My wife and I have a symbiotic relationship which has two major components: she’s adorable, and I adore her; I lose things, and she finds them. Except sometimes in the lost and found department, neither of us finds what I’ve lost, and rarely, I find it. I don’t find it because she asked me where I had it last. She does that frequently. It’s one of the few things about her that annoys me, because if I knew where I last had my lost object, it wouldn’t be lost. Would it?
I used to have an old bookshelf stereo system. For the last few years, it languished in my garage, getting dirty. I dragged it out and wiped it off for college reunions. We set it up in the lobby of the dorm our class stayed in, and I used it to play music popular during the time we were in college. I was a deejay, both on radio and in a local disco, in my college days, and have enough songs from that time to play them for the whole three-day weekend without ever repeating one.
Our most recent reunion was in June of last year. I brought the stereo, and the music, as I always do. But the stereo was broken. The volume control no longer worked consistently. The unit had a remote control too. Would that work reliably to set the volume? I couldn’t know, because I couldn’t find the control.
At the end of the reunion, rather than lugging it home, I gave the old stereo to the current students who had helped herd we old, cranky alumni around. Not too generous of me because as I said the unit was old, I never used it, and it was broken. Some students, especially at a university with an engineering school, are capable of fixing what was wrong with it, so they were happy to have it.
Why do I bring this up now? I found the remote yesterday.
