The End of an Era: The Death of a Boom Box

Upon graduation from high school in 1998, my parents gave me a brand new boom box, complete with cassette and cd players. If you may recall, in the late 90's, mp3 players and Ipods were virtually unheard of, so I considered my boom box to be a stellar gift. (When my younger sister was given a trip to the west coast following her own graduation from high school two years later, I was pretty pissed and it made me reconsider not only the stellar-ness of my own graduation gift but also whether or not my parents did indeed have a favorite. ) Anyway, in the fall of '98, the boom box accompanied me to New Brunswick, New Jersey, for my freshman year at Rutgers University, and it has been with me ever since. It is on this boom box that I wore out my Allison Krauss and Union Station cd while weathering depressive episodes and on this boom box that I became addicted to NPR. The boom box has been disassembled and reassembled in six different states.

So perhaps you can understand my misery when tonight, after a uneventful Sunday afternoon of blissful radio programming, my boom box ceased functioning. Sure, it wasn't in perfect condition -I was aware of that. I mean, the volume was no longer something that I could control and there is a plant in a ceramic pot on top of it to weigh down the cover of the cd player enough so that the disk will actually spin. And sure, there have been close calls in the past. Two summers ago, when Meghan and Lisa came to visit, Meghan over-watered the aforementioned plant and the boom box didn't work for a day. But miraculously, it came back, albeit with the newly acquired volume-control issue. But tonight, it's not coming back. The boom box is dead. It is indeed the end of an era in the life of Stephanie Amber Tesch. I told my sister (who I have since forgiven for the whole better graduation gift thing) that now all there is to do is wait for my boobs to begin to sag and my butt to get flat because - I'm just gonna say it - I am getting old.

In two weeks, I will turn 29. (In single female Mormon years, I will actually be 90. Thank god I'm not Mormon.) For some time, I have been thinking about starting a daily journal or a blog, but it was the death of my boom box that solidified my decision. So here we go - I begin a new era.