12.17.02 stereo

When he was fourteen years old, Byron worked as a dishwasher at the Wheatridge Dairy to save up money for a stereo. He bought it, finally, at age fifteen, and then added a cd component when he was in college.

The cd broke around the time we started dating in 1992. The stereo itself has traveled with us through all of our moves, and for the better part of the last ten years it has been broken: the tape player didn't work, the stereo needle was dirty, the speaker cord is a spliced piece of phone wire.

Most people would have given up on the thing long ago, but the image of a gangly young Byron riding his bicycle across the suburbs of Denver in the night, scrubbing pots and pans, back and forth motion through two summers, kept the machine in a place of prestige in our family. Last summer, it was the first piece we moved to Seattle; it required a special trip, Byron and Chris driving the machine and cords and albums up ahead of the rest of the furnishings.

We bought a needle and Byron cleaned it and put it together and we listened to our Don Ho albums, our import singles. But we both assumed, with no research, that it would be too difficult or expensive to get a cd player to work with it.

When the VCR started to eat all of our tapes I decided to buy a cheap DVD player as the family holiday treat. We opened the box and Byron stared at it, pulled it out, and placed it on top of the stereo. He fiddled with some wires and then the most astonishing thing -- we had a cd player running through a good stereo system with speakers.

I couldn't find my Rosemary Clooney Christmas album so I played the Blur song Girls & Boys and we had a disco party in the living room. Then I put in The Gossip and the music filled the whole house and we jumped around and sang along:

All I want is a revolution
All I want is a simple solution

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