My favorite things 40

When I was a senior in high school I saved up my babysitting money and bought a record player, which meant I needed to acquire records.  For some reason, I decided that what I wanted to hear was classical music, and having joined the Columbia Record Club, with its infamous negative option membership setup, I soon amassed lots of music.  Despite flirtations with Motown and Broadway, I remained a classical girl at heart, and was delighted to learn that my husband-to-be also loved classical music and had his own bazillion records.

Records, of course, are hard to integrate into your daily life, because they require tending, even if you have a turntable with a changer to drop a new one into place when the old one is finished.  You can only reliably hear the music from the same room, which doesn't work if you're doing housework or tending children or making dinner (whoever would have put their record player in the kitchen???).

Fortunately we've been blessed in Louisville with great classical radio.  For several years in the 1970s, we even had two classical stations!  If you didn't want to listen to Hindemith, you could flip the dial and see if you could get Tchaikovsky on the other station!  We're down to one station now, but it's 24/7, so we turn on the radio when we get up in the morning and turn it off when we go to bed.

#2 of 5

Some years ago we stopped at an outlet store on our way home from vacation and bought a Bose radio for Ken's office.  It was a splurge, but what a quantum leap in quality from the previous radio (a pale green Grundig that Ken had bought 50 years earlier) in that room.  I immediately became jealous, and a couple of years later I stopped at the same outlet store and bought one for my own office.

Meanwhile our radios in the other rooms were getting old.  The radio/stereo system in the living room was getting increasingly unreliable.  We own more than 1,000 CDs, and I realized that CDs are an almost-obsolete technology.  I worried that one day the system would refuse to play a CD, and this would occur two weeks after every manufacturer of CDs in the entire world had decided to stop manufacturing CD players.

A Bose outlet store had just opened less than an hour from us, and as Christmas approached one year I announced that I was going to buy a Bose radio with a CD changer, in the hopes that it would outlast both us and our CDs.  When I got there, I decided to buy not only the radio plus CD player for our living room, but one for our bedroom and one for the kitchen, a total of five.
 
Ken accused me of over-splurging, but I pointed out that if you listen to the radio during every waking moment, why not have great quality?  All the radios are equipped with remote controls, and the three new ones also turn off and on if you simply touch them -- a great boon when you're walking through the kitchen with greasy hands and can do the honors with your elbow.  I'm not sure whether this works through temperature, pressure or ESP, but it's pretty neat.  As is the ability to have music throughout the house throughout the day -- wouldn't Bach be jealous?