Lesser women would have run for the hills long ago
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- February 15, 2019
- 1057
So what do you do on a mid-winter’s day when it’s chilly outside but not cold, when it’s overcast but not cloudy, when you’re feeling kind of blue but not sad?
Right.
You go to the beach.
It’s a great place for an emotional tune-up.
Part of it stems from the ocean’s mesmerizing pull, that awesome attraction, the sense that eternal truths are within arm’s reach.
And a lot of it has to do with the notion of “why not?” and the realization that it won’t always be this easy to get there.
To put it in perspective, the beach is actually closer to this house than the newspaper where I worked for a decade was to that home.
Not that I planned anything even close to what ended up happening.
Faithful readers might recall that when I suddenly left that job on New Year’s Eve 1999, I glibly fended off astonished questions with the quip, “Well, I guess I wasn’t Y2K compliant.”
That was a very strange time.
For the first time since college, I had no reason to get up in the morning, no pressure to meet a deadline, no bosses barking, no 50-mile commute, no lingering sense the world needed me.
Instead, I got back to basics: taking long bike rides with my fiancée, going to church once a week, writing for the fun of it, cooking for friends and family, bowling and playing softball, reading and listening to records I’d ignored for too long.
I was 45 as the new century began and would never have guessed that my life was going to shift so dramatically that, looking back from a distance of nearly two decades, it still feels unreal.
Normally I’m not big on change; in fact my wife will tell you she’s astounded when I pull on a T-shirt that I wore at Notre Dame.
“Did you know,” she said the other day after trying to create some semblance of order from the chaos that is my dresser, “that there was a time when people got entirely new wardrobes when the seasons changed?”
I looked up from the Babe Ruth biography I’ve been plowing through all winter.
“Did you know,” I countered, “that Babe Ruth hardly ever wore underwear?”
I’m always amazed that she’s stayed with me all these years.
Lesser women would have run for the hills long, long ago, given my propensity for over-indulgence and my affection for vintage stereo equipment.
Which brings us back to our most recent trip to the coast.
After we’d taken a long walk on the beach, scoping out the McMansion we’ve reserved for the second week of September, we savored a leisurely lunch in a waterfront restaurant.
“We should bring the family here,” my wife said. “It’d be within walking distance of the house, and the food’s good.”
“OK,” I said, staring out at the waves and thinking that it was high time I replaced the amp that had died two years ago. “Sure.”
Having not had the means to power up my music system for an unconscionable length of time, I’ve relied on a couple of computer “speakers,” little things that stand about 6 inches high but lack even the oomph of a mid-’60s transistor radio.
I mean they get the job done if all you want is to be able to watch “Madmen” on Netflix or play a 10-year-old video of Neil Young and Paul McCartney collaborating on a sonic version of “A Day in the Life.”
And of course I can keep up with the latest strange goings-on at the White House, though I try to limit my exposure to that circus.
But what I really want is to get my JBL L50s — weighing in at 50 pounds apiece — back in the game. I’ve had them since the late ’70s when my pair of Electro-Voice towers bit the dust after a great career at Notre Dame.
My JBLs have it in them to not only rattle the windows of the stereo room, but also to shatter them, should I decided to do that.
But for nearly three years, they’ve been reduced to what amounts to display shelves, offering prime space to my Bass Ale neon sign and a hand-carved Janus head I picked up on my trip to Jamaica.
And it’s not as if I haven’t tried to replace my old receiver, a true beast that lasted for more years than could rightly be expected.
It too died, but not until giving years and years of top-grade service including the transition from Northeast Ohio to Coastal Carolina, a time that I needed it more than I can describe.
I cannot imagine surviving that seismic shift without having that component stereo system — amp, speakers, turntable, cassette and CD player, AM/FM radio, headphones — at my beck and call.
The thing is I’m not smart enough to figure out how to hook up my old JBLs — which relied on obsolete connections — to the new equipment. Two years ago as my wife and I celebrated our 10th anniversary on the Outer Banks, I bought a brand-new unit but failed to make it compatible with my vintage stuff.
Returning it was my only option, and I felt six shades of stupid doing that because I pride myself on hooking up systems and making them sound good. I’ve done wedding receptions and class reunions, not to mention making house calls, helping friends get their music flowing, making all the right moves.
There’s a big box store on the way back from the beach, one of those mega chains that you see everywhere, and my wife and I stopped there after lunch the other day. The sales guy patiently explained that the unit I was looking at could easily accommodate my JBLs.
We shall see.
I haven’t opened the Onkyo TX-SR373 yet, thinking that if I keep the amp packed inside, I can more easily return it.
But my wife is not having it, knowing how much I want to experience those 155 watts per channel, to be able to make the music mine again.
She’s pumped.
“I know we can do this,” she said, “just like we have everything else, together.”
So stay tuned.
Mike Dewey can be reached at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. Join him on Facebook.