I had a moment when I wrote the last entry. Searching for photos to illustrate the topic, I stumbled across cover art for the song "The Final Countdown", the great hit by the Swedish rock band Europe (learn about this famed song at Wikipedia). It just so happened that this was the first album I ever bought, back in 1986; I was 8 and music had just enchanted me for the first time. It was a cassette tape, and I remember buying it at the music shop with my mother. That first night, I sat on the edge of my bed listening and listening and listening to that song, wearing out the rewind button on the cassette player. It was a short time later that I got a Walkman portable cassette player as a birthday present, and my horizons were expanded again. I remember walking in my neighborhood with headphones on, listening to that cassette as well as various radio stations. The sound was bursting out of those headphones and seemed to encircle manicured lawns and mature trees that dotted the sides of the street. I was a kid, walking with music, and enveloped by the experience.Funny how seeing the cover art of a long-ago album can do that to you; music has that sort of power. Come to think of it, so do other things like the smell of certain foods on the stove and the sight of a familiar face from long-ago lurking in a crowd. These visceral experiences are reminders of a past that disappears everywhere else but in our head. For such memories, the web is an interesting medium to revive such experiences at the drop of a keyword.
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