Saturday, August 14
Same turntable, 29 years later…
My 18 year old son Matthew checked into his dorm room yesterday at the University of Tennessee, Hess Hall. He is a freshmen in the music program there at UT.
This is our second child to go to college. Our son Michael is entering his third year of architecture, also at UT.
I’m not sure this drop off was more or less traumatic to my wife and I than the first. I do know that it didn’t help that Toy Story 3 , released this summer, was all about Andy going away to college and what was going to happen to his toys. That in itself is enough, but what you may not know is that as kids, when the first Toy Story came out, it was very obvious that each of our sons identified personality-wise very definitively with the two main characters: Michael was Woody & Matthew was Buzz, no doubt about it.
Well, needless to say, volume 3 of Toy Story didn’t necessarily make this drop off any easier…
Anyway, while packing up Matthew’s stuff in my car I noticed he was taking with him the Technics Turntable he’s been playing albums on the past few months. He’s begun collecting different classic albums to play on the turntable as well as some of my old records.As I loaded the turntable in the car I remembered that this turntable is actually the same exact turntable that I packed up in August of 1981 and drove to college and unpacked in MY dorm room. (It’s also the same turntable that Scott Cunningham left my “Journey- Escape” album on for a couple of days with the hot sun shining through the dorm window that left it melted. Not that I’m bitter or anything…)
It was quite an odd feeling seeing him set that turntable up in his dorm room now 29 years later. (I made sure he knew not to sit it near the window, and told him never to lend an album to anyone named Scott Cunningham)
This realization on my part, about the turntable, tells me at least a couple of important things:
One, some things in life change so much, so rapidly, so quickly, and they are not even close to the way they were years ago. Other things, not so much.
And secondly, evidently I bought a really high quality turntable some 29 years ago…
Mark Nelson at 5:54 PM 0comments