What’s the silliest thing you’ve gotten excited about lately?
For me, it was a recent purchase. Not a new vehicle. Not some swanky wardrobe upgrade. Something far more mundane. After months of wanting one, I finally splurged and bought a clock radio. And I’m fairly certain no one has been this excited about a clock radio since about 1978.
Why? It’s the radio part.
A while back I realized we didn’t own a single AM/FM radio anymore. When we lived in Iowa, we had this giant stereo my husband hauled through multiple moves. It was so well loved you couldn’t turn it off or the volume would never come back on. On our last move to South Dakota, we made the rash decision to toss it. Terrible idea.
It didn’t take long for me to miss the radio. Radio is pure nostalgia for me, especially being back in northeast South Dakota and able to listen to KBWS out of Sisseton again. They even brought back the old DJ, Johnny Seiber. As kids, we had a radio on constantly. There was always a boom box sitting on our very messy kitchen table. My mom flipped it on every morning.
My sister and I spent hours trying to record songs off the radio onto cassette tapes. Your timing had to be flawless. You would request a song, wait patiently, and then hit record at precisely the right second so you didn’t capture a bunch of DJ chatter. It was high stakes business.
And don’t even get me started on radio contests. Trivia. Call in to win concert tickets. That was my equivalent of gambling. I can still picture us sitting in our shared bedroom waiting for them to announce the contest, desperately trying to be caller number 26 or whatever random number they chose. Repeated dialing. Immediate hang ups. Praying you got through. Peak preteen behavior.
Fast forward to adulthood. When I realized I didn’t have a radio, my quality of life took a steep decline. Okay, slight exaggeration. But how was I supposed to hear the morning birthday show to see if my kids won a free cake? What about trivia? I even resorted to borrowing my dad’s fish shack radio once so I could call in for tickets and I won. Nosebleed seats, but still. Victory.
The final straw came when they announced the recent Zac Brown Band ticket call-in contest. I tried streaming the station online, knowing there would be a delay. When they announced the contest, I sprinted out to my vehicle to hear it live and find out what caller I needed to be. I sat there in my cold car for 20 minutes, only to realize I had missed it because of the internet lag. Devastating.
That was it. I had had enough.
So when we were in Fargo recently for Monster Jam, I gave Walmart my hard-earned money and paid twenty some dollars for a clock radio roughly the size of a large potato.
And let me tell you, joy.
The sound quality is somewhere between inside a tin can and bottom of the ocean, but it works. The very first morning I turned it on, I won radio trivia. Redemption.
My kids are baffled by this little device sitting next to our smart speaker. They do not understand why they cannot just tell it what song to play. Welcome to my youth, children. You wait. You listen. You hope.
And pretty soon, I am making them be the callers, because apparently even I cannot win trivia three times a week.
