Better Than I Remember

A while back I wrote about something that was not nearly as good as I remember. Visits to things from your past are sometimes dangerous journeys onto wind-tossed shoals of memory, where one wrong move can drive your fond recollections onto the sharp rocks of reality. But not everything you remember fondly from your past is doomed to turn out poorly in the present. Today, for example, I was pleasantly surprised.
   I'd just finished fencing and was driving home in the hot rod when some Jethro Tull came on the radio. Even though Tull was a regular part of my youth, it's been quite a while since I've listened to any of my old favorites. Sure, the songs are on my iTunes list, but the last time I was really into Tull I had to listen on a cassette tape.* And that's quite a while ago.
   Gotta say, I remember why I liked them all those years ago. I was jamming out on the highway to 'Aqualung,' which is about a 6 minute song, so I got pretty far down the 134 with Tull blaring, almost like when I used to pop the cassette into the player in my '72 Chevelle on my way to pick up my friends for a night of mischief. Good times, good times.

So not everything I liked when I was a kid is crap. It's a good thing I thought parachute pants were stupid back in the day, or I might have more to regret than Heavy Metal the Movie.


* Kids, cassette tapes replaced 8-track cartridges in the national zeitgeist and were co-existent with vinyl LPs, which themselves were like big, fragile, black CDs. CDs are what your older brothers and sisters used to buy back before iTunes.
** also, Jethro Tull was a real person a few centuries ago. Sounds like a Dickens character.