Old Sheet Music & Vintage Friends

Update on Plums

First to say, someone else must have been watching and waiting for the plums along the bike path to ripen. When I biked to work yesterday, I intended to pick them to make compote (thanks for the recipe, Kirsten!).
The trees, however, were stripped bare of all but the hard yellow fruits.

I'm glad someone foraged them, anyway, and they didn't just fall to the ground and rot.

Sheet Music & Friends

Donations of sheet music are fun to look at, but a pain to sell at the thrift store. I have no good way to present these ephemeral items.
If they're modern, I put them out in a plastic tub for .49/each, where they get rummaged through, and quickly bought or torn apart.

If they're vintage, they're even more fragile, but they aren't worth much more. It's more trouble than it's worth to put them in protective sleeves, which, at any rate, I don't have.

I keep them until they're piled up, thick with dust, and then I take them to my friend, Allan, at the art college library where I used to work, who digitalizes images of sheet music before 1924 (copyright free). Allan posts the images on a university's website--I forget where, I'll have to get the url.

Allan photographs all the ones I bring him for the university site.
He keeps choice ones for his personal collection;
passes the most astonishing examples of race and gender on to an art historian professor friend of his who specializes in the history of presentation of race and gender;
and puts the rest in protective sleeves and gives them back to me to sell at the store.

Below--examples of the classic face-off of black face and lily white.

I've known Allan since I started at the art college library when I was twenty-eight. He and I took a couple big trips together: Sicily and Turkey.
We go for long stretches without seeing each other, but I'm always happy to see him.

Allan is in his early 70s. My friend Sophie, who had a stroke three weeks ago, is 78.
It's weird to realize friends around my age (61)--vintage friends--will start to die from natural causes associated with old age...
I want to make more of an effort to keep in touch with Allan. I'm taking a pile of sheet music to him next week--first time we've seen each other since before Covid.