February 23, 2014:

I found the tape that’s a major reason I wouldn’t give up having a cassette player in the house.

Actually, it turns out there are two of them, but the first is done.

When my mother was dying in 1990 she said she wanted to record some of her memories, so I bought a little hand-held cassette recorder and spent a good part of a week sitting on her bed while Mother talked about her family and her life.

I filled two C-60 cassettes. The sound quality isn’t always that great because the recorder started picking up the sound of its own motor, more and more as I went on, but still, it’s two hours of my mother talking, and easy enough to make out every word.

I’ve done the first tape. I split it up into nineteen pieces; it was actually recorded in about a dozen sessions, but I broke the long ones up to more manageable sizes.

Haven’t done the second tape yet.

Anyway, there are four segments about her grandparents, two about her father as a young man, one about her mother, three about their wedding and where they lived at various times, and nine about Mother’s own life from early childhood through college.

Listening to these after so long is fascinating. Just hearing her voice again brings back a lot of memories. I’ve discovered I misremembered a bunch of family history, and attributed two of her stories to my father’s side, for some reason, attaching a story about an unnamed great-uncle on her mother’s side to my father’s Uncle Sam.

And I realize that one reason she wanted to make these recordings was to distract herself from what was happening to her; there are a few spots where you can hear the pain, a few places where she had to stop until the morphine kicked in again.

I’m sending copies of the MP3s to my sisters, one at a time.

I’ve also gone through some of the other cassettes. One turned out to be completely blank, and three others were junk I have no use for, so… well, the stack I still need to deal with is down to fifty-five cassettes, out of the seventy-eight I started with.

From here on, they’re all labeled; six are audio letters, but the other forty-nine all look like stuff I want to keep — mostly music, a few radio shows, etc.

March 6, 2014 (out of sequence):

I said I hadn’t done my mother’s second tape yet. Now I have.

The first tape covered from her grandparents through her graduation from high school. The second tape covers from there to the birth of my oldest sister.

She was deteriorating by then, and frankly, so was my tape recorder, so there’s no third tape.

I’m glad I gave her a chance to revisit some good memories. I feel a little bad that I told her about some of the changes to a place she’d remembered fondly (Ogunquit, Maine — I’d visited there in the ’80s, and she’d been there in the ’40s). I just automatically went into my habitual “being informative” mode without thinking that she might prefer not to know; the changes weren’t for the better, and it wasn’t as if she would ever go back there. I should have just let her remember it as it was when she was there with her boyfriend. (The last one before my father.)

The second tape wound up as a dozen pieces. One of them has speed problems — maybe I should have tried to adjust that. The batteries were dying when we recorded that bit, so the wheels were turning slowly, which meant when it gets played back at normal speed it sounds as if we’d both been hitting the helium.

I also could have filtered out the tape hiss and other noise, but I didn’t. It’s not that bad, and I didn’t think of it until I was 75% done.

I’m sending the files to my sisters, one by one, so the whole family will have copies.

February 24, 2014:

Huh. Turns out I didn’t have seventy-eight cassette tapes. I had eighty-one. There was a stack of three sitting on a bookshelf for no obvious reason.

And typing that reminded of somewhere else I should have checked. Make it an even hundred in all.

Sigh.

I’m pretty sure some of them are duplicates, though. Because what I was reminded to do was check my bookcase of my own work for audiobooks. I found a total of nineteen cassettes — four four-cassette sets, and three singles.

So that’s something of a setback, and I’ll be keeping the author-copy cassettes even if I never play them again.

Of course, I’ve still dealt with twenty-three of them, so there are seventy-seven left. And I’m fairly certain at least six are duplicates.

I have two more completely unidentified ones, though — only one of the three I found out of place was labeled.

February 26, 2014:

Well, one of those two appears to have been blank, but I’ll never know for sure, because after successfully playing one (blank) side, about two or three minutes into the second side the tape broke.

So it went in the trash, and if there was anything on the remaining 43 minutes of Side 2, it’s lost forever.

The other one had “Rootabaga Stories” on it, copied from the same scratchy LP I recorded back in late January. That filled all of Side 1, and in fact didn’t all fit — the end of the next-to-last story and all of the final story were missing. Side 2 appears to be blank; I’m about 25 minutes into it, and not a sound.

February 26, 2014:

In case it’s not obvious, no, I didn’t save anything off that; the rest was indeed blank, and I don’t need duplicates.

Today I recorded a letter on tape a friend sent in 1992. I hadn’t planned to keep it, or any letters, but this one had so much content I decided I should.

Also: Played a tape labeled “The Very Best of the Everly Brothers” on one side, and “Peter Paul & Mary: Moving” on the other. The descriptions were accurate, but the tape’s defective — it keeps jamming and slowing down. I already had “The Very Best of the Everly Brothers” on CD and MP3 anyway, but I decided to go ahead and buy the MP3 download of “Moving” rather than try to salvage this.

Looked through some more, and if the labels are accurate I have two more duplicates. I’ll want to double-check before tossing them, though.