The Best Moment from the Ed Sheeran Concert Trip (aka CD Recovery)
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Dad passed away last January 2022, and working with my ever-efficient sister, we closed things out, sold his little zero-lot-line unit, did several garage sales after giving aunts and uncles and cousins and my children opportunities to take what they might want, after my sister and I kept the few things meaningful to us by the end of July 2022. But a lot, like A LOT, just ended up getting to Goodwill (and some stuff like diapers and pads and medical stuff to a senior center), and of course my 2003 Ford Ranger pick-up was often the mode of deliveries.
I personally drive one of two vehicles, the truck (currently >283,000 miles), and a 2014 Mazda 2 (~110,000 miles) that I purchased to get a bit better gas milage on my ~80 mile daily round trip to work. Though honestly, since going back to the office after COVID, and during the weekend trips to care for Dad, I really prefer driving my truck. The small Mazda 2, although the economy version of their line, is like my truck a 5-speed and it handles and accelerates like a sports car (“Zoom, Zoom” as their advertisements went back then).
Because I alternate vehicles, and because I’m still a person who prefers to listen to music via CD rather than Bluetooth, I have two black CD case holders, one for each car. My wife has a 2009 Camry (~68,000 miles) which I only drive if we are going somewhere together (to someone’s house or holiday gathering or on the rare trips we take), or if she asks that I fill up her gas tank, check her tires’ air pressure, or to wash it.
While we were post-selling Dad’s home and later completing yard sales, all that furniture and knick-knack stuff was stored partially in my sister’s one-car garage and in one bay of our 3-car garage, the one where I normally park my truck, so it stayed in my driveway uncommonly for months last year. Because I live out of the city limits and my house sits back from the little dead end street among a series of “no exit” dead end streets of my neighborhood, I don’t typically think to lock my vehicle doors - though that was a habit decades ago when we still lived in Nashville.
During that timeframe at the end of last summer, one of my car CD cases went missing, the one from the truck. I have DOZENS of times over the last year emptied out and searched every nook and cranny of the Ranger and the Mazda, of my bedroom where my shelves of a few hundred CDs live, all around the garage where I hang out and where there is also a shelf-mounted 30-year old CD player that was once in the kitchen of our first house in Smyrna. I have looked so many places, and kept hoping since I’m getting older and forgetful it would be some weird place, but I’d really given up. Every time I go to replace my remaining CD case with new selections from the bedroom, I would happen upon an empty case and add it to a stack of other empty cases, knowing that it was likely a lost cause in that disappeared CD case. I’d convinced myself that I’d either accidentally dropped it into a random box of Dad’s stuff that I’d donated to Goodwill or more worryingly that some random UPS, Amazon or other delivery driver, who would be pulling into my long driveway and walking past the unlocked truck might have decided to take it (though that too seemed a stretch since no one else really listens to CDs and in the zipped case it wouldn’t have been obvious the contents anyway).
Regardless, I have been very sad in the background of life at this for a year now, mourning a different sort of loss.
Because my wife booked us rooms at the Indigo Hotel in Nashville on Friday and Saturday night for the Ed Sheeran concert, we were of course driving in her Camry. In order to put our two suitcases into her trunk, I had to disconnect one side of this net/hammock sort of things that hangs across the initial edge of the trunk to hold loose things.
In that netting was my missing CD case. When we do take trips together, because I’m often awake when she’s not and/or I like to just walk around new places like when we rent a cabin in the Gatlinburg area, I typically will take my CD Walkman and a little carrying case that hangs off my belt (and a bevy or rechargeable AA batteries). I honesty don’t remember us going on a trip last year, but it’s obvious from the contents that I purposely picked an eclectic variety of some of my favorite things - every single slot was occupied.
That happened as the first stage of this concert “vacation” and I’ve nothing but a net fond memory of the musical highlight of this Ed Sheeran experience, my discovery of lost music by other artists.
You+Me: rose ave.
