G is for...

"Go Rest High on That Mountain" by Vince Gill


This song has some sad memories attached to it, but they aren't mine, and I'm not going to spend much time on them.  My uncle died when I was very young, and maybe this song came out around the same time or something because it somehow became associated with his passing.  But this isn't about that.

Instead I'm going to talk about cassette tapes.  When I was younger my parents listened to a lot of country and "easy listening" music, and since I was too little to find my own music, so did I.  My mother had two Vince Gill tapes because she really liked the sound of his voice.  She let me borrow these tapes sometimes to listen to on my little boom box, which I liked to take outside so I could hear the radio or Vince Gill while I was playing on my swing set or pretending to be a wolf pack.

Yeah, I wasn't just a wolf.  I was the whole pack.

I also really liked to play in the rain.  One day it was raining, but not very hard, so I thought my little boom box would be okay outside.  Vince Gill was crooning in the background while I swung, then something weird happened.  Vince's voice started to... warble a little.  I don't know how else to explain it, but it was clear that something was wrong.  Immediately I panicked.  Didn't I know better than to have electronics outside?  Now the tape's ruined and it's all my fault!  Mom's going to be so mad at me!

So I did what any quick-thinking seven-year-old would do: I put the tapes back in my mother's car and went inside like nothing happened.  The next day I overheard her talking to my father about how her cassettes had suddenly warped.  She figured maybe sitting in a hot car all day had ruined them, and that was fine by me.  Fast forward sixteen years or so.  Somehow Vince Gill came up in passing conversation, and my mother brought up how she had some old tapes that melted in the sun.  It was only then, a few months ago, that I finally told her what really happened.  I played them out in the rain and destroyed them.

She laughed.  Hard.  Had I been holding that in since I was seven?  Well yes.  Then she laughed some more.