Tinny Speaker

Mosquitos are out in force tonight. Blood is being shed as I try to focus and get something down. At the end of my blood splotched arm sits my cell phone. Lying there on the glass table top the black rounded rectangle is playing the Lucy Kaplansky station on Pandora.  Of course I could play the very same station on the tiny stereo speakers on my laptop but that would be too complicated right now.  Far enough away from the house the Wi-Fi gets kind of dicey. I still have unlimited data so I am going to use the 4G. I want to make sure I get uninterrupted sound right now.  Buffering is a mood breaker.

Hearing the monaural mix playing out of the tiny iPhone speaker brings me back to a different time.  If I close my eyes I am in such a different place.  Suddenly eight year old myopic me is heading down south to visit my grandmother.  With that car nearly flying we were headed to Horry County. Bouncing in shorts in the front of an old American boat of a car I am listening to the radio. Funny the delivery of sound then and at this moment have certain similarities.

Sometimes I remember riding in the middle of the front seat of a Ford Galaxy 500 travelling down U.S. 301.  Some distance south of the Mason-Dixon Line the telephone poles with their faint green glass insulators fly by.  The old man might be talking about safety, he hated old three lane highways and railroad crossing without warning lights. My brother and sister might be squabbling.  It might have been 1963, the car might have been a Galaxie and I might have been seven but we were rolling.  One thing was sure my brother was longing for some serious southern fireworks.

But I am not really remembering anyone else in the car. Also it not so much the sights of the green world flying by I remember.  What I have pulled from storage because this little speaker is playing beside me is a dashboard image. I am looking at the chrome knobs and buttons of that a.m. radio that sat dead ahead of me when I rode in the center spot.

Through a tiny speaker on the dash came my favorite songs, the sing along tunes that would be played repeatedly on Top 40 stations until we got down below Richmond.  Songs like Puff the Magic Dragon and I’m Henry the VIII would come on. At the first strum I would know the song and then I got to sing at the top of my lungs much to the chagrin of my much older siblings in the car.  Sometimes Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction would come on and the old man would twist the dial and change the station. Damn commie music. There are some other phrases that might have flown out right then but I shall opt not to remember those now.

It was important to get as much of this music as I could early on in the trip. Once you got south of Richmond all you got were farm reports, the price of tobacco and the like or serious twang. Today that hard old country twang, think George Jones singing White Lightning or anything in the Jim Reeves catalog would be music to my ears, not so much then. Sometimes on that tinny speaker the further down you went there were trading shows.  In a thick old time North Carolina accent can’t you just hear Bob in Wilson (home of Parker’s Barbeque) who has a set of barely used white walls asking if anybody would want to trade for a full sized bed and a chest of drawers?

But what I remember is the music or the news came out of that centered little speaker. No matter what else happened in that car we all had one ear open and focused on what the radio waves were bringing us. The windows were down and the air was hot.  In 1964 the old man wasn’t ready to pop for air conditioning even if it might have been an option. The people in the back seat wanted the sound turned up because of the roar of the air going by on that old U.S. highway drowned out the radio if it was set too low.  The people in the front seat, the more senior members in the car were not of like mind. 

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Was it there my radio ear was created? I spent the next several decades listening for the next cool song, the next thing that would spark my aural imagination.  I don’t know but I remember begging whoever was sitting next to me in the passenger seat to turn the knob to see if we could catch one of those songs I loved before it was too late.