Last week, I was listening to the radio in the car on Saturday morning, enjoying the return from retirement of a DJ I've been listening to since I left the womb, I think, Harry Harrison on WCBS FM in New York, the oldies station. When I was a kid I listened to the top 40 rock and roll stations in New York, WMGM, WMCA and WABC. Murray the K, Cousin Brucie, all those guys. I think that I came back home from college in 1973 and they were all gone, replaced by an FM station with all the same DJs, but now they called my music "oldies." It was the first step on the slippery slope to Codgerville. So I listen to the same music I've always listened to, but now I'm old.
Anyway, HH retired, it so happens, the week my father died in February 2002, so when I went back to work the next week and turned on the radio in the car on my way there, he was just gone. I only listen to the radio in the car, of course, because in the house I have a myriad of electronic goodies that are so much more entertaining than radio. Remember, this is a material world and I am .... okay, I'm a gadget girl, if not a material girl. I only listen to the radio in the house if there's a long power failure, and then it takes me forever just to find a radio.
Because I didn't have one. Oh sure, there's a radio in my alarm clock, but I don't need to sit there on the bed for hours just to catch up with HH (who has a great Saturday morning show now that he's back, during which he plays two hours of Beatles, mostly obscure Beatles, so I love that.) I grew up surrounded by radios; I remember my sister's first transister in the late fifties (it was the size of a hardcover book), and radio was really Jack's favorite medium, especially talk radio. He loved Barry Gray, who, I'm told, created the talk radio format in the late 40s or early 50s. Almost every night of his adult life, Jack fell asleep with a radio earplug in his ear, because he was an insomniac and it kept him entertained, but didn't wake up my mother. So here now I wanted to listen to HH on a Saturday morning after my car-based chores were done, and I didn't even have a radio.
You'd be amazed at how difficult it is to find what they used to call a "table radio", that is, one that doesn't clip onto your pocket and require headphones. A radio that sits on a shelf and plugs into a wall and you turn it on and everybody in the room can hear it. I figured if I was getting one, I wanted one that would look nice in the family room, too. I decided that what I wanted was a Crosley Cathedral radio, not a real one, a replica. My grandmother in New England had a real cathedral radio, but of couse, that's long gone. I discovered that unless I wanted to either spend a fortune or buy one online from a seller I never heard of, I wasn't getting one. They did have it on the Linens and Things website, but apparently don't carry them in the stores. I didn't want to order one and wait. All I really wanted to do was listen to the radio. Turns out it's way easier to just walk into an electronics store and buy a computer than it is to buy a radio. (And no, the station I wanted to listen to wasn't broadcast over the Internet, I checked that first. Only to AOL subscribers.)
Then I was browsing the aisles at Target, looking for cheap DVDs, probably, and I found my radio:
It's not a cathedral, but it is a replica of an old-style wooden radio -- except with a CD player under the lid :-( -- so it looks nice in the room and all. Here I am, TechnoGirl, with a nice old wooden radio. I feel all full circle-like.
--------------------------------------------------
I'm watching Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
--------------------------------------------------
last ::
next
Sweet Sorrow - 06.12.2007
So ... - 12.19.2006
Christmastime Is Near - 12.18.2006
Fifteen Years - 12.17.2006
A Message From Our Sponsor - 12.16.2006
|
