I find some interesting things when I’m wondering around. This morning, I found a few eight-track tapes on the edge of the street and the sidewalk. As if someone had driven by and tossed them out every hundred feet. I amused myself by trying to imagine who drove through sometime last night and chose to toss them out the window. Did they come flying from a vintage car? Was the person who tossed to them someone who bought them when they were released?

Eight-track tapes came to the United States in 1965. By the time these were popular, Glenn Miller had already been dead twenty-one years. He was another artist I didn’t appreciate until my Uncle Buck told me to listen to his big band style with a different ear. Glenn Miller once ruled his corner of the musical world. But now he’s an increasingly forgotten relic of the past. 

I like moments like these before the sun comes up. A random find brings nebulous memories back from the dead. 

I’ve decided that the person who discarded these decided that the owner of a carefully maintained 1966 Ford Galaxie took his old car out for one more drive. Ford was the first company to put 8-track players in their vehicles in the United States. 

I’m not a car enthusiast, but when I was younger I involuntarily learned an encyclopedia of information about cars. Because of innovation, all that knowledge is just trivia now.

Like Glenn Miller, we will all be footnotes. I guess I better walk a little faster before time races past me.

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The Langoliers haven’t arrived yet. People might not get the reference. But I’m always looking at things and admiring how pretty they are when they are static and waiting for people to inhabit them.