Computers, noise and a hunk of changing times

I know little if anything about computers. I know how to turn on this Dell at my office and

my Mac at home. I know how to get into the word processing programs, write my stories

and send them to the editors.

And I know how to check my e-mail at the office and how to check my checking account

and those of my boys at home. They have the same access to their accounts as I do,

but for some reason they rely on me to make sure their accounts aren't overdrawn - an

around-the-clock job.

I've been trying since January to get Brenton to record some music for me on a CD. He

knows how to do this but won't take the time to show me because I'm a slow learner.

I wrote down the names of the songs I wanted recorded. He looked at them and

laughed. He had never heard of most of them.

That reminded me of a time not so long ago when the boys were growing up. I saw an

ad in the Charlotte Observer about Peter, Paul and Mary making an appearance in

Charlotte. I thought it would be great to go.

The boys looked at me like I was crazy. The were into heavy sheet metal singers like

AC/DC, Guns N' Roses and Metallica. It was loud stuff, or "noise" as my father called it,

that shook the house and got the dogs howling.

Their mother at the time was wrapped up with Michael Bolton, who wailed like a

banshee singing such wishy-washy winners as "Steel Bars," "How Can We Be Lovers"

and "When A Man Loves A Woman."

Nobody - not even the dogs I fed every day - gave a hoot about Peter, Paul and Mary.

And I say "hoot" because they were popular during the hootenany craze of the early

1960s that featured such other groups as The Kingston Trio, New Christy Minstrels and

the Serendipity Singers.

I didn't go see Peter, Paul and Mary because I didn't want to go by myself. And even if I

had gone to Charlotte, I would have never been heard from again because I would have

gotten lost.

But then I got to thinking about early September of 1963 when my father was taking me

to Wingate, N. C., to enroll my freshman year at Wingate College. He couldn't get a

St.Louis Cardinals' baseball game on the a.m. radio in our 1959 Oldsmobile Super 88

and listen to the late Dizzy Dean warble his patented version of "The Wabash

Cannonball." So, he fiddled with the radio until he found some ancient station playing

"Toot ,Toot, Tootsie," a hit of his era in the Roaring '20s.

"Now that's what I call music," he said swooning back to his college days at Yale. "It's

not like that 'noise' you listen to today. You don't know what good music is."

I didn't give him time to change the subject to baseball and start ranting about Roger

Maris breaking Babe Ruth's 1927 home run record in 1961. I had heard him say too

many times before, "Roger Maris couldn't carry Babe Ruth's bat."

Log In | Register as a new member