Music In The House

When I was a child my parents had a "Hi-Fi" stereo in our den.   It had a radio and a record player and many evenings and on weekends it would be loudly playing music out into the living room and onwards into the dining room.   When I was very young the only thing the stereo played was classical music. that being the only type of music I have ever heard my father listen to.

I think, for some reason, I believed parents liked classical music and that it was something children grew into as they became adults.   My mother never chose to have the music she preferred on the stereo.   She loved gospel music and sometimes we'd sing gospel songs she and my aunt would teach my cousin and me on long road trips to visit my grandparents.

As a child, I preferred pop music.  Our cars listened to the radio stations local to our area and I picked up on the latest pop songs from being in the car.  Later on, I got one of those boom boxes that became popular in the early '80s and was able to play music I preferred.   My boom box was rather small and didn't have the big "boom" of large speakers.   That was fine with me since I valued compactness over sheer volume.

My little portable stereo had cassette players—two so I could play something and record at the same time.   This was a rarely used feature, but it did allow me to confirm some backward masking when it was all the rage in later years.

My parent's stereo and the classical music it played sometimes had intrusions of other music.   When Star Wars came out we got the double record album set.  Many a night I would play the Star Wars records, looking forward to my favorite song, "Cantina Band."  I remember a Shaun Cassidy album we danced to and then there was Barbara Streisand, a favorite of both my parents.

My father added an 8-track player at some point.   We only ever had a few 8-track tapes from my recollection.  One of them was a comedy set from a radio announcer who's last name was Spooner.   He would call people and do what today would be called "pranking" by calling them with some outrageous story that always ended with, "you've just been Spoonerized!"

Today, my father still loves classical music and my mother enjoys listening to gospel singing.   They also still have the same HiFi system in their house, including (I believe) the record player.   After fifty years, I'm betting its an antique now.

The Big Boy Update:  My son has been all about Harry Potter since shortly before the Disney trip.  Today, before home school started, he was watching one of the Harry Potter movies.   I recently got him a funny little plush that gets angry, yells and shakes violently when you poke him or move him around enough.  He named Grumbledore as a nod to the Hogwarts headmaster from Harry Potter.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter likes to peel and core an apple and then eat the spiraled center area.   I challenged her to eat the peel in one long piece as I wound it off the apple.   She stood over the trashcan until she was sure she could eat, matching my peeling pace.  It was the single largest (longest) apple piece she'd ever had.  Next time we're going for speed eating and faster peeling.