Probably only 80% of the 10,000 vintage phonograph records at the Vintage Music Company in Minneapolis have been meticulously organized by genre, group, condition, year, etc. The rest are in stacks in the floor. Still, we were able to find some records we couldn’t live without, including Jelly Roll Morton’s “Big Lip Blues” and Rosetta Tharpe’s rendition of “I Want a Tall Skinny Papa.”

I think the owner (armed with encyclopedic knowledge of recording history) was charmed by my son when he asked “if you have any Mozart,” because he kindly gave Ben a 4-record set of Toscanini’s recording of the Jupiter Symphony.

We had other reasons to enjoy our trip back east. We managed to see 70 or so relatives in 6 days, plus a visit to our high school Humanities teacher, who got me started in this Philosophy business in the first place. We’re still on friendly terms, though.