My philosophy includes the notion that you never know if you can eventually use one of the gadgets that you cannot throw away.  It, one day, might have a use.  Or, at least if you take it apart, one of those parts might be useful elsewhere.  I have just gone through one of those revelatory moments when I thought of a place where I stored old recording devices one of which I know has a screw missing. This is from one of my truly valuable electronic classics, a Walkman F2 that works really well as a radio but has a missing screw that holds its lid down tight when working as a recorder.  It has a really fine reproduction of FM sound but I would like to get it working again to use in recording the songs we sing and rehearse in our Chorus group. I just know I will find another little machine that will provide the answer.  Of course, I could send this out to be fixed by a professional but this was the recorder I took with me to the 1983 International Conference on Utopian Studies in Italy to do research on monastic structures as a Utopian response to the stress of group living.  It worked then and I just know it can work again. I found that women and men who live in monastic seclusion remain human and bring human frailties and complaint in with them rather than leave them behind.  Monastics have not solved those age-old problems by leaving them behind.  They just bring them into monasteries and nunneries along with them.  But that does not help me finding the little screws that will get my F2 working again.

Now, Carol has a philosophy learned from her father, that “If in doubt, throw it out.”  This clashes with my love of collecting, packrat style, things that might be useful again or at least have value for being oddities or antiques.  There are collectors of these things, you know.

I have discovered, although I knew it all along, that screws made in Hong Kong, Japan or Indonesia are most likely created with idiosyncratic measuring histories or individualistic approaches to creating little machines that are snatched up by Western aficionados of electronic miniature miracles.  Then, too, there is the fact that the U.S. has NOT adopted the metric system used by other nations East and West.

I probably will have to do some real research to find the little screw missing from F2 or ultimately make the decision to have it repaired by professionals.  I might even have to dump that drawer full of unused electronic devices and give in to the understanding that we no longer use players of 78 or 45 “records” and have gone to and passed tapes.  Miniaturization has even taken over cd’s and I am left with my fixation that time has NOT passed me by but everyone else is out of step.