Youth has its rewards. When you’re younger, you naturally take in many experiences as though you will never have them again.
One of my most beloved birthday gifts as a child was my first stereo system. It was my first “real” piece of sound equipment, with multiple components and larger speakers. Within that first August weekend, it became a prominent fixture in my small room and I could sit on the edge of my bed, staring mindlessly out the window for hours listening to the radio. It was my “precious” time.
I usually listened to the more popular stations, and would get so genuinely excited if I heard a favorite song – especially if it was one reminding me of my friends or some happier memory. I would drop whatever I was doing to be in that moment and just enjoy the song. Pretty soon, I learned how to record onto cassettes and would always have a blank tape ready for those times when I was lucky enough to push the right combination of buttons before the singer’s first word. Even if I didn’t get the tape reel turning until the first chorus, I would still deem it successful and declare it a “keeper”. This was during the 80s, and the stations I was listening to cycled through the typical top hits of the time, repeating songs at least once every two hours. Yet in my happy-go-lucky youth, racing to the play-record button combo, I truly believed it necessary to do everything in my power to preserve such a unique experience. The resulting box of mixed tapes, most with awkward starts and stops and repetitive content, now resides in my closet as a childhood time capsule of sorts.
Still today, I enjoy just listening to the radio at times. I now understand the concept of “popular” music, advertising, airplay, and consequential ratings, so I’m not eagerly adding to my awkward collection of “chance music”. And though my box in the closet is dusty, there is a small part of me that still gets excited to hear what they will play next – sometimes while sitting in the car a little longer to do so. I sometimes use the iPod feature on my cell phone to shuffle through playlists while I’m getting ready in the morning. The shuffle feature makes it seem like it’s all happening by chance, and I admittedly pay a little too much attention to which song randomly hits my ears first each day – interpreting it as an omen for what’s to come or some special, individual cosmic message.
It’s a small comparison to how some of my friends describe their religious experiences. “It was as though the pastor knew exactly what I had been going through when he wrote the sermon.” I don’t have a strong religious background, but in some weird way, I treat the randomly selected songs I hear as some sort of confirmation of what’s going on or what could be going on. The child in me also likes the “here and now” of hearing something pleasing. Maybe it has to do with the music I hear while at work; everything is planned and mostly predictable, since I’m the teacher in the room guiding it. Though, the children’s reactions and energy they bring or don’t bring to the music I am guiding is usually unpredictable, making it worth the challenge of having a keen awareness to what they are perhaps nonverbally requesting. (In my next life, I will try radio programming…)
This is a lot of analyzing for something simple like the radio, but as we grow up, we slowly become accustomed to what is stable in our world and what seems fleeting. Things we mentally or emotionally organize as fleeting take on a much stronger vibe than things we know we can count on. It takes more and more effort or reflection for those stable things to feel quite as special. Birthdays and holidays begin to lose their real meaning for some, lost in commercialism or social expectations. Others are even afraid to admit when something is special out of a fear of seeming too simple-minded. We’re more selective of what we try to preserve and slowly take more things for granted, finding it “cute” when children are mesmerized by the common and uncomplicated. Perhaps it’s one reason why ticket prices for concerts have grown to be so expensive; if there’s a large price tag, it will seem worthy of dropping everything else in your life to simply enjoy some music in a focused way. We’re paying as much for an excuse to focus as we are for the entertainment aspect. The same is true of vacations; it takes an awful lot of money sometimes to give you an excuse to relax. Of course, every ying has its yang; not everything can be seen as amazingly unique, special, or worth fumbling for the video camera (we’ve all endured those long family videos…). Yet, I sometimes wish there was a freshly paved middle road, with a bridge between youth and what we have decided to over-complicate.
I’d bring my boom box.
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