Gould in the record store

[kimmoor@mindspring.com (Kristen Immoor)]

        This is of limited interest, but I just feel compelled to say that
there is a man whom we all call Glenn Gould who frequents the record shop I
work in. He is an older man, maybe on the verge of 50, he wears large
glasses and his scraggly greying hair reaches his collar. Not a bad looking
fellow, but his clothes are most unfashionable, and he always wears a wool
Donnegal cap and a knit scarf. He comes in every month or so, scans through
the sheet music and the classical collection, and when he finds a misplaced
cd, rather than file it himself he brings it to me. I think he is testing
me on how quickly I can file it in its rightful location. We've only
conversed once, other than the standard "hi, how're you" sort of thing, and
I must say I think he was testing me then, too. He ran me through a series
of bizarre questions about this composer or that record label, and when it
seemed I didn't know enough about a given topic he ran on at length with
information. He seems to be quite arrogant, tell the truth, and in this
aspect I believe he is quite different from GG, but still there is
something about him that calls Gould to mind; I think to myself, what if
he's lonely and just doesn't know what to say? He definitely stands out
among a crowd, and it always starts me thinking about the shot in GG's
Toronto of GG on the balcony in the Toronto shopping mall. What a strange
place for him to be! If you saw Glenn Gould in a shopping mall, and had
never seen him before... would you know he was something special? I always
thought there was something about his hands that would set him apart from
the crowd, something you'd see right away, but the more people I meet, the
more I realize that I tend to overlook the glory in everyone. I don't know
what the point of this is... I'm babbling and hopefully Mary Jo won't put
it in the log or anything. It's been a long night.


______________________________________________________________________________

Elyse Mach: "But do you think that if Beethoven came back to life he'd go
along with these notions of motif and tempo?"
Glenn Gould: "I don't really know, nor do I very much care..."