I worked it loose, opened it up, and my legs damn near gave out under me.
It was a bundle wrapped in a man’s flannel shirt, soft with age. Inside: a thick stack of letters tied in ribbon, a black-and-white photograph of a young couple caught mid-spin on a dance floor, and a single 45 rpm record in a plain paper sleeve with two words on the label in pencil — OUR SONG. And folded on top, a letter, in a shaky old hand.
“To whoever brings her back to life,” it began. “I’m sorry for the trouble of the crate. I couldn’t take her to the dump. Sixty years of my Margaret is in this machine, and I couldn’t watch a man with a forklift drop her in a heap. But I couldn’t keep her either. Since Margaret passed I can’t hear our song without coming apart, and a quiet jukebox in the corner is worse than no jukebox at all.”
I sat down on my garage floor and kept reading.
“We met at a sock hop in 1955. I asked her to dance to the record I’ve left in here, and I never stopped asking for sixty years. So I’m sending her out into the world to someone who’ll fix her and fill her with music again. When you get her running, do an old man one kindness — play B-17. That’s our song. Play it loud, and know two kids fell in love to it once, and loved each other a whole lifetime. Don’t let the music die just because we got old. Let her sing for somebody new.”
The jukebox wasn’t broken bad — a seized motor and a loose wire, a weekend’s work for a man who tinkers. And when she finally lit up, all that chrome glowing warm, I did the only thing there was to do. I loaded their record, and I pressed B-17, and a song from 1955 filled my garage while I stood there with tears running down into my collar.
But I couldn’t leave it there. There was a town on those envelopes, and it took me two weeks of calls, and then an old man’s voice came on the line, careful and thin. I told him I had Margaret’s jukebox. I told him she was singing again.
He couldn’t speak for a while. Then he asked, so quiet I almost missed it, “Did you play our song?” I told him I had. I told him it sounded like it was meant to. And this man I’d never met cried into the phone like something that had been clenched shut for years was finally letting go.
I drive out to see him now, now and again. I bring him recordings of his jukebox playing in my garage, and last month I brought him something better — I loaded B-17 and held the phone up to the speaker, and over the line a ninety-year-old man hummed along to the song he danced to with his girl in 1955.
He thought he was sending his Margaret away to be forgotten. He was really just handing her to a stranger who’d keep her dancing. The music didn’t die. It just needed somebody to plug it back in.