Sade: lovers rock
Stevie Nicks: Bella Donna
Ashley McBryde: Girl Going Nowhere *
Dan Fogelberg: Home Free
Sheryl Crow: Feels Like Home
Beth Orton: Daybreaker
Tubes: The Completion Backwards Principle
Duncan Sheik: Day Light
Train: (self-titled)
Fiona Apple: When The Pawn
Nickel Creek: A Dotted Line
Dire Straits: Communique’
Fleetwood Mac: Rumours
The Civil Wars: (self-titled)
Jewel: 0304
Dire Straits: (self-titled)
Pete Townshend: Empty Glass
Bruce Hornsby: Halcyon Days
Robyn: Robyn Is Here
Steely Dan: AJA
Sarah McLachlan: Surfacing
*P.S. listening to this on the way home night before last, I kept hitting replay on this song which is both the perfect bar beer-drinking song and so fun to sing at full volume down dark the two-lane curvy road heading home.
“If you ever get tired of bein’ happy”
God, it's good to see you, I just got in
We got a lot of catchin' up to do, How the hell you been?
Yeah I saw the pictures, the two of you all dressed up
I can't believe I'm gonna say this, You look so damn good in love
And if you ever get tired of bein' happy
You know I won't be hard to find at all
Baby you know you always had me
And if you ever get tired of bein' happy, give me a call
Now Darlin', I ain't sayin' it won't all work out
It's just no one knows like I do, you can't settle for settlin' down
I guess I gotta own it: I'm the one that let you go
I ain't puttin' nothin' on ya, I just wanted you to know
If you ever get tired of bein' happy
Oh I won't be, hard to find at all
I've never wrecked a home, but don't put it past me
If you ever get tired of bein' happy, give me a call
If you ever get tired of bein' happy
You know I won't be hard to find at all
I've never wrecked a home, but don't put it past me
If you ever get tired of bein' happy, give me a call
If you ever get tired of bein' happy, give me a call
Oh, why don't ya give me a call
Yeah, just give me a call
Dad passed away last January 2022, and working with my ever-efficient sister, we closed things out, sold his little zero-lot-line unit, did several garage sales after giving aunts and uncles and cousins and my children opportunities to take what they might want, after my sister and I kept the few things meaningful to us by the end of July 2022. But a lot, like A LOT, just ended up getting to Goodwill (and some stuff like diapers and pads and medical stuff to a senior center), and of course my 2003 Ford Ranger pick-up was often the mode of deliveries.
I personally drive one of two vehicles, the truck (currently >283,000 miles), and a 2014 Mazda 2 (~110,000 miles) that I purchased to get a bit better gas milage on my ~80 mile daily round trip to work. Though honestly, since going back to the office after COVID, and during the weekend trips to care for Dad, I really prefer driving my truck. The small Mazda 2, although the economy version of their line, is like my truck a 5-speed and it handles and accelerates like a sports car (“Zoom, Zoom” as their advertisements went back then).
Because I alternate vehicles, and because I’m still a person who prefers to listen to music via CD rather than Bluetooth, I have two black CD case holders, one for each car. My wife has a 2009 Camry (~68,000 miles) which I only drive if we are going somewhere together (to someone’s house or holiday gathering or on the rare trips we take), or if she asks that I fill up her gas tank, check her tires’ air pressure, or to wash it.
While we were post-selling Dad’s home and later completing yard sales, all that furniture and knick-knack stuff was stored partially in my sister’s one-car garage and in one bay of our 3-car garage, the one where I normally park my truck, so it stayed in my driveway uncommonly for months last year. Because I live out of the city limits and my house sits back from the little dead end street among a series of “no exit” dead end streets of my neighborhood, I don’t typically think to lock my vehicle doors - though that was a habit decades ago when we still lived in Nashville.
