Collectible Elvis bites the dust

Things occasionally happen around the house that, in the grand scheme of things, don't really matter but can still make you feel bad.

For example, I recently broke a bowl.

It wasn't a great bowl, not a family heirloom or anything, but it was a bowl I used most days and my heart sank when I dropped it. For a split second, I imagined myself gluing it back together — it broke into quite large pieces — but I've moved beyond that as a solution to a broken dish and I stoically swept it up and put it in the garbage.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, my new white blouse got put into the drier by mistake. The clothes would normally be on the clothesline but it was a showery day and so the drier was pulled into emergency use. I'm sure I assumed the blouse was a man-made fabric, just made for a drier but it turns out the blouse is 100% cotton. I knew as soon as I looked at it that it hadn't enjoyed its trip in the drier. It was the broken-dish-on-the-kitchen-floor feeling all over again.

As it happened, I gave it a little iron-therapy which may have stretched it out — it was the length that was affected — and although it might not be perfect, I think it will probably be wearable.

These are small things though and I mention them only to try to lead up to a comparison.

Because then, there's this:

Please look at this very closely. Click on it to enlarge. That's a 78 rpm record of early Elvis — on one side Blue Moon of Kentucky, on the other That's All Right. It's a classic and it's a victim of many moves and many boxes since it left my parents' basement many years ago. Our joint record collection has now been dealt with as we begin the marathon of trying to get rid of decades worth of stuff. This wasn't the only 78 that didn't make it but it was the most notable.

I went to some of the collectors' sites to see what they'd think of this record. The original recording of these two songs was on Sun Records with the yellow label. Someone would pay you a few hundred dollars for that one. By the time RCA Victor got its hands on it and put the black label on it, it lost value and you might get $50 for it. There's also more than one RCA Victor label and they're also considered to be different values.

I wasn't going for a payday anyway and would never have got around to sending it away to some collector in Tennessee or wherever. I just liked the idea of having a collector's item, even if I wasn't doing anything with it.

I can still listen to Elvis. Our music supply is, I guess, simpler to access nowadays. It's certainly more portable. This is the exact device I listen to music with. It's a few years old now so it's probably obsolete but it works really well and it runs on a triple e battery. It's tiny and easy, not nearly as cumbersome as a turntable and a stack of records.