I wonder why

Found it!

We just had a bunch of old family VHS tapes converted to DVD, and the other night watched Older Daughter's first four birthdays. The highlight, for me, was her singing a clever song called "I Wonder Why." I couldn't remember where she'd gotten that song, and it's been bugging me since. I just found it:

tables turned

We were talking about the future of music the other day with Kevin, then Harrison 

asked if I had a turntable. Therein lies one more brief cautionary tale about the future in general.


My old console stereo, with built-in LP "changer" (called that, I think, because you could pile a stack on the spindle and another record would drop onto the platform in turn as the needle withdrew from each terminal circuit) died while I was still in High School in Missouri in the '70s.


I made do for a time, it was the 8-track era and that's what I listened to in the car. I loved  the chunka-chunka sound of the track switching every three songs. When I think of it I mostly imagine "Magical Mystery Tour" playing as I rolled down I-70 to or from my first college semester at UMSL (U of Mo - St. Louis), in the '72 Dart.

Eventually I bought a nice cheap Technics turntable, which carried me to grad school in Tennessee. I didn't buy many new records; cassettes and the Sony Walkman were big now. And then compact discs.


And then, at some point-- I'm hazy on (or traumatized by) the details, maybe it was in the fog of preliminary exams-- I became convinced that I no more needed that turntable and those LPs and 45s and tapes than I needed an Edsel. 


So I gave 'em away.


Dumb dumb dumb.


Now my music is on a large, neglected stack of CDs, on an iPod, and in the clouds of Sirius and Pandora. I miss my records!


The moral, of course: don't give away your rich, textured (ok, scratchy and hissy) and memory-laden past, in the present, for the unsecured promise of perfection in a shiny but hypothetical future. And don't assume that new and different is always necessarily better. 


But: keep aiming for the stars anyway. 

Postscript. Thank you, Harrison & class, for this wonderful parting gift. It was pressed by Third Man Records in Nashville, whose leader says "people are paying a couple hundred bucks each" on Ebay for this very rare item. Wow.  I'm now officially shopping for my next turntable.

That's the great thing about the future: you don't know what you're gonna get!

Dad

A quick inventory of the partial contents of an envelope Dad left for me last year. I just opened it.

1. Many b-&-w family photos, including one from 1925 featuring four generations (brother Glenn, mother, grandpa, great-grandpa, b. 1845)...
2. Our first family photo, from 1957.
3. Class photo of me from 1966, another from1970 inscribed to Uncle Glenn and Aunt Lucy.
4. Winterton Curtis monograph from 1957, "A Damned-Yankee Professor in Little Dixie"
5. Commencement program from Dad's graduation from Vet School, 1960. (btw: I took a walk this morning and saw the new clinic just opened by the two young men who bought his practice last year.)
6. An aerial photo of (old) Busch Stadium, with exploding fireworks above, 9.8.98 (the night Mark McGwire hit his 62d home run).
7. The letter I wrote to our older daughter on the day of her birth, reporting a forgotten but (if I say so myself) prescient personal conversation with Bill McKibben about the environment and our obligations to future generations
8. A copy of Vanderbilt Magazine from 1999, in which I reviewed John Lachs's In Love With Life.
9. A newspaper clipping from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch dated 9.18.74, featuring a letter to the editor written by yours truly defending "President Ford's courageous, though untimely, attempt to put Richard Nixon behind us."
10. Another clipping, dated 12.25.89, called An expression of love: a father's letter. It begins: "To our sons: We are fathers, and we find it hard to say 'I love you.'" It concludes: "We reach out, and this time we say, 'I love you...' Love, Dad"

Thanks, Dad. I love you.

http://obits.baue.com/obitdisplay.html?id=582820&listing=Current