How's This For Retro? I'm Making Mix Tapes!

Regular readers of "Life On The Beach" know that I drive a 1997 Honda Civic that recently passed the 100,000 mile mark. I love that car.... It gets me where I want to go, and in the $4.00 a gallon era, it gets nearly 30 miles to the gallon, so I love that too! However - there is one drawback. Because of its vintage, the Honda has a cassette deck, and NOT a CD player.

This creates a problem. As also previously discussed on this blog, I recently launched an alumni website for my college choir. The reason I launched that website was because my single old choir cassette had finally gone to the magnetic media graveyard, and I needed to reach out to my old school mates to save the music we recorded on analog tape thirty years ago from meeting the same fate.

For the past several days, my fellow choir alums have generously donated their cassettes to me, which I have been lovingly transferring to my hard drive and editing into individual tracks, which folks could then listen to online, or download and turn into their own CD's. No more worries of their analog cassette sound gradually devolving into mud!

Except for me. I could burn a CD or two to put in the family minivan, but do you think my wife is going to let me play "memory lane" in HER car? Think again. No - if I want to hear this recently-saved-from-certain-time-erosion-death music, I need to play the splendidly digitized files on my computer, and record them back onto cassette! Yes, I'm down to the point of creating mix tapes again!

Maybe I should put together some Bread and Dan Fogelberg cuts, create a make-out cassette and slip it under the Missus' pillow... then we could really go back to the 70's!

Thank You, Honda!

This is my 1997 Honda Civic. We bought it new in July of that year, trading in my wife's old Plymouth Horizon for 500 dollars, and walking away with this car for just a couple of hundred bucks over cost. I had a choice between the optional cassette deck or the optional CD player, and of course went with the more popular option... the cassette deck! After all, I had all those mix tapes at my disposal... and no one had ever heard of burning their own CDs! The sales manager at Sport Honda in Silver Spring gave me a good deal because I had just purchased two Hondas from him for WMAL that are still being used today as news vehicles. This practice tells us two things, but since I am sworn to take the high road, I will only make the second observation. Hondas are built to last!

I love my Civic. It is neither plush nor cool, and it has a couple of battle scars thanks to a couple of scrapes with pillers in the Jenifer Street garage over the years. However - it gets nearly 30 miles to the gallon, and it is reliable with a capital R. It could also make the drive to Connecticut Avenue to my old job by memory after more than a decade of commuting. The reason I'm writing about my Civic now is that we have observed an important milestone - Today, it reached the big 100 K.

The milestone was reached in Gaithersburg, near the Quince Orchard Swim Club, where I was dropping Brad off for a community service project he was involved in. We reached the pool with a mile or so to spare, so I drove around a traffic circle at a nearby school a half dozen times so we could experience the big flip together. A true father-and-son bonding experience!

It was especially signficant that I shared this moment with my oldest son. He is going to be 15 this fall, and it is certainly possible, if not likely, that the Civic will someday be Brad's first car. My first car was my grandfather's 1972 Ford Maverick, which was on its last legs when I inherited it, and which was spewing oil and smoke within a few months on its way to the scrap heap. I'm betting Brad will be getting a much better deal a couple of years from now!