The More Things Change

The other night, in the midst of a deep sleep, I heard a whisper from above. “Mama,” the voice said. “Mama, wake up!” I opened one eye, and there was Blue, peering down at me with an intense gaze. “Mama, I can’t sleep,” he said.

“Huh,” I muttered.

“MAMA,” he said more firmly, with a hint of impending whine. “Did you hear me? I can’t sleep!”

Because I was so tired, I let him into our bed. That is always a mistake. Two seconds later, he was breathing heavily, his enormous head taking up the better part of my pillow. And I was the one who could no longer sleep.

I gathered some blankets and headed to the couch, already feeling the mounting anxiety about being tired and grumpy the next day. Once my brain engages, it’s hard to turn it off. And my thoughts often turn to all the things I haven’t done, and all the potential horrible events that could possibly happen, and how I wish that I had said X instead of Y to that guy in history class back in high school.

I tried to steady myself, to focus on something neutral. I decided to think about record albums. You see, my dad brought me a big bag of my old records that had been taking up space in his basement for the past 20 years. Strangely, the bag did not include any of the good ones I purchased back in the day; instead, it contained ones like this:




This Shaun Cassidy album is the first album I ever sought out myself. I wanted a Shaun Cassidy album because everyone else had one. In particular, Maureen O’Reilly, who was just a tad cooler than I was, told me that I had to get one. She had a poster of him that came with her Dynamite magazine, and she put it on her wall just high enough that she could tip her head back and kiss the image of his lips.

So I was pretty pleased with myself for acquiring this album, because it meant that I was entering the outer reaches of cool. But, to my dismay, this did not turn out to be the album that featured his hit cover of Da Do Ron Ron. It wasn’t cool after all, and neither was I.

When my dad brought in the bag of albums, Blue and Green asked, “What are those?” They had never seen a record and had no idea what the purpose of such a thing would be, especially since we don’t own a record player. To them, a record is just a black frisbee in a funny case.

This got me thinking about all the antique objects that linger on in my memory and in my language. I say “printer ribbon” instead of “cartridge.” I talk about leaving a message “on your machine” instead of on voicemail. I say “turn the channel” as if there’s still a knob on the TV that you have to twist.

Michael, too, has his retro moments. Right now, he has a message on his cellphone that cracks me up every time I hear it. He says, “I wasn’t able to make it to the phone, so please leave a message after the beep.” What, were you so busy playing Strat-O-Matic on the orange shag carpet that you couldn’t sprint to the kitchen to answer the wall-mounted phone? No, dude, you just have to reach down into your jeans pocket, so why is it so hard to “make it to the phone?”

The other day Polaroid announced that it was no longer going to manufacture its signature film. In a world where everything is already instant, who still needs to wait three minutes for their Polaroid picture to emerge from the photographic darkness? Apparently there was a mad rush on Polaroid film when this announcement was made. Lots of kooky folks were clamoring to extend the life of their now useless toy.

You all know that my garage is full to the brim with similar dinosaurs. There are car seats from 6 years ago --- obsolete! There’s my typewriter from college – obsolete! There’s a Sharp Wizard from the 1990s – obsolete! And there’s this:



This was the “stereo” that I brought with me to my freshman year of college. It was very cutting edge – a dual cassette player that could easily whip out mix tapes to suit my adolescent moods. My roommate and I agreed that we would share things – I could use her tiny refrigerator, and she could use my stereo. Of course, what that meant was that I had to hear her Erasure tape played on a continuous loop for an entire year. Over and over and over.

But you know, my freshman experience would have been so different if she and I had been plugged separately into our respective iPods. I would have experienced my academics differently if I could have emailed my professors my papers instead saving my drafts on enormous old floppy disks, taking the disks to the computer lab to print, and then running at breakneck speed to the departmental office by 5 pm to get them in on time. There were things – like going to the travel agent to buy plane tickets or waiting desperately by the dorm mailboxes for REAL LETTERS from faraway friends – that gave texture and shape to my life.

It’s so easy, now that I have kids, to talk about “the olden days.” You know, how I had to walk to school barefoot in the snow without any music to listen to because my Walkman was broken. The boys have already learned how to roll their eyes at those stories. Blue asked me the other day to tell him the year I was born. Then he said that if I were a ferry boat, I would be out of service. That’s me, out in the garage with the typewriter and the Polaroid camera. Obsolete!