ODE TO AN IPOD OR TO MUFASA?
By Jay de Leon

When I started writing this article, I had not yet decided whether the article was to be a gee-whiz look at technology, a standard parental whine about our kids never having it so good, or a baby boomer’s nostalgic look at the sixties.

So I will just stick to the facts.

For Christmas last year (2005), we decided to give our middle child, Mitch, sixteen, the then latest edition of the iPod.  This particular Christmas gift was decidedly pricey, and on top of that, we threw in some of those prepaid cards for purchasing and downloading music to the iPod.  But Mitch had been and is a real good kid, a strong B student in school, did his chores at home, and although he had opted out of his high school’s wrestling program, had recently embarked on a dirt biking regimen on his own with several friends.

Anyway, while Mitch and I casually hung out over last weekend, he presented me with a list and some startling statistics about his iPod.  First of all, the iPod allows you to print out a list of artists whose music you have downloaded to the iPod.  He showed me the print-out, and based on his print-out, this was what I learned:

His iPod contained 2,909 songs sang by 237 artists, plus a dozen or so music videos.  If you played the songs one after the other, it will take you 7.3 days to listen to all 2,909 of them.  And of course, Mitch is not done yet and continues to blissfully download more music.

I will gloss over the fact that I did not recognize 99.9% of the artists.  The rest were oldies but goodies he downloaded for me to listen, to show off the power of his technological gadget .  What are these kids listening to nowadays?  There is no accounting for taste.  But I digress.  I am straying into shaky ground, that of musical taste, and that is another blog.

If you are one of those technologically hip about iPods and other current musical gadgetry, you probably just shrugged your shoulders.  For somebody like me that grew up in the sixties with flower power, this was mindboggling.

I remember as a little boy receiving my own transistor radio as a Christmas present.  Then as a teen-ager, I received my own record player that played the latest vinyl records--45 rpm for the singles or short playing and 33 1/3 rpm for the LP’s (long-playing) records.  I remember going hog-wild and buying records of hot bands like the Dave Clark 5, Cliff Richard, the Searchers, and of course the Beatles, and listening to them hours on end.

Holy Sony!  What musical gizmo will my grandchildren be listening to?

But of course now I realize that as Mufasa taught us in the “Lion King,” it is just the circle of life.   Thirty years from now, Mitch will be writing his own blog (the future version of course) and reminiscing about the stone-age gadget he got for Christmas called an iPod. 

But hopefully he will be recalling, with some filial love and remembrance, how his parents indulged him one Christmas with this toy, perpetuating the tradition of introducing young cubs to the wonders of life, both the necessary lessons as well as the trivial trappings of the world.

Yes, even iPods.