On a recent road trip with friends to Victoria (about 2.5 hours southeast of Austin), we stopped in to the Salvation Army. [editor's note: just accidentally typed "Salavation Army" - anyone need a quirky-clever name for a new bakery?] There was a table set up with stacks & stacks & stacks of dusty old 45's, all of which appeared to be Tejano music (maybe not Tejano, but they were all in Spanish).
It was beautiful, yet I found it a bit sad for some reason. Someone had spent a long time acquiring this collection of records, and why were they now giving them all away? It was like a visual declaration of someone's decades-long passion for music. The first thing I thought of was that this person had died, and so his or her family gave all of the albums to the S. A.
Maybe it was much less somber than that; maybe it was the collection of a former DJ who just transferred them all to digital files & no longer needs the vinyl because he doesn't do the wiggy-scratch anymore. yeah, that's what i'm going to choose to believe.