Cassette Recorder

Crazy the opportunities we miss, my father served in the First World War and had many stories. At the time I owned a portable cassette recorder but I never had a good idea how to put it to use. The stories he used to tell I could have recorded then in later years wrote a book about his life. Some second war veterans who are alive today are writing books about their lives on notebook computers. My father was uneducated because had to work as a child to support his family so he never learned how to write but he could dictate a letter really well. And he was good arithmetic and math which he would do in his head to figure out area for building and constructing when he was working at brick laying or plumbing. Dad was a man that never allowed us as boys to cry, he believed that men don’t cry. But I remember the day when he took me to a reunion with his battalion, all that was there were old men in wheel chairs. He took me from the room in tears and told me that these were not the comrades that he severed with.
It just seems to go that we make stories of the past when it is so long ago. I am sure this is what my father was doing. There was a horrible amount of human suffering in this war, and I wonder how much of it he blanked out. I once asked him if he ever kill another person and he never answered me, but there was a sad look on his face when I asked him.
Getting down to it how many stories do we make up out of the past which is over glamorized to tell, children, and friends? How many stories are horrible things hidden and only the good told? I am sure we all have these things hidden away or we just blank the ugly truth out. But at the same time we need to be kind toward ourselves and forgive ourselves, for we are human and it is a part of us to make mistakes and transgress. I know human-beings are all capable of horrific acts when lead by the collective consciousness of the countries, sects and other groups. An example of this was the Nazi’s during WWII with the genocide of the Jews, Homosexuals, and other races. Goodness seems to come out from in oneself not in the collective but I have seen the collective consciousness come together for the sake of goodness. Canada’s 2010 Winter Olympics was a good example of collective consciousness in action. The pride that Canadian’s shared was so alive and the moment that Sidney Crosby scored the winning goal for Canada was electric to say the least. This collective consciousness may be the only hope for our planet, with the problem we face with climate change. We never had an opportunity in the history of mankind before, but with the Internet and television we are all spectators of the events that are affecting the world today.
So the simple cassette recorder back in the early sixties to record a first war veterans stories was a miss for me. We need to record and archive our times now we have digital cameras and video recorders. Thankfully there is still a few of these portable cassette recorders around for us old diehards that love the analog age. I still love vacuum tubes and old radio sets and vinyl records.