Everyone Is Entitled To My Opinion- On Records Tapes and Memories
Dear Friends,
by Paul Big Bear
I have been trying to do something my wife has been asking me to do for a long time, de clutter my life. I have to admit that I have a lot of stuff to go through, shelves full of boxes stuffed with a huge collection of stuff from my childhood on; I started with music, 78 rpm’s near one hundred of them, albums (33 1/3) over six hundred,
45 rpm’s (more than I have been able to count many bought for a quarter from the guy who changed the music in the jukebox), 8 tracks (with two players) 38 of them, cassettes, one large bin full of them. I plan to digitize a lot of this music onto CD’s. Next I pulled out VHF videos, studio and home recordings; I’ll just say that I have eight six foot shelves full. Two vhf tape players, five DVD players, and six turn tables. Next I turned to books; from Uncle Wiggly that my mother read to me at bed time to books I read during summer when school was out (we traveled back to Gram’s house in the mountains where we had no TV or radio in the summer) so our entertainment consisted of about twenty 45’s and a small turn table, board games; Shute’s and Ladders, Monopoly, chess and checkers, and cards – Old Maid or Go Fish, or we read. Books that I bought at the end of the school year from the book club; for everyone I saved up and bought my other grandmother would buy me one, Boys Life Magazine and of course Comic Books (here is another huge bin filled with carefully preserved editions). All of these somehow managed to survive all these years in storage. One old footlocker held a real treasure trove, of army men, jeeps, tanks, and trucks included, cowboys and Indians with horses covered wagons and Tee Pees, many of them made of lead, yes we played with lead soldiers. I also found one of my old cap guns. An old scout knife complete with a fork and spoon for eating around the campfire (I’m sure that was washed thoroughly after each meal), my first pocket knife, my old slingshot with dry rotted rubber. Oh the treasures, the memories. Then I found a sturdy storage box filled with papers, homework, school test papers, essays, report cards, and letters that over the years I received from friends and family as we corresponded via the post office. Some were in envelopes bearing two cent stamps. As I sat amidst this museum of my past playing some old 45 records on a very old yet still working turn table, reading through these written messages of days long gone I began thinking of people from my past, those who were no longer with us and wondering about others that I lost touch with. Revisiting times, places, memories long forgotten.
That evening we went to dinner with some friends and as I sat chatting and eating I watched the young people around us, I’ll say in their twenties and under as they ate with what looked like a white mouse tail hanging out of their ears and I wondered who were they talking to and would they ever have any memory of this conversation. One younger member of our dinner group asked a trivia question and before I could answer they had the answer from their cell phone. I thought to myself so this is downsizing and I felt sad as I realized that the generations of young people now and to come will never know the thrill of revisiting their past, the memories surrounding each treasured piece of their history, all they will have, maybe, will be a white thing hanging out of their ear magically connected to a phone they never put down that will pull up anything they seek with no emotion, no thinking back to who they danced with when this song played or who did they have their arm around as they sat in the back row or in a drive in watching this movie. Will they ever know the thrill of reading a letter from a long forgotten “Pen Pal”.