Replaying a moment, and cassette tapes from July 14, 1987

When I was a child, we had to have a TV guide because the only way you could watch programs that you wanted to see was to be in front of the set at the moment it aired. VCRs either didn't exist or were only used in professional settings. It wasn't until I entered junior high school that they became commercially available, and my family was too poor to buy one until I was in college. Experiences  were transitory. You had them for the present time, but they could be replayed only as imperfect memory.

The idea that you could record and replay anything, let alone special moments in your life, was not something anyone expected. Cell phones with cameras weren't resting in every hand. The best you could hope for was that a wandering photographer at an event may have caught something important and offered you a print. This is why so many events, such as weddings or proms, only involved highly staged photos that captured the fact of the experience, but none of the quality of it.

Even though we presently live in a time in which people are constantly recording their lives, it's still serendipity if a spontaneous, precious experience is recorded. The first time someone tells you they love you, your first hug, or your first kiss are unlikely to be in a replayable format. One of the handful of benefits of a distance relationship back in the pre-internet age was that it was all written or recorded. I could put in a tape and hear Tito say over and over and over again that he had strong feelings for me. And, I did.

The two tapes I'm picturing  here were labeled physically by Tito, but I called them "Wow" and "Oh, Wow" and I listened to them more than a dozen times. Hearing them was the best moment of my existence and I could repeat it as many times as I wanted. This was a rare gift of our circumstances.