radio

I don't listen to the radio much except for when I'm at home. In addition to the perfect temperature of the sun, and the easy wide roads, and the hills, the radio is why I love driving in the Bay Area. Besides the current pop (it was unexpectedly satisfying to crank up "California Gurls" in California), the stations here take me back to junior high dances and even further back to playing in the aisles of my dad's store with nineties soft rock in the background, and to being driven around by my brothers in their eighties cars to the tunes of eighties new wave. I blast a lot of bad, catchy music. It's stuff I never hear elsewhere, stuff that I haven't heard in years, like old school Mase (words I still know) or that one beautiful Donna Lewis song (I Love You Always Forever) that made me buy the entire album but only listen to that one song. Now that I've sold that CD away years before iTunes import was invented, the only time I might ever come across the song again is by chance on the kind of radio station they use at the dentist, the kind of station programmed in the car along with pop, hip hop and oldies.

It was in this house and in this place that I listened to my first radio, sometime in elementary school. The beer and cigarette companies my dad would purchase his store's goods from would send him little gifts with their brands all over them, like bags and cups and one time, a radio. It was from Camel cigarettes. It was a blue and yellow handheld radio, in a rectangular shape, with a camel on it, and an antenna. I sat on the carpet of my parents' bedroom, turned it on, and became mesmerized for the next four hours. I heard the same top forty songs cycled through the afternoon, and it's my first memory of discovering music. I became familiar with the concept of a radio station, and especially when I've been away for a long time, the pureness of that discovery comes back when I drive here to the radio. There's something about all this that makes nostalgia fresh, and the layers of everything around so light without losing substance. And it's just fun to dance and sing loudly, badly, and honestly in the car.