It's Called a Nano

 

      I have always loved music.  Years before I have true memories of my life, I loved music.  I  remember my Mom telling me stories about it.  When I was two there was a TV show with this violinist I used to be mesmerized by.  She told me how I watched him every day.  I wish I could remember his name... Myron Florian or something.

 

      I wanted to make music from the time I was very young but I lacked the drive to practice.  I played the saxophone, guitar, standing bass, and other instruments.  Unfortunately, I never became fluent.  How can you without practice?  And I loved to sing until one time when I recorded myself.  The song was "Witchcraft" by Frank Sinatra.  I put everything I had into it.  I was sure I was good.  Then I played it back; not even close!  I sang all the notes and all on key, but whatever it is that makes a voice beautiful was lacking.  That was a very sad day for me, to say the least.  My only future in music would be as a listener.

 

      When I was a little boy, I used to listen to music on my parents' phonograph.  It was electric and had one speaker, not one of those older crank types with the megaphone like my Grandma Dorothy had.  My first favorite record, a 78, was "Blueberry Hill" by Fats Domino.  (I'll bet most of you young people don't even know what a 78 is.)  I can't remember the flip-side or if it had a flip-side for that matter.  My Dad might remember.

 

      I grew up with a lot of singers and swingers; Frank, Tony, Dean, Sammy, Barbra, Glenn Miller, and Lou Rawls.  When I was about ten or so my parents bought a console stereo.  It was antique white with curly gold pin striping and looked like a low wide chest of drawers.  You would open the top and there was the phonograph.  They bought it so they could play the recent invention called the "33" or the "LP."  It was a "Long Playing" disc of pressed vinyl with many songs on one disk, unlike 78s that had only one song per side.

 

      Then it happened; The Beatles.  The first album I ever bought was "Meet the Beatles" in early 1964.  When I was ten years old I rode my bike all the way into town to the music store to buy it.  It was new and different and it was mine.  It was my music, not my parents' music.  My Mom would let me use the stereo all by myself.  I thought she was being nice but later I found out the truth.  She didn't want to hear it.

 

      For my sixteenth birthday I received my own small stereo.  It could be small because unlike my parents' stereo which used vacuum tubes, mine used transistors.  It had a phonograph and an AM/FM radio; FM Stereo!  That is where I discovered and explored the "new" music; the music of a revolution; ROCK!  The Beatles kept evolving and there was Jethro Tull, Cream, and Jimi Hendrix; my Dad hated Jimi Hendrix.  It had to be loud and he hated loud.  It was 1969 when I discovered headphones; volume without negative parental attacks.  My collection grew to nearly two hundred albums by 1980.

 

      At the time I graduated High School my parents were divorced.  It was 1971.  My Mom and my new Step-Dad bought me a car.  It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen; gold with a black vinyl top, a 1967 Pontiac LeMans with a 326 V8.  It was almost a GTO!  I immediately went to the car stereo store and had a new eight-track player installed with two big speakers in the doors and two more on the back deck under the rear window.  FAR OUT!  I got my first speeding ticket the very next day while listening, at ear bleeding volume levels, to the Doors "Morrison Hotel" album.  I couldn't hear the sirens and the cop claimed to have followed me for two miles.  That made him extra cranky as he wrote me a ticket for going 52 MPH in a 30 MPH zone.

 

      More than forty years have past since I bought my first record album.  Now I have all my favorite music, the Beatles, Frank, Jimi, and Glenn in digital music files on my computer.  LPs are almost gone.  CDs are still widely used but their time may soon be up.  Digital is here!

 

      I won a contest at work and was presented with a 2 GB Apple iPod Nano.  A true mastery of the integrated circuit, this little digital music box can hold over 300 songs and it is as small as a box of Chiclets!  That's as much music as 30 LPs!  And Apple makes another iPod that can hold 9000 songs and even videos!  I understand how it all works and the engineering but it still amazes me.  I picture that old console stereo that my parents had, compared to my little Nano that gets lost in my shirt pocket.  I love it!  That portable CD player is clumsy and obsolete... chuck it!

 

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