We’re purging our record collection. The LPs are lined up against several walls. That’s what happens when you put two music Ph.D.’s of our age into the same late marriage.

We’ve found someone to buy the collection. The purchase price is miniscule but we’re lucky to find a buyer at all for this kind of collection. Plus, this fellow is genuinely interest in the music and will come and get them. I needn’t tell you what that is worth.

The goal back when we bought them was to have access to the full rostrum of important compositions from the Western Classical tradition. That meant owning at least one recording (if not multiple ones) of the complete Beethoven symphonies, concertos, sonatas, and string quartets, the Mozart, Haydn, Brahms, and Mahler symphonies, the operas by Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, Puccini, the songs of Schubert, Schumann, and Wolf. And much, much more that I’m not mentioning.

In my case, it also meant scrounging around to buy the major works by Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Glinka, and Rachmaninov, as well as the Rimsky-Korsakov operas and Scriabin sonatas. That was no easy feat back then. A lot of my Melodia recordings were bought in Soviet metro kiosks for just kopeks and stuffed into my suitcases. It’s a blessing that the airlines’ weight restrictions were less stringent back then.

It all sounds quaint now. Quaint and heavy. We’ve moved them around long enough. I’ll take one last look at each beautiful cover. My husband’s still are in perfect condition, including having the right liner for each disc, whereas mine, well, think of a thin platter that’s been run over a couple of times by a tractor. But be that as it may, the memories of virtually each purchase are in perfect condition. Vivid memories, with the majority constituting stories in and of themselves.

We work differently now. These rows of treasures standing at attention on shelves no longer reflect how we learn and write. Back then it was more important to buy records than to eat. Each album inched us closer in our pursuit of knowledge. They were flagstones leading into the world of the music.

Today our work is conducted via digital files. They weigh nothing. They travel to any time zone and allow staggering specificity (a single chorus from an obscure opera). It’s terribly convenient.

But what is lost? It’s hard to say. The world moves on. The horseless carriage drove out the buggy whip industry. It’s that simple. Yet the decades spent caressing and absorbing these LPs shaped our musical understanding and aesthetics in a way no digital file can. They were keys to beauty. They were proud members of our households. They mattered more than clothes, cars, or rent.

It takes me back to a remark my dissertation advisor made in the early 1980s when I was preparing to house-sit for him. Admiring his academia-decorated home (his wife also was a scholar), the comfy overstuffed chairs and antiques, the walls resplendent with art, the groaning shelves of books and records, I said with wonder: “How does one ever get all of these amazing things?”

He looked me directly in the eye and laughed. “The stuff? Oh, getting that is easy. Expensive, sometimes, but don’t worry, you’ll get all of this. It’s getting rid of it that’s the problem.” I had no idea what he was talking about.

I understand it now. Letting go is the problem, especially when something has mattered. Especially when it has shaped you, your goals, your aesthetics. Perhaps the real message is our challenge to fulfill the natural cycle of our lives, beginning with my magical first 33 1/3 LP (Swan Lake) in 1957 and ending with a truck backing up to our garage next week.

It’s time, though. Out the door this part of our pasts will go. The fruits of those precious recordings will remain with us. And think all of our books still in storage that can fill the empty shelves!