MY SON DANIEL IS A VERY smart young man. In his free time he's been buying broken Kindles and piecing them together to create like-brand new ones. Then he "roots" them and installs the Android operating system. The result, a fully functional touch-screen computer! This was my Christmas present. I know. My son rocks.
I am not a full-fledged techie. There is a lot I don't understand and when I hear words like the aforementioned "root" or "driver" or "sync" I glaze over. But I like my electronics. I like having my Kindle e-reader and my Amazon Cloud (music) Player. Thanks to my son, these apps are not only accessible from my laptop. The world exists on a 5x7 tablet. Who'd a thunk?
When I wrote my memoir, I took advantage of all the memory-triggers I could think of. I spent hours at the library looking for books on various topics of my past. I Google-searched and Wikipedia-ed and Google Map-ed. Many of my findings can be seen on my Pinterest pages.
Music was one of the most emotional memory-triggers in my repertoire. I graduated high school in 1979 so the mid to late 1970s was my generation. I was addicted to KGON radio station and every time I got a paycheck I'd traipse over, sometimes with my gal pal Reva to For What It's Worth Records and buy an album.
When I became a mom, I sold all my albums and changed roles. Throughout the 80s, 90s and part of the first decade of the new millennium I stayed in mother-mode. But when my kids grew up, I got introspective and started peeling back the layers. The bygone decades became important again. I bought CDs and would listen to them, tearfully pummeled back in time. I'd take notes on my surroundings and my emotions, seated in my bedroom, writing in my journal, Peter Frampton or Styx, or Boston lullabing me through the turbulence of my teen years.
I'm so grateful to be alive in a time when, at least to some extent, the past is accessible. Do you have a favorite way to reconnect with the past? Favorite book, song, movie or TV show that connects you with those bygone days?
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