I remember when I used to listen deeply to my music

I remember when I used to listen deeply to my music. Back when I had the time to do anything I cared about deeply, which was very near the Christmas before I turned 15. My parents, long ago divorced but still immature in every sense of the word, set me up with a wicked sound system any freshman would have envied in the early 90s. For one thing, I had a CD player. A CD player! My mom and stepdad apparently got this great 2 for 1 deal at Sam’s Club, and I was the lucky recipient of the “2”. The receipt of the CD player (which I personally believe to be the first CD player in the greater Grant County area) created two problems: 1) it was JUST a CD player. No speakers, no way to hook it up to my miserable excuse for a boom box and 2) my mom and stepdad had just showed up my dad and stepmom on Christmas. That meant war.

Luckily for my ridiculously competitive sets of parents, my birthday is in mid-January. This allows for an annual celebration of one-upmanship conveniently commemorated on or near the anniversary of my birth. In my adult mind, this seems a little elementary. However, on the cusp of 15, playing mom against dad to score more loot didn’t seem like a half-bad idea. And so, knowing the woe of not having what I needed to use such a thoughtful (and obviously expensive!) gift, my dad passed down his receiver, speakers, and best of all, expensive Sony headphones. The headphones radiated luxury – soft black spongy pads that covered each ear, wrapped in velvety leather that completely enveloped my ears. I remember Dad showing me how to store the headphones: don’t wrap the cord; you don’t want to kink the wires. Make sure you unplug the phones from the jack when you are done; you don’t want to trip over the phones and strip it out of the connection. Put the headphones out of reach; I don’t want to see your little sister using them, they are for your use only.

With my new setup, I was inspired to start a music collection. The idea of a music collection reached critical mass when I realize that while I had the best stereo in the 9th grade, but no one had thought to buy me a single CD to spin on it. In a town of 1100, I couldn’t just head down to the corner record store for a good alternative rock recommendation. 40 minutes away, even the closest discount store didn’t really carry CDs yet – after all, it was still a luxury to have a tape deck in your car. And, let’s get real – I was 15 years old, just starting in driver’s ed, and there wasn’t much hope for me getting to a real city anytime soon under my own powers.

Then, while reading Peanuts one Sunday morning, the answer fluttered out of the Star Tribune advertisements like a direct-mail answer to prayer. BMG music service: 12 CDs for the price of 1, nothing more to buy, ever. Ideal.

Fast-forward through the angst of my selections and the secrecy of getting my initial club membership past my stepmother (the mail nazi) and allowing for an appropriate amount of mailing time. I came home from school one February afternoon to find a large corrugated cardboard package in my name sitting on the dining room table. After facing a litany of scrutinizing inquisitions from the stepmother who so obviously spent a past life as a chaste, angry, repressive elementary-school-teaching Sister, I assumed possession of my very first compact discs.

Prying open that first unmarked package was utter magic. It had been snowing that morning, and I could tell where snowflakes had landed on my box. Little bits of moisture still pock-marked my precious cargo’s packaging, awakening the woody scent of a package left outside to absorb the chilly winter air. Like a puppy with a new rawhide, I dashed to my most secret place, my private indoor treehouse – the 2nd floor of our home, of which I was the sole occupant.

Ignoring the invoice (for that day, at least), I was careful to pull each CD out of the package and smooth the cellophane enveloping them. I studied the artwork, the photography, the tracklists on each disc. It seemed almost sacrilege to open them; though I would never enjoy the sound of my new stereo without a disc in the player, the smooth perfection of an unblemished CD was nearly too much delight for a marooned city girl to bear.

My first selection could not have been anything else but U2’s Achtung Baby. Having committed the entire cassette to memory while push-mowing our triple lot that was now buried outside under the snowbanks, I wanted nothing more than to compare the sound of the cassette emblazoned in my heart, mind and soul to the promise of a vastly improved musical experience on the “new system”.

I flipped on my receiver; the stainless steel front plate lit up and the needles monitoring the treble, bass, and volume jumped to life. Pressed the power button on the black, sleek brush finish of the CD player. A digital readout blinked “NO CD”. Pressed open/close. The tray of the player slowly slid out to greet me: CLIKSSHHHT. I look down at Achtung Baby. Same artwork as the cassette, but somehow clearer, more powerful: just plain cooler. I slid my flimsy fingernail down the spine of the case, splitting the cellophane in two. Round like an apple, I peeled my CD, revealing an unblemished jewelcase as smooth and reflective as a lake before the loons take their morning swim. It took me a moment to discern how to open the case; once mastered, it took a few more moments to understand how to extract the disc from its circular resting place. After several attempts at prying the edges loose, I inadvertently stuck my thumb in the middle of the hole in the case, turned the case upside down, and watched the CD slide down my finger like an absurd crackerjack prize.
Eureka! I took just a breath or two to admire the screen-printing on the face of the CD; similar to the jacket artwork but stunningly enough, printed on the ACTUAL DISC. On the flipside, a silver rainbow contained my 12 favorite songs in an entirely different medium. I nestled my first CD in its tray and gently pressed it in: SSHHHTCLIK. One blink on the CD player: 12 songs, 52:48. How. Cool. I won’t even have to flip from side A to B.

One final decision: speakers or headphones? I consider the speakers facing me: large, paneled in wood-grain, they would certainly make a joyful floor-shaking noise, but this was during business hours, which meant that loud music would almost certainly meant interrupting one of my stepmom’s TV shows. That settled it: headphones. I reached to my keepsake shelf and pulled the buttery black leather to my ears. Plugging them into the receiver, I curled up in the nap of my bedroom’s mossy carpet. Pressed PLAY. Closed my eyes. Waited for the chasm of silence to end as the player read my disc.

Then, suddenly, in the twilight of my unlit bedroom, rough-hewn guitar washed over my eardrums and through my brain. The downbeat traveled down each nerve and into the tip of each ending. My pulse became the pulse of the trap set and my lungs expanded and emptied in time with the bass guitar. Suddenly I couldn’t imagine why any of my friends might want to attend a keg party when I could get drunk on the rock and roll tumbling around in my soul.