During that timeframe at the end of last summer, one of my car CD cases went missing, the one from the truck. I have DOZENS of times over the last year emptied out and searched every nook and cranny of the Ranger and the Mazda, of my bedroom where my shelves of a few hundred CDs live, all around the garage where I hang out and where there is also a shelf-mounted 30-year old CD player that was once in the kitchen of our first house in Smyrna. I have looked so many places, and kept hoping since I’m getting older and forgetful it would be some weird place, but I’d really given up. Every time I go to replace my remaining CD case with new selections from the bedroom, I would happen upon an empty case and add it to a stack of other empty cases, knowing that it was likely a lost cause in that disappeared CD case. I’d convinced myself that I’d either accidentally dropped it into a random box of Dad’s stuff that I’d donated to Goodwill or more worryingly that some random UPS, Amazon or other delivery driver, who would be pulling into my long driveway and walking past the unlocked truck might have decided to take it (though that too seemed a stretch since no one else really listens to CDs and in the zipped case it wouldn’t have been obvious the contents anyway).
Regardless, I have been very sad in the background of life at this for a year now, mourning a different sort of loss.
Because my wife booked us rooms at the Indigo Hotel in Nashville on Friday and Saturday night for the Ed Sheeran concert, we were of course driving in her Camry. In order to put our two suitcases into her trunk, I had to disconnect one side of this net/hammock sort of things that hangs across the initial edge of the trunk to hold loose things.
In that netting was my missing CD case. When we do take trips together, because I’m often awake when she’s not and/or I like to just walk around new places like when we rent a cabin in the Gatlinburg area, I typically will take my CD Walkman and a little carrying case that hangs off my belt (and a bevy or rechargeable AA batteries). I honesty don’t remember us going on a trip last year, but it’s obvious from the contents that I purposely picked an eclectic variety of some of my favorite things - every single slot was occupied.
That happened as the first stage of this concert “vacation” and I’ve nothing but a net fond memory of the musical highlight of this Ed Sheeran experience, my discovery of lost music by other artists.
You+Me: rose ave.
Sade: lovers rock
Stevie Nicks: Bella Donna
Ashley McBryde: Girl Going Nowhere *
Dan Fogelberg: Home Free
Sheryl Crow: Feels Like Home
Beth Orton: Daybreaker
Tubes: The Completion Backwards Principle
Duncan Sheik: Day Light
Train: (self-titled)
Fiona Apple: When The Pawn
Nickel Creek: A Dotted Line
Dire Straits: Communique’
Fleetwood Mac: Rumours
The Civil Wars: (self-titled)
Jewel: 0304
Dire Straits: (self-titled)
Pete Townshend: Empty Glass
Bruce Hornsby: Halcyon Days
Robyn: Robyn Is Here
Steely Dan: AJA
Sarah McLachlan: Surfacing
*P.S. listening to this on the way home night before last, I kept hitting replay on this song which is both the perfect bar beer-drinking song and so fun to sing at full volume down dark the two-lane curvy road heading home.
“If you ever get tired of bein’ happy”
God, it's good to see you, I just got in
We got a lot of catchin' up to do, How the hell you been?
Yeah I saw the pictures, the two of you all dressed up
I can't believe I'm gonna say this, You look so damn good in love
And if you ever get tired of bein' happy
You know I won't be hard to find at all
Baby you know you always had me
And if you ever get tired of bein' happy, give me a call
Now Darlin', I ain't sayin' it won't all work out
It's just no one knows like I do, you can't settle for settlin' down
I guess I gotta own it: I'm the one that let you go
I ain't puttin' nothin' on ya, I just wanted you to know
If you ever get tired of bein' happy
Oh I won't be, hard to find at all
I've never wrecked a home, but don't put it past me
If you ever get tired of bein' happy, give me a call
If you ever get tired of bein' happy
You know I won't be hard to find at all
I've never wrecked a home, but don't put it past me
If you ever get tired of bein' happy, give me a call
If you ever get tired of bein' happy, give me a call
Oh, why don't ya give me a call
Yeah, just give me a call