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| Me reading funnies |
Ralph emailed me to ask if anyone had notified Ginger about Jimmy's
death
The phone number he had no longer work for her for gingers chiropractic
office in Pennsylvania and ginger had not checked her Facebook page since
September where I had emailed her to tell her about Jimmy.
I went and did some research and found an ad she had taken out for some
kind of conference in which she had placed a phone number.
Ralph got back to me and said that this number was still active and
that he had left a message on her answering machine.
I called as well and told her that if she needed more information, she
should contact John and they gave her his email account.
All this of course was part of the synchronistic events that seem to be
swirling around Jimmy's death.
I had just transcribed a letter that Jimmy supposedly got from Ginger back
in 1983 – Frank had read it supposedly and reported to me about what it said.
After that I spent most of the afternoon in the frustrating attempt to
rescue a cassette tape that Jimmy, and ginger and others had recorded for me
while I was still in Portland that magical night of Christmas Eve 1971.
The ghost of Jimmy or some other being beyond this world kept trying to
stop me from making the recovery and perhaps a bit of my own stupidity.
I originally damage the tape in
a cassette player by trying to force it to play when its gears were stuck. At
the time I didn't think it was important so I set it aside presuming I would
get to fix it at some other point in life.
Jimmy's death made it clear that I needed to have that memory since he
and ginger and most of the Garley Gang took part in the drunken referee that
was a message to me.
But again, fate plus my own stupidity appeared to be hampering the
project.
At one point I did manage to put the fix on the tape, but it was too
bulky to get through the rollers. I managed to rewind it to the beginning and
play the first half and then hating the idea that I would miss something I
again forced it, breaking the tape inside the cassette
This meant that I had to take apart the cassette to make the next
repair.
I have done this kind of thing in the past, but it is an incredibly
complex and often frustrating effort.
The inside of a cassette is a complicated mechanism and without the
cassette to hold the tape in place the whole thing could come unraveled at any
moment. And to tell you the truth when dealing with tiny bits of plastic and
metal such as this I am all thumbs.
I had to abandon the portion of the tape that I had saved initially,
losing precious minutes of the past in order to save the rest.
I had to Scotch tape the remainder on to the now empty other real and
hope that I could weave everything through the mechanism to have it work at
least one time for me to re-record.
But every time I had one part of the thing corrected another part came
undone, and there were times when everything came undone and I had to start
from scratch.
Then other parts began to come undone such as the spindles and the
complicated tiny spokes that kept them connected to the cassette. One fell out and
it took me forever to find the tiny piece of metal in the rug to reattach it.
The 50-year-old cassette could not stand the strain and I realized that
I needed to take apart another cassette -- one that had screws in it -- and try
to adapt the tape I was repairing to that one.
This proved a much more adequate solution although it's still took me
time to thread everything and get everything lined up. At one point I put a
piece of tape on the end of the recording tape attached it to the wheel only to
have it come undone when I tried to actually play it.
So, I had to reopen it again and realign everything and use stronger
tape to connect the recording tape to the wheel.
Everything was perfect; everything was lined up; all I had to do was
put the cassette together again.
Then as I reached for the top of the cassette, the heel of my hand hit the
other part and the whole thing flipped over sending the entire contents
spilling across the room.
I never did find all the
original parts again.
More than once during this process I thought maybe just to give up to
be happy with the half that I had managed to recover and let the rest go.
One part of my brain kept telling me that one of the higher powers
involved in this whole Jimmy Garland death circus was opposed to my recovering
the cassette and had created all of these obstacles to keep me from doing so.
Another part of my brain said this was some kind of test of love from
the afterlife and that there was Jimmy's spirit somewhere in the world saying
if I did this, I was proving how much I loved him.
But as in life, I was not going to let Jimmy stop me from doing what I
had set out to do. If his spirit was
opposing this effort, I was going to stick at it and stick it to him.
If this was a test of love, then I was going to prove just how much I
love this man and how much he changed my life and how important this tribute to
me back in 1971 was and how much it still means to me.
I put the cassette together again using the parts from the original
cassette and to replace those that were lost in the scattering.
Then remarkably the thing worked I was getting sound into the computer
as I digitized the contents of the tape only after a few minutes the cassette
player stalled unable to make the recording work. The whole thing warbled has this tape
struggled to play.
I switched machines which reduced the warble, but I was scared to
rewind the thing back to the place where I had started from and so just kept
saving the past that I could and hoped that it was enough.
Only after having accomplished this did I dare rewind the tape hoping
to recapture that portion that had been lost to the warbles in the original
attempt.
Miraculously this worked and so in the end I only lost about six
minutes of that time, precious minutes but I had saved most of the hour of that
time when they might not have ever been heard again.
And hearing them stunned me and brought back all of the feelings and
the emotions that I thought lost from that time and stirred up the regret at
Jimmy's death. And I heard Frank and Jimmy and Ginger and others who voices
have been lost to me overtime and it moved me in a way I am still moved.
This truly was the Ghost of
Christmas Past and I admit that in the end I just sat in the chair stunned.
At this point I look down at my phone and saw that someone had called
and left a message another voice from the past because it turned out to be Ginger’s.
Journal entry about tape
A tape for Al in Portland (Journal)
Links to tapes
1971 Xmas tapes Part 1
1971 Xmas Tapes Part 2
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