The folks pulling old computers out of the closet based on Steve’s passing jogged a memory loose.
We have a car we bought in 1998. It’s got a 12 disk cd changer in the trunk with music from 1998-2000…we just never got around to swapping them out after switching to iPod like devices.
I have a much older Weekend play car and got to wondering if the cassette tape player still worked. Sorting about the house, all I could find was a tape with Duran Duran on one side, and Information Society on the other. Not only did the player work, playing both sides automatically, the tape was in pretty good shape. The only complaint I had was that Duran Duran sounded about 10% too fast.
We lost touch for a long time. Both of us got married, yada yada yada.
Fate sort of brought us back together. I had a meeting at her place of work, and thought she would probably be in it. So I called her.
That was about 3-4 years ago. Now, even though we live pretty far away from each other, we try to get together about once a month. It’s been great. It’s really like stepping into a time machine.
In 1986, I bought a Beastie Boys tape, and put it in my 1985 Pontiac Firebird. Then, in 1988, I moved it into my new Daytona Shelby. In 1994, it went into my Subaru Legacy. In 1996, it went into my Mustang GT. In 2000, it moved into my Dodge Dakota. It sat in that truck for 11 years. It was lost somewhere in the truck. I forgot to dig it out.
So… I just cleaned the truck out a few weeks ago and put it up for sale. I couldn’t find the tape. I would have sworn it was in that truck for years, stuck in a seat or something.
I sell the Dakota truck earlier this week and the buyer calls me to tell me he found a tape in it. I meet him to get my old tag and the tape and it’s the Beastie Boys tape! But… I replaced my Dodge Dakota with a new Ram… and the new Ram doesn’t have a cassette player.
So a few days ago, I saw the end of an era: For 25 years, I have been driving around with a Beastie Boys tape, and even listened to it occasionally to bring back memories of being 18 years old. But new cars don’t come with cassette players… so the run is over…
But wait! My wife decides that we should buy a little commuter car and I wind up with a 2002 Toyota Celica (as of yesterday!)… and it’s got a cassette player in it! In goes the tape, in its 26th year of service, and sounds like it never went flat, or lost an iota of tone… and I am in a time warp, courtesy of my little Toyots Celica GTS time machine.
I hung out with my best friend from elementary school last weekend. We drifted apart in middle school and then she moved before high school.
While I still hang out with most of my people from high school, she never really knew those guys. So this weekend she spent a lot of time talking about people from elementary and middle school, people I haven’t thought about in years.
A few years ago, I was in my parents attic when I found my big case of tapes I recorded off the radio. So not only do I get great 80’s mix tapes, but I get the DC radio station tags from the DJs at the start and end of each song. Specifically, WAVA, DC101, and Q107 (NOT WMZQ).
Sigh. Mix tapes. Did y’all have that one acquaintance who was a little odd, didn’t listen to a song all the way through, and gave you a mix tape of people you’d never heard of, and it was the best thing ever?
(and do you remember high speed tape to tape dubbing?)
