Morning Music

This morning on my bike ride into the office my MP3 player clicked over to an album I haven’t heard in the longest time! What memories! There are a number of things that strongly evoke an emotional memory response; tastes, smells, and music are three of the strongest for me.

Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass were playing. I purposely elongated my ride, taking a turn down a wrong street in the village, to give me a few extra minutes so that I could hear the end of "So What's New?" before having to get into the office.

My parents had all the Herb Alpert albums when I was growing up and I can remember sitting listening to the albums in the living room on evenings when there was nothing good on the television.

Not that I remember watching all that much television, there were the standards of course, we had to watch Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and The Wonderful World of Disney. But I really remember listening to those albums.

We had an old console stereo system that sat for years in the living room, just inside the front door, to the right of the coat closet. It was a huge thing, one side folded open to display the record player, the other to show the radio controls. Either end was a built-in stereo speaker with gold cloth grilles with fleck of gold foil entwined in the fabric. The center had doors that concealed the storage for the LPs. That is they would have had we ever been able to actually store all the LPs that my parents had in the center area!

At the holidays, mother would decorate the top of the console with little Christmas-y knickknacks and Christmas cards from relatives. The rest of the year, as is common with any horizontal surface in a household that has four children, the stereo became a collection point for the various detritus from the day; school books, sweaters, jackets, and other assorted odds-and-ends tended to collect in gravity defying configurations on the top of the stereo.

Strange, the things you remember! In later years, my parents erected a room divider between the living room and the dining room that had shelves for storage of knickknacks, dishes, and a compact stereo unit. The old console stereo moved to the south wall of my parents bedroom where it stayed for the rest of our residency in the house on SW 122nd Avenue. Oddly enough, it served exactly the same purpose in their bedroom that it had in the foyer: collecting a ponderous pile of proportions impossible to convey. Suffice it to say that it was the nearest thing to a mountain that part of South Florida could boast!

Well, I'm in the office now, but am going to put on my recordings of Herb Alpert again to listen to the entire album now. It just won't be the same without the pops and hisses. I wonder if I could devise a method of adding realistic pops and hisses back to MP3 files (preferably as a digital affects filter that one can turn on and off so as to not permanently affect the recording on the file itself) so as to make the listening experience even more nostalgic! Hmmm...

I hope that wherever you are today, your day is filled with making or enjoying memories. (...or, indeed, both!)

Don Bergquist - 14 December 2006 - Thames Ditton, Surrey, UK