Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

My dashboard currently has a huge hole in it, my CD player's punishment for attempting to devour my CD's.

It had been acting wonky for a little while now, but I'd dealt with it the way my family always deals with things when they go wrong: work around it.

If the lightbulb flickers every time you turn on the fan, simply use a different lamp when you use the fan. In other words, it's not a problem if you can work around it.

The CD player first started being persnickety about six months after I bought my 2002 Ford Focus. Sometimes when you loaded a CD, instead of starting the music, the player would make an unhappy sort of whirring sound. But I discovered that if you simply advanced to the next CD in the six-CD player, it would start that one. You could then go back to the original CD and it would play it.

I was happy to put up with this bad behavior until worse things started to happen. Several months ago, when I went to reload the player, it refused to spit out one of the CDs, insisting there was a CD error. It switched off the CD player and started playing the radio. I tried a couple more times with no success.

Frustrated, I just listened to the radio until I got home. Sure enough, next time I started up the car, the CD player spit out the troublesome disk and reloaded properly. But since this didn't happen again for a long time, I figured it was a temporary anomaly.

This week, the CD player really started acting up. The Gryphon was loading up six CDs, and it refused to eject Emperor Tomato Ketchup by Stereolab, apparently wanting to savor it. Despite pushing a number of buttons in frustration, the player wouldn't respond. It spit the CD out itself a short time later.

For awhile, I thought it would be an annoying behavior I could work around, but then it decided to eat Tom Petty. It refused to eject Petty's Greatest Hits no matter how much we tried, and even turning the car off and trying again did nothing. The CD player was, apparently, holding its breath and turning blue.

I was finally willing to admit something was wrong. So when I took the car in an overdue oil change, I told them about the CD player. They looked it over and then removed it to have it repaired elsewhere.

It's kind of strange driving around in silence, although I am getting used to it. I haven't had this sort of quiet in my vehicle since my first car, a 1973 Chevy Caprice Classic. It had a radio, but it only worked on AM and even that was hit and miss. On long trips by myself, instead of listening to music I used to make up songs. I'm not saying they were Grammy material, but it kept my mind alert.

My 1988 Ford Ranger, a.k.a. Red Arrow, did have a radio. When I bought it, all the stations were set to country stations but I soon ensured steady listening fare of classic rock and alt rock. The speakers temporarily went funny one day when I talked aloud about buying a new radio, maybe one with a cassette player. As soon as I apologized and promised not to replace the radio, the speakers began to work again.

My Ford Focus, a.k.a. Moondancer, is the first car I've owned that allowed me to play my own music. I admit, I've gotten spoiled.

Driving in silence has advantages and disadvantages. Among the advantages, it's calm and peaceful. You don't have to turn the volume down to speak to your passengers. Among the disadvantages, it's calm and peaceful. There no driving music to keep you motivated, nothing to jam out to in the traffic jams.

But I'll suffer in silence for now, try to enjoy the music of my own thoughts.

Copyright 2005 by Alyce Wilson

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