The Mixed Tape

Every time I go home to Arizona for a visit, I walk through my mother's door, tired and worn down from the long journey and I take the load off my sore shoulders from all of my many heavy bags and I plop them down on the ground in the guest room, glad to be in familiar surroundings. I stare at the wooden chest my father gave me and it stares back at me, beckoning me to toss aside the doilies and the tacky ceramic figurines and coffee table books my mother has placed on top of it, open it up, inhale the distinctive cedar fragrance, and remember.

But the thought of opening it and becoming acutely aware of time, and in my case space, makes me gulp slightly for extra air. Besides, I don't have to open it up to know that underneath the Guinness coaster I kept from a pub in Ireland, the U2 ticket stub from the 1993 tour, the embarrassingly immature letters exchanged with friends or exes, and the incense burner that once filled a cozy apartment with hippie aroma, underneath it all, surely somewhere at the bottom of that chest, tucked inside an old shoebox, there must be a long lost mixed tape.

That mixed tape, if it is there as I suspect it is, would have survived the many moves and shifts of home. It would have escaped being accidentally placed in the box of cassettes to be sold at the garage sale which a brave mystery shopper would gamble a whopping 15 cents for, not knowing what would be on it. It would have somehow survived the brutal, tidying hands of my sister who had no idea how much fleeting feeling had gone into this delicate piece of plastic and wheels and coils of tape when by mere chance she tossed it absentmindedly into the 'junk to keep' pile as opposed to the 'trash' or 'Good Will' pile.

Mixed taping is quite a forgotten art, isn't it?

No, it is not the same as burning someone a CD or sharing a playlist or sending someone a YouTube link. It just isn't.

MP3 playlists don't have the folded flap to be filled in with ever-so-neatly executed tiny penmanship, perhaps even a second draft, with the first flap having been tossed because a right mess was made of it, and a new one having been stolen from a fresh unused tape so it would be just right.

Burned CDs don't have that clicking noise on the tape between the songs where years later someone, a real person, can be heard carefully pushing pause after having run back into the room near the song's end, conjuring up the images of the tape-maker fumbling through all of the CDs laid out on the floor in front of the stereo. You can imagine how the tape-maker pored over the CDs painstakingly one by one, to identify the best of the best of their songs with just the right lyrics sending just the right message to the recipient of the mixed tape. Runner-up songs that didn't make the mixed tape cut would be eliminated distressingly, but only after much indecision. An entire Saturday would be killed to create this musical anthology as a parting gift, crafted as the perfect compilation of ardor and devotion turned to the foreshadowing of absence and recognition of the fate of circumstance.



Maybe that mixed tape would be exchanged during a good-bye with a quivering voice awkwardly saying:

"I want you to take this tape I made you...and I want you to just listen to it."

And words would be giant jagged stones to be tripped over and fallen onto and injured by accidentally. Because the compiler of the tape was afraid that muttered words would be the wrong ones, coming out in the wrong way without a fraction of the eloquence of the composers of the songs on the tape. But this tape was also an insurance policy of sorts because if feelings changed, words were too committal, whereas, a song's true meaning could be easily questioned, or its inclusion on the tape could be justified based on musical appeal alone, having nothing to do with its lyrics.

But maybe the recipient would forgive the tape-maker for borrowing sentiments from songwriters, unable to say anything original from within and with decision. She would listen with wonder, looking for clues, as if the tape-maker had actually been the one who had written all of the lyrics. Maybe the recipient would listen to that tape that very night again and again, Side A, Side B, Side A, Side B...



And maybe the recipient would sink into her seat on her first international flight ever, and buckle herself in for a long flight and maybe she would put on her headphones and let the mixed tape soothe her excited mind.

She would listen without an inkling that this tape that contained so much intent and emotion, would soon be forgotten, the compiler would soon forget having ever made it.

She would not envision that after much listening and much rewinding and fast forwarding of the tape and undertaking many repair procedures with the careful precision of a chewed up pencil, she would soon tire of listening to it, and might even stick her nose up to that kind of music later.

She would not foresee that as the months passed, the original meaning of the songs, reflecting the momentary feelings of the tape-maker, would be lost to her and the songs would take on new meaning for her somewhere else across the world.

When she gently pulled the flap out of the case that she had placed into the seat back pocket of the plane, she would admire the craftsmanship that went into its careful inscription, and she would be wholly unaware that it would soon enough get misplaced, leaving only the tape floating around unlabeled and unprotected to be tossed into an old shoebox and thrown at the bottom of a cedar trunk somewhere to never feel the rotating spindles of a cassette player again, to mix and possibly unravel among the other junk and memorabilia, just like any other artifact of an ordinary past.

"I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in" by Hryck from Flickr
"TDK C90" by Status Frustration from Flickr
"Cassette" by Tania.Paz from Flickr

StumbleIt