recording

When I was younger, I would tape-record sounds. It was an attempt to counteract loss. Knowing that my parakeet, Cottentail, would not live forever, I recorded the sound of her chirping. Knowing we might someday sell our house, I recorded the creaks of our basement stairs as I went down them, and the growl of our old furnace igniting. The particular slapping sound made by the wooden venetian blinds on our front door; the flub-flub of our swinging kitchen door as it came to rest against its frame. I didn't want to forget.

I was going through some of these old tapes last night, and found one on which I had recorded some stuff from when we lived in Spain in 1985-86.

It was interesting. I had captured the sound of the town's one lone church bell tolling solemnly. I'd gone into a bar and recorded the carnival-like song playing on a slot machine that we'd heard every day while walking past or stopping for a soda. But later I had done something that I didn't often do - I left the tape recorder running on the dining room table in our rented house, and recorded the last 15 minutes that we lived there.

It was weird; almost disturbing to listen to. It's the usual last-minute hustle and bustle of a family scrambling to get ready for a long journey - mom asking whose was the bag of nuts on the table, me stressing over how to pack a sweater in an already-overpacked suitcase, our landlady stopping by and my parents arranging with her in broken Spanish to leave the house keys at the neighbor's. At the end of that 15 minutes, we would be on our way to England, taking a bus through France to Calais, the ferry to Dover. Later that day, my mother's purse would be robbed by two guys on a motorbike, as we stood on a streetcorner in Malaga, waiting for the bus. We would lose our passports and have a difficult time entering France.

But that was all to come. As the tape recorder ran on that day, none of that had happened yet. The walls of the house still echoed with our voices and footsteps; the taxi hadn't yet arrived to finally carry us away from that period in our lives.

Try as I may (and believe me, I've tried), I find myself completely unable to comprehend the passing of time, and our inability to re-construct or re-connect to what once was. And I know now that the tape recording doesn't help; in fact, I think that it makes it all harder to understand.