There are so many things I talk about with my kids that might as well be a foreign language. 

As they’ve gotten older, they’ve become more polite about my ramblings. Maybe they pity me. Maybe they think the old man needs to be handled gently. Whatever the case, I keep telling the stories anyway, and they keep listening, nodding along with that familiar look of polite confusion.

I bought Michelle a record player for Christmas. It’s one of those made-to-look-old models, like an antique radio from back in the day, but it has all the modern bells and whistles. There’s a turntable, of course, but also a cassette player and CD player. All three of those formats are equally outdated in the eyes of my kids. No 8-track, though. Probably because those things were too big to hoard easily.

We dug out the old Christmas records and had a ball. “Porgy and Bess,” along with a handful of albums rescued over the years from grandparents and parents downsizing. Michelle and I have been on a bit of a blues kick lately, so I had purchased a big blues CD collection, too. We sat around, listened, got up, danced a little. Nothing fancy. Just good music and a good time.

Naturally, it sent me back to when I was little. I remember going up to Olney, Illinois – maybe to Sears & Roebuck or one of those catalog stores – to pick up a record player. It was cream-colored, with cool speakers and lots of knobs that were very tempting to small hands. My brother and I were told very clearly not to touch it. It cost money, after all. And as much as we wanted to spin that turntable and twist those knobs, we didn’t – at least not when Mom was watching.

I’m pretty sure Mom belonged to some sort of record club. You’d order a few albums a month and get a deal, or something like that. What I remember most is how exciting it was when a box of records showed up in the mail. Mom didn’t make us wait. She was just as excited as we were. Unless something big was going on, the records were opened immediately and a dance party followed.

I must’ve been 5 or 6, which would’ve made my brother about 2. We’d wait for the arm to drop, listen for that familiar crackle, and off we’d go. We liked the fast songs, not the slow ones. I remember an album with Cher on the front, peeking through her long, straight hair. “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.” We played that one a lot.

But the album I remember best was John Denver’s with “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” and “Grandma’s Feather Bed.” That record was a rip-roaring good time, at least to us. We asked for it over and over.

Years later, when my own kids were little, we’d put on old 45s from the 1980s and history repeated itself. They wanted the same songs again and again, romping around the basement just like my brother and I once had. I still have that Cher album, and definitely the John Denver one. The jackets are yellowed. The records are a little faded. The crackle is louder now.

But when that needle hits the vinyl, it still has the power to take us right back to a simpler time. 

And for a few minutes, that feels pretty good.