Whoosh whoosh

 When the kids were little, there was a very restricted set of music that was palatable to all of us - Dan Zanes, Woody Guthrie, Mike and Peggie Seeger... whether in the car or around the house. Actually, not much has changed, but that's a topic for another post.

In any case, at least one of our cars didn't have a CD player, so I was still making tapes. Since we knew all the songs by heart, I didn't label the tapes by artist and album name, as one often does. Instead, I used the shorthand names by which we refer to them: "Hijee Heejee Hojee", "Farm Animal Friends" and so on. As we got Natalie ready to go North last week we were giving her some CDs to play in the Subaru, since it can't connect to a phone and I was also looking at what remains of our tape collection, which is of course Mary's tapes, because I threw all of mine out when we left Princeton. I saw all the old tapes and the songs started springing forth in my memory, just like back in the day. Except one. "Whoosh whoosh." What is it? I have no idea.

Luckily, we still have a cassette deck in the house, so I popped it in there. But the tape is so old and hasn't been played in so long that it just freezes up, taunting me mercilessly. I have tried gently trying to nudge the tape mechanism forward by turning it with a pencil, a trick remembered from the old days. No luck just yet. One thing I haven't done is search on the interweb or YouTube for tricks to use in this situation. I'll bet there are some.

But the higher order point is this. Our media serve as extensions or prostheses of our memory, but they are only as good as the reference apparatus used. All the music in the world may be available to us on this or that streaming service, but if we can't remember what it is we want to listen to, it's no good. That's why I like physical books and bookshelves, because they remind me of what I've read. It's also why having a good filing system, whether of physical files or digital ones, is key to being able to find things you archive.

I had some other point when I started but I can't remember what it was. But I would really like to hear the song "Whoosh whoosh" again.