Letting Go

This last weekend I had two things occur that directly recalled different elements of my childhood. The first was a recycling run. There was this stereo I had, formerly my mother’s, that had become inoperable (only the radio seemed to work and I had newer versions of those) and therefore a liability. I almost cringe when I use that word because of what that stereo meant to me as a kid. I bought my first album for that stereo. (Dark Side of the Moon, natch.) I spent hours sitting in front of that thing, both with and without headphones, pouring over lyrics and album credits as I tried to commit the words to memory. It was the stereo I first made mixed tapes on. (Yes kids, it was that long ago.) Not only did I record from albums using the tape deck, but I used an 8-track converter (ask your grandparents what an 8-track is) to record from tape to tape. (Years later of course they would come out with the tape-to-tape boomboxes and such, but this was a much more primitive time.) Sitting in front of that stereo is where I learned to appreciate Beethoven and Mozart, Ozzy and Judas Priest, Scottish pipes, Benny Goodman, and Wavestar. Then we come to now, and the chest that seemed to reveal so many secrets, offered me so much consolation in my teen years wasn’t working in even the smallest way. Since I had gone through purging some of my belongings in the last few years, it was fairly easy to decide to turn the stereo in at a special electronics recycling event. But I had to say goodbye to a part of my childhood. And, in a way, goodbye to my mother. She was the one that purchased the stereo. (So it was, in fact, hers, not mine, but I claimed possession anyway.) She purchased it to listen to her own albums: Beethoven, Benny Goodman, Brahms, Glenn Miller, and Puccini; all things she had grown up listening to. (I wonder if she didn’t sit on the living room rug listening to music as I did thirty years later?) I’m consoled with the knowledge that most of the albums (we’re talking albums here kids; big, black, grooved discs) I would have played on this stereo I now have in cd format or digital. And by the fact that I was able to give them to an electronics recycler and not have to defer to the expediency of happenstance. As for music, later that night I heard one of the tunes from my childhood, Seasons in the Sun by Terry Jacks. What a bittersweet, poignant tune. It reminded me of the time, as a kid, I would walk around with a transistor radio with an earphone (precursor to the earbud) and listen to tunes. In a way, that sad tune of a person dying and saying goodbye to those he loved, I was reminded that in most of life, we are presented with the best and the worst, with the beauty and the ugly, and it is merely our charge to discover within us which we choose to see. I see beauty. I can’t but help it.