I just bought a new stereo receiver. Yes, I have heard of Spotify, and I know I am wallowing in the technology of the past, but when I looked at the vinyl and CD collection of a lifetime I couldn't bring myself to throw it away just because the receiver Mike and I bought in 1972 doesn't work anymore. We were newly married and, being essentially still teenagers, we thought a music system was more important than furniture. We went to a small specialty shop with the reputation of being THE place for stereos in Seattle at the time. Our budget was not large and although we wanted a Marantz receiver we agreed on a lesser model, with a Phillips turntable and Advent speakers. The system wasn't available immediately, so Mike had to go back later and pick it up. When he walked through the door with a sheepish but excited grin I knew he had sprung for the Marantz. There was nowhere in our apartment to put all these components, so we went down to a local warehouse that was importing antiques from England and bought a Victorian sideboard for $150. It has had pride of place in our living room ever since, and the Marantz has powered our music for fifty years.
We added a CD player when vinyl went the way of the dinosaurs, but we still needed the turntable to play the Christmas records Mike kept from his childhood. To this day, Christmas is not complete without the Harmonicats tootling Winter Wonderland. The turntable is still operable, although the on switch is finicky and has to be weighted down to keep the power on. However, the receiver was much more heavily used and a couple of years ago it quit. Research revealed that Marantz receivers are now really valuable to audiophiles and cost thousands of dollars to replace.....way more than we paid originally. Mike was an electrical engineer and he decided to fix it himself. He quickly located the defective chip and ordered a new one. When it came he attempted to solder it in. He used to design circuit boards and was an ace with a soldering iron. That was many years ago though, and this time his hand slipped and he ruined the circuit board. It was a huge blow, not because the receiver was so important, but because it was another sign to him that he was losing the competence that he always counted on. He gave up on the stereo and we went without music.
There were only two months between the time that Mike received his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and his death. It was so fast that it seemed like a lightning bolt, but looking back I can identify signs that he was failing in the years before. I was worried, but didn't recognize them as truly serious as they turned out to be. He was quite sad at the increasing difficulty he had doing things that used to come easily. It seems that aging is series of little deaths, maybe to prepare us for the total death to follow. Now, in the aftermath of losing him, I am sad for myself, but am also entering more fully into his sorrow, which I somehow see more clearly in retrospect. With the new receiver (not a Marantz) the silent house is filled by the music from our past together, which I find comforting. When Christmas rolls around again, we will listen to the Harmonicats on vinyl and think of Mike with love and tears.