Memory #34

The Mixed Tape. Year: 1995. When CDs were just coming into style and double-cassette decks still populated most houses and the era of mixed tapes was about to die. This is the year I got my first and only mixed tape: From a Boy. My City Cousin and I would exchange mixes once in a while (an expression of my late eighties/early nineties tastes I will Never Ever Live Down as I gave her nothing but Guns'n'Roses in exchange for nothing but The Smiths) but that didn't count. Cause we were related and she wasn't a boy. And she was giving me music out of what I can only assume was pity (and a kind attempt to make me less lame) while he was giving me music to get in my pants. Oh the romance. Once in a while I come across a song from That Mixed Tape and I'm forced to remember the Only Mixed Tape I Ever Got From a Boy. And oh that boy. That was before we fell in love with Velvet Underground and banana pancakes and other people. And before the Celestine Prophesy (yes, I'll have some cheese with that cake) and before Chabbits (a chicken + a rabbit), before I understood just how damn scared I was and before the Only Poem Ever Written Just for Me. Oh that boy. Used to send me letters on things he found in the street. And hitch-hike across the country and materialize at my window. It was also the first time I heard a recording of Here Comes the Sun. And when I hear it now, I think about waking up on the beach to the sound of the PEI ferry docking and chasing airplanes out of the sky and calling my mother asking her to put some chips (and antibiotics) on the evening boat to the island cause I was SO Hungry (nothing has changed really) and that it burned when I peed. I wish I still had that tape. But it was lost 10 hundred years ago during my Famous Exodus of 1999 when I left all my belongings to someone else. Oh well.