Rainy Christmas

Every year at Christmas time, I make my way back to the family in Augusta, GA, which is about a four hour drive south of my home. This morning I awoke to thunder and a heavy downpour of rain. More rain. It just will not stop. I'm just hoping or a respite lasting long enough for me to get in a decent walk.

This year, I received one of the most awesome gifts ever for Christmas. When I was a kid, I used to go to bed with a radio. Handed down from my folks, it was one of those clock radios that had the flip display for the time. Once they got a digital display clock radio, they had no need for that clunker.

At night I would lay on my side, radio turned so the speaker pointed right at me, with the volume turned down as low as I could hear it. I would flip the switch to the AM setting and slowly turn the dial until I began to hit the signals from radio station transmitters. I remember hitting WLW out of Cincinnati, OH or WOWO from Ft. Wayne, IN; a station from Pittsburgh with the crazy call letters KDKA; WNBC in NY,NY.

I would listen to their music, imagining some kid my age living up north listening to the same program at the same time. Traffic reports, snow alerts in the winter, local news...all fascinating to me. I can even remember tuning in to one station from Cleveland and listening to the Cleveland Cavaliers, back when Jim Chones, Austin Carr, Walt Frazier, Bingo Smith, and Foots Walker played there.

Usually, I fell asleep, with a hand on the dial. Cloud cover, the earth's rotation, or whatever the reason, caused the stations to fade out at some point, leaving a churning mix of static in my ear as I slept. Sometimes my Mom would come in and turn it off. Sometimes she would come in and yell at me to turn it off, claiming that I wasn't getting "good sleep" with that thing blaring in my ear all night long! I thought she was just hassling me because she was a light sleeper. Now I know the importance of restful, quiet, dark sleep.

Since I have moved to the mountains, radio reception has been horrible. I have threatened Jennifer on more than one occasion that we are gonna spend money on satellite radio. Well, she solved that problem with my gift this year, a Logitech Squeezebox radio. People, this is the coolest thing ever. It is a radio that allows you to listen to any radio station in the world that streams its broadcast on the internet! The radio picks up the signals from a wireless router.

I can listen to NPR, clear as a bell. I can listen to UGA basketball games. I can listen to Car Talk whenever I want. It has a search feature that allows you to type in call letters, or cities, and it will remotely play all of your mp3s from your desktop. It's awesome. My mother even approves of it because it has a sleep timer that will shut it off after 30 minutes, once I am fast asleep.

And, yes, I have re-introduced myself to WLW, KDKA, and WOWO, many years later, using technology that seemed as far away as the stations I listened to as a kid. Again, I lay in bed, searching the dial until settling on a station. Thank you Jennifer for allowing me to capture, again, some of the spirit of my childhood.