Two summers ago, during an already-dark time for me, I lost a dear companion: my CD player. (It could have been worse. It could have been my turntable. Let’s not even go there.)
It wasn’t just an oh-darn materialistic inconvenience – this thing was a workhorse. It’s strange to think of anything with LCD displays as “antique,” but my CD player had history.
In the early Bush (Senior) years, I DJed my way through grad school and broke my girlfriend’s Discman at a gig. Chivalry demanded an upgrade, so I bought her a 1992 Sony five-disc changer. Five discs! It was hard to fathom such luxury.
Over the following decades, that player moved across the country and back again, and then back again; it had been wired into (and outlived) three equalizers and two amplifiers in three apartments, two condos, and five houses. Several thousand different discs, spinning for tens of thousands of hours at several hundred RPM? No matter how you slice it, that’s a lot of miles. And now…nothing.
I turned to my wife – she had been that girlfriend, all those years ago – and asked for a ride to the stereo repair shop. Well, first I said a few unprintable things. Then I asked.
Earlier that spring, “labs” led to “scans” led to “procedures” led to “treatment options.” By summertime I maintained emotional distance while my body was failing and my hair falling out, but having to face the mortality of this trusty piece of stereo equipment was too much.
“We can’t repair these,” the shopkeeper told me. Something to do with laser-tracking. “Too much work to get ‘em back in shape.”
I knew how that felt.
But he took our Sony as a trade-in on a used player that didn’t fit my shelf quite right, but once properly inaugurated (every new component since my first boom box in 1979 gets christened with The Who’s By Numbers) worked just fine.
Fast forward to winter 2025. Cleaner bills of health and my hair only comes out when I tear at it in frustration. Which I am right now, at my writing desk, next to another CD player, one that has conked out. Not dead, but acting up, just sporadically enough to annoy me, like a flickering light across the street or a sneeze that just won’t come.
This one is just a black box. There’s no barely-interesting story behind it; it holds no real value, sentimental or otherwise. Truth is, I’m far less sentimental about “things” than I used to be. If that’s not a side effect of chemo, it should be. I am more emotional though. (That car commercial where they find the lost dog? Every time I watch it, I wonder why the ending is so blurry. Every. Time.)
Some may call me a denialist to spin music instead of streaming it; I prefer to think of myself as “steadfast.” Trouble is, subscriptions are getting cheaper and hardware is not. New CD players once sold for hundreds of dollars before plummeting below the cost of a box set, but now, no longer ubiquitous, are back up to hundreds of dollars. More than I can justify spending on backup background music.
The local Goodwill had been picked clean, so I checked in with the gang at the repair shop.
“Yeah, we got an old Sony. Some surface scratches but plays fine.” The woman on the phone quoted a price right at the tipping point where it’s almost worth it to buy a new one.
I characteristically dragged my heels, arguing with myself for a few days. Then one morning, waiting for an elevator with my wife, talking about weekend plans or grocery lists or something, it hit me like an ice cream headache. Everything locked into place.
An old Sony? I called back. The clerk confirmed: a 1992 Sony five-disc changer.
They did it! They fixed my old player!
This only amplified my inner debate. Why pay a hundred bucks to get my old stuff back? Alternatively, if they’d quoted that price two summers ago to restore my old friend and told me when I got it back I’d be relatively healthy, happy, and successful, that I’d have energy and optimism….Well, that sounds like a deal.
Life doesn’t have an Undo button, but this felt a little like a reset. A restoration. Providence.
Maybe I am getting sentimental.
My eyes lit up as soon as I saw it on the shop’s racks: That surface scratch matched exactly where my old equalizer clawed across its top. The consumer protection label on its side – faded from where it sat under the TV next to the living room window.
“I think,” I was almost giddy, “I think this is my old Sony.” I told her my story and she shook her head.
“Probably not, the guys in back won’t touch these. Too much work.” Something about laser-tracking.
I asked her to check the provenance, but they’d recently updated their computers. She insisted it wasn’t mine. I knew better.
I brought it to my workspace, patched it in, and cued up “Slip Kid.” Air-drummed a bit.
Scratched up, scarred, washed-out and dented; none of that is as important as function. Anything can be fixed. When the experts say it can’t, that’s only because they haven’t figured out how yet.
It’s a small victory, sure, but I’m sitting here with pen in hand admiring the player and the impossible journeys we’ve taken.
But you know how when you look at something every day, you stop noticing things? And then suddenly you notice a detail and wonder how you could have missed it? For example, I swear there didn’t used to be a big ol’ button labeled “Time Edit” just underneath the display….
Image by Thomas Breher via Pixabay
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