sonia | A history in cassette tapes

Before I left for college, I spent hours recording my father's folk music LPs onto cassette. I sprawled on the couch and read science fiction, pausing to flip the tape or the records as needed. I carefully wrote the names of the songs on the paper inserts. I grouped the records by country: Romania, Bulgaria, Israel, Italy. I also had some commercial classical tapes. I listened to them all the time on my boom box.

The treasured cassettes traveled with me through many homes over many years in a stack of faux wood-grain three-drawer cassette holders. Over time I acquired CDs and a CD player and stopped listening to the tapes as much.

In 2007, a kind soul named Steve uploaded a huge collection of folk music mp3s to alt.binaries.sounds.music, and another kind soul alerted a mailing list I was on. Steve posted 40MB a day, and I downloaded them with delighted recognition of many of the same records my dad had. He saved me the trouble of digitizing the tapes, and also created better-quality mp3s than I could have.

The tapes have lived quietly in their drawers in the bottom of the stereo cabinet. Once or twice I have gone looking for a specific song I remembered that wasn't in Steve's collection, but couldn't find it.

Now that I'm preparing to move, I pulled the tapes out. It turns out that the drawers are "vintage" and the estate sale seller was interested in them. I got all of $8 from a used music store for the commercial tapes and a few CDs, but at least they're out of the house.

For the home-recorded ones, nearly a hundred of them, I found a recycling place that takes cassette boxes. With a twinge of dismay, I pulled each cassette out of its box and separated the paper liner. The paper goes in the city recycling, the boxes get dropped off at a collection event next month, and I guess the tapes go in the trash.

I have said for years that the music was home to me more than my parents' house ever was. The tapes were the concrete manifestation of that. I have treasured them for over 35 years. They have probably degraded over time, even if they hadn't been played many times already. I still have much of that music in digitized form. And yet, it is the end of an era and teen me feels nausea and regret at discarding them.