, music or pop or scratch, reproduced without judgement, somehow landing in the room as if the musicians themselves had knocked on the door and politely asked if they could come in, set up and use your apartment to practice.

And all the albums had a beginning (side one), a middle (turn the album over) and an end (side two), and the middle, the moments when you lifted the tone arm, flipped the record, dusted it off and lowered the needle to play side two were the filled with the best, purest, most sublime sense of anticipation. The best of those feelings came the first time you played a new album, something you only got to experience once per record, once in your life. You heard Baba O'Riley for the very first time. You turned over the record not knowing that Won't Get Fooled Again is on the other side.  You listened in wonder as you first hear Kitty's Back-- having no idea that Incident On 57th Street and Rosalita were just a few minutes in the future. You flip over Sergeant Pepper. Could you possibly have imagined A Day In The Life?

All you had to do was turn over the record.

You can get to sixty from anywhere. It's divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30. Multiply just about any two or three small numbers and eventually you'll land on sixty. But like forty and fifty before it, sixty is not a destination. While you're there, its just the middle, coming after what came before and coming before what will come after, which may still be new and different and great. There are even more directions away from sixty as there were paths to it. 

Time to turn over the record and hear what's on side two.

Monday Morning

Distracted by a report by an analyst I do not know about a company I do not own in an industry I do not cover, with Claudio Arrau playing Chopin in my head, oblivious to a truck backing out of a hidden garage, I felt the nudge of a fellow pedestrian’s shoulder just in time to look up and veer out of the way. 

It’s a relief when unseen forces erase danger, reinforcing that child-like feeling that God or the government or some all-knowing future mentor exists, solely for my protection and guidance. 

Of course before I reached Fifth Avenue the magical thoughts were gone and I knew that I had better keep either my eyes or my ears on the road ahead. So I clicked away the analyst report and let the music play.

I like Chopin when played on an almost out-of-tune piano half an hour before last call in an nineteenth-century Parisan tavern, drunken and romantic. My near collision with the truck coincided with the horn fanfare that transitions the Andante Spiniato to the Grande Polannaise. Soon after the piano returned: a sad song from the right hand balanced by ringing, triumphant chords from the left. The two themes danced around each other, sorrow and triumph; the pianist taunting us with almost-missed entrances and barely audible notes. The music floated to an inevitable conclusion of sprints up and down the keyboard, and grand chords that pushed open the revolving door to my building and made me smile. I arrived at work, chastened for my inattention but grateful that triumph and sorrow together can still equal joy.