While helping my mom clean out the basement last spring, I came across a shoebox full of old cassette tapes from my childhood. When I was 8, my parents had given me a Fisher Price tape recorder for Christmas. Casually slipping it into conversations, I requested extra chores to earn it. I also stuck notes on the pages of every Consumers Distributing catalogue it was advertised on with scribbles like, “This one, Daddy,” on a piece of paper adorned with multiple brightly coloured arrows pointing to the picture. I bugged them constantly until they finally gave in and bought it for me. It was my most beloved toy.
I spent hours capturing every audible moment: My baby sister’s babblings, my mom and dad’s conversations, my friends’ fights, sirens, the sound of me crumpling paper, and even rain. I also recorded myself telling stories. The classics, like Cinderella or stories that I made for school, but more often than not, I just recounted my day. There was also a lot of singing. It wasn’t just the novelty of hearing my voice thrown back at me (which never wore off), but the realization that my childhood could essentially be stored and put away for safekeeping. As much as I enjoy looking at pictures, they contaminate the memory it attempts to preserve.
Soon, you begin to remember the experience from the camera’s perspective. It is the image on the picture itself that replaces the actual memory. My recordings, on the other hand, were raw and resonated with life. I’m not a passive visitor to my past but immersed in it once more.
Listening to the sound of my eight-year-old giggling self with my two-year-old sister while watching the Flintstones opened a portal in my brain and revisited a sacred place in my heart.
I have played the tapes back for my daughter, who is herself an eight-year-old. She is amused but unable to fully make a cognitive connection that her mother was once a silly little girl, too. Neither can I.