Musical Ghosts

I feel as though a certain cruel but poetic justice has been dispensed. After complaining some weeks ago about having thousands of songs playing in the wrong order on my shiny new mp3/CD player, someone stole both the player and most of my cds.

For a few days I sat dazed on my porch listening to the squawking magpies, screeching roosters and wailing goats in my neighborhood, trying to pick out recognizable melodies. “Did you hear that?” I asked Adriana, who had come over to cheer me up, or use my bathroom, I can’t remember which. “Did that rooster just sing the theme from the Washington Post March?” Adriana sighed. “You’re no fun without music,” she declared, and she skipped out to the market and purchased a Cougar Radio Cassette recorder.

This machine, for the benefit of people who haven’t fallen into money, is shiny, black, about the size of a travel pillow, and is manufactured in The Future (no country of origin is noted anywhere on the box, set up guide, or the unit itself). The Cougar features “Auto Stop,” which allows the cassette playing engine to automatically sense the end of a side rather than most other tape decks which continue to rotate and snap the tape right off the reel. The two-inch speaker mounted inside a shiny silver grill practically guarantees that after the end of side A, your ears will be ready for a little auto-stopping. I notice from reading the manual that my model lacks the optional “Disco Light Bulbs,” (I swear!) but I admit that it’s not bad for nine dollars.

Since there’s only a small window in the Mauritanian day when you can find a radio station not dominated by a woman wailing over a possibly broken stringed instrument, we are lucky that previous volunteers left us a time capsule of sorts: three blue medical kits full of old cassettes. The tapes fall into two basic categories: never listened to Christmas presents and college mix tapes dubbed during moments of personal crisis.

In the former category you have titles like Jazz-A-Live, Mad About The Orchestra, and Instrumental Gold, which is coincidental because I was recently wondering where in Mauritania I could listen to Lara’s Theme from Dr. Zhivago. The latter category of mixes is even more strenuous, as it requires you to plunge into the psychological morass of a late 20th century Peace Corps Volunteer. Tapes with faded labels sporting titles such as “Crappy Mix,” “Sarah’s Road Trip” or the mysterious “Step Aerobics 1” suggest that maybe I’ll use this as an excuse to spend more time out of the house.