Note that the manufacturer of these cassettes is Kmart. The best place to shop on a Friday night after my dad took us to supper (yes, supper. We ate supper then. Lunch was called dinner. It's a confusing concept to my husband who was raised in a upstate NY. He's never had supper until he married me, and to avoid confusion, I gave up saying what we'd have for dinner because he was expecting meals at times I had no intention of cooking them.) I can only wager a guess that a great portion of my $5/week allowance went towards the purchase of 60 and 90 minute blank cassette tapes for my tape recorder that I got for Christmas when I was in seventh grade.
Except it didn't. It looked like this. I remember because of the high tech record and play button combination. When play was pressed, the small orange button remained in the up position. While recording, the orange button was pushed down as well.
I'd often been asked what was the best gift you'd ever received. I think thoughtfully, as one should do, and I'd say something like my children, or meeting my husband. Maybe I'd wax romantically and say it was my first engagement ring that my husband bought before we ever laid eyes on one another (that's another long story for another time). I'd like a do-over on all those answers because that Panasonic tape recorder, hands down, was the greatest gift EVER.
It strikes me what a different era this was. When photos were taken, you didn't just randomly point and shoot as we do now with digital cameras and cell phones. No, it cost money - to buy film and have them developed. Photo ops were few and far between. Of course, there is photographic evidence that I did have a childhood. My family didn't do the home movie thing, and again, there was an expense to that as well. I know some people who have home movies, but in most, there's an underlying theme of conserving film just in case something more important happened that needed to be saved for posterity.
My tape recorder and a blank tape afforded me the luxury to capture moments, that for all practical purposes, didn't necessarily need to be preserved for posterity. I'd hit record, oftentimes unbeknownst to my friends who were being recorded at the time. So, I broke the law and didn't know it. Had I known you were to inform someone they were being recorded, I probably would have lied awake at night waiting on the FBI to show up and haul me off to the pokey. Copyright infringement would be the other crime I could be charged with because I recorded TV shows by holding my recorder up to the TV. Why it was important to have audio of "The Muppet Show" or the "Solid Gold" escapes me a little now. But, again, it was a different time. VCRs were a technology still a few years out.
One tape snippet I've listened to at least a dozen times. It was a sleepover, and my best friend was staying the night. The tape recorder set in the background capturing a moment that was neither spectacular or noteworthy. We talked about boys. We talked about what we did that day. We giggled. A lot. My dog at the time was a Bassett Hound named Bosley. He was the greatest dog EVER, but that's a story for another time. Wherever there were kids, this hound could be found. And naturally, this meant Bosley had joined in on the sleepover festivites.
By joining in, this meant he was trying to snag an empty sleeping bag or pillow for his own. He must have crawled between us because the conversation focused on him for a good bit of time trying to convince him to just lie down and go to sleep.
"Go to sleepy time, Bosley dog," I coaxed to him. I was somewhere around the tender age of 12, but I spoke to him as if he were my human baby.
And then, I started singing to him. "Go to sleep my baby, my baby, my baby." My friend joined the lullaby and we both sang to Bosley.
Either he fell asleep, or we forgot it was our mission to lull him into slumber, because we both got up to do something and ditched the poor pooch. Walking and banging around on something is heard in the background. My friend and I both come back, giggle over something, and go about getting the dog back into the position we preferred.
"Bosley, you're in my seat. Can I sit with you, Bosley dog?" my friend asks him. "You're a good boy letting me sit with you." A few moments of silence pass, and then she says, "You're a stinky dog. You know that? You stink. Why am I letting you sit with me when you smell bad? Kelly, why am I hugging your dog?"
I'm still at a loss to explain how exactly listening to these recordings impacted me. I'd thought of Bosley many times since then. I've thought about our countless sleepovers and how we amused ourselves by making recordings. Sometimes, we'd even use them as blackmail if someone happened to confess which boy was the cutest or who'd we like to kiss. They're the closest I come to having home movies of my youth, and I'm reminded of a time that wasn't perhaps simpler, but my life was much simpler. There's something about my dog partaking in the moment that's left me a little melancholy, perhaps.
I spent way too many hours listening to these treasures from the past. I'm still not done. One hour in, though, I reached the conclusion that I was thankful for three things - that I stopped giggling incessantly, that I stopped recording myself singing, and for the technological advances since the early 80s.
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