Sitting on the floor of my bedroom in the house where I grew up, my sister and I listened to a long-playing record we liked very much.    It was about Abraham Lincoln and was called something like Freedom Train.   

These big round monophonic discs were called LPs and were made of something stiffer and heavier than the vinyl that records would later be made of.   The record revolved on a turntable where a needle at the end of an arm drew sounds from its grooves.   The sounds magically came out of a little speaker in our record player, which folded up into a box when not in use.

We listened to this evocation of the Great Emancipator, flipped it over, heard the other side, also excellent, and were discussing whether to hear it again.  I must have just learned to read.   I puzzled out several unfamiliar words on the label of the LP.  One of them was “unbreakable”.  I was amazed to read this.  My sister, too young to show real surprise at such a fact, looked on with interest.

I took the LP, held it in the flat of my hand and turned my hand over. The LP fell the short distance from my child’s arm to the wooden floor and broke into five or six pieces.

I don’t remember my parents being particularly mad when they found out what happened, though they never replaced the LP.  My mother may have shook her head with a wistful expression.  The expression would have said “oy, welcome to the world, my son.”