Timeless Tunes
Resurrecting my grandpa's old radio.
My grandpa used to lock himself in his basement workshop for hours, listening to his radio while fixing antique light fixtures and door knobs from around the house.
I wonder what he listened to.
After my mom recently sold his home, I rescued his radio. I sat his mysterious wood box on the table in my living room, plugged it in, and prayed it still worked. The little wood door on the front opened to reveal a metallic silver control panel with two channel tuners and four ribbed knobs. I turned the volume knob until it clicked, and heard an explosion of static.
A tiny red light turned on.
I turned the tuning knob and watched a blue bar ascend through the FM channels. I listened for clarity in the crackles of white noise, finding blips of Taylor Swift, baseball play-by-plays, and merengue beats.
At the very top of the channel list, 105.9 FM, classical music softly sang through the speaker. I raised the volume, somewhere between the knob’s distinction of “softer” and “louder.” Static crinkled through the violins, so I adjusted the tuning ever so slightly, barely a millimeter. The sound of the crinkle reduced to a barely noticeable fine grain.
The sound of the pianist’s keys rolled with the cellist’s smooth base notes. The flutists' high notes sang softly in the distance. My grandpa’s mid century modern relic performed classical masterpieces, rich in sound, as if it were new.
For the rest of the afternoon, I was swept up in this radio’s classical music while painting. Mozart and Bach filled my living room and the space between my thoughts. My internal cast of characters were silent. Hours passed, in the flow, simultaneously painting two identical disco balls.
My husband and I have been playing this radio, set only to this station, every day since. We turn it on when we wake up, before we open the blinds, and turn it off with the lights before bed. We’ve listened to Debussy, Tchaikovsky, and live operas at the MET.
Sometimes we’re surprised with a unique live performance. On Christmas Eve, the chamber choir at the King’s College chapel in Cambridge performed perfectly harmonized carols that vibrated through my living room.
Our plants seem to like it too. Our philodendron plant suddenly sprouted three new leaves. Our Christmas cactus continuously bloomed for two weeks straight. The rest of the plants perked up and inched closer towards the window.
Listening to my grandpa’s radio connects me to my past in a way I wouldn’t have expected. I forgot what it was like to intentionally set what I listened to.
Growing up there were no automatic taste algorithms hiding in landline phones. But today, I can turn on my grandpa’s big wooden classical music box, listen to timeless classical music, and hope that he’s listening alongside me.
Do you still listen to the radio? What do you listen to? Drop a comment, or reply to this email and let me know!
Thank’s for reading! See you next time <3 E
Okay, damn. I need that radio! What a beautiful artifact. It’s perfectly clunky.
I like to think of old things like this as conduits, so in my mind you’re definitely conjuring grandpa.
I can tell he was kinda digging the blips of Taylor Swift. Do you know what kind of music he liked at all?
This immediately made me think of my home and grandparents.
I grew up and live in a home of music. It exists on two levels:
Upstairs, my grandpa plays his vinyl records (mostly Mexican singers/Mariachi) out loud. And I do mean L-O-U-D. Because his hearing sucks.
I know I am my grandpa’s granddaughter because sometimes when he’s listening to his music, I’ll pop in, and catch him laying on his back in bed, with his hands under his neck, staring at the ceiling, crooning and daydreaming like a teenager.
Downstairs, the radio, some Spanish station, is turned on also out L-O-U-D the moment my grandma enters the kitchen first thing in the morning. This is every single day, always. The radio stays on essentially all day until the evening when she watches TV. So throughout the day, she’s in there singing and sometimes dancing while she’s doing her things. She doesn’t like it when anyone turns it off, quiets it, or anything, even if she’s outside.
So literally descending down my stairs, I can catch that transition of music from grandpa to grandma. I have a stereo/radio I got when I was a child that is beside me and I still use it, so occasionally I’ll listen to some college radio station on that.
I loved this :)
Actually, I think I have more thoughts about this, I'll need to think on them.
This would make an amazing short story or even a book. Just to document all the ways your life and perspective and plant life : ) change over the course of listening to nothing but this for a year. What a beautiful connection point to your grandfather.