A RADIO LOVE AFFAIR: the rekindling of an old, staticky flame

Radios.

Back in youth...I'm talking the 60's and 70's...in small town rural Canada, the height of personal entertainment was the radio.

We would listen to our old radio in the kitchen a lot, but mostly it was turned on to 730 CKDM to listen to Bernie Basaraba "The Voice of the Kings" as he commentated the local hockey team who both of my brothers each Captained at one point or another. 

My social life centered on watching the games live when I was old enough to walk to the arena myself, but when I was younger (or older but babysitting my sister) listening to the game on the radio was pretty damn exciting! Games and the local radio station playlist was all we got, except on a cloudless night when we could tap into a Winnipeg station now and then. Scratchy, staticky signals weaker than a preacher's whiskey.

But those big radios were permanent fixtures in most homes, like ours in a nook in the kitchen above the counter, so privacy for listening alone was impossible. 

So, when I was given a small, hand held transistor radio, I was crazy happy! It made an indelible mark in my childhood. I listened to it pressed close to my ear so often, I'm sure you can still see its imprint some 50 years later.

I went to bed every night with that transistor radio next to my head on the pillow, or if my sister complained (we slept two to a bed in our big family) I turned down the volume to a ghost's whisper and slept with it under my ear. I learned to contort my body so my full upper-weight was on my arms under the pillow and the hard plastic radio was less painful under my head. 

That must be a mannequin's hand holding the radio pictured below because, trust me, 10 minutes in that position, your hand would we numb for life. 

It wasn't until I was about 19 yrs old (1979) when the Sony Walkman came out that earphones/headphones were common. There may have been something similar for transistor radios before that, but not in our house. None of that fancy stuff for us.... *eye roll*

When I happen to catch an old tune on the radio now, it immediately sends me back to my room at home. I can smell Mom's honey-dipped donuts cooling on the rack; I hear the boys arguing out back, fighting over who has to mow the lawn; and I see my posters of Donny Osmond plastered on my wall like love-sick, teeny-bop wallpaper.

Some of those early tunes are:

The Archies

Sugar Sugar:

Lay Down 

by Melanie & The Edwin Hawkins Singers:

Three Dog Night

Mama Told Me Not To Come:

Freda Payne

Band of Gold: 

The Guess Who

American Woman: 

I was so madly in love with Canadian singer Burton Cummings from The Guess Who, I told everyone my first baby was our Love Child. My husband at the time just smiled and let me have my fun. *smile*

So...the point of this post, finally, is to share with you an app I found called RADIO GARDEN. It's a mobile or webb app actually and it's bloody amazing! And it's FREE whether it be on your phone or computer! 

 "From the (click link in blue letters) Radio Garden app site on the Google Play Store “Radio Garden allows you to listen to thousands of live radio stations world wide by rotating the globe. Every green dot represents a city or town. Tap on it to tune into the radio stations broadcasting from that city.“ The app designers are adding stations constantly. You might be surprised what stations you will find just in your area you didn’t even know existed. As long as you have a phone signal you can tune into Radio Garden. Just select a green dot or city, there is drop down menu for all the stations in that area on the app. 

For your computer just go here to radio.garden. Or just Google it yourself. There is an app, of course.

I just LOVE it! Sure, I have access to tons of music, but nothing beats listening to music (or programs of all sorts!) on live radio from ANYWHERE in the world, 27/7! You can be your own DJ!

And it looks SO cool. When you turn on the app, an animated planet Earth comes on your screen and it rotates and takes a few seconds for the bright green dots (the 'seeds' ) to get planted...which only means it's getting populated with the stations for you to use...

Then you can scroll around the world immediately listening to what looks like hundreds of thousands of radio stations playing LIVE in their towns and cities globally. You can type in the city or town etc...where you wish to listen, or look randomly, like I usually do, and listen to one of a gazillion stations in Brazil ...

...or the USA, or Germany, Iceland, Poland, Sicily...anywhere! I like to find a lone wee green dot in the middle of the ocean on an island somewhere remote and listen in on what some lonely Lighthouse Keeper in may be listening to...

I can't tell you the thrill I got the first time I played with that radio app. To listen to CKDM again in my hometown...

....or to the music my daughter may be listening to in Edmonton, or the news in German my sister-in-law listens to in her little village in Germany...or my grandchildren in Australia...it was mind-blowing!

I have travelled extensively in my life and it was just so beautiful to sit in my comfy chair outside in the sun last summer, close my eyes and listen to some tunes out of Jamaica, remembering the feel of warm sand at my feet and an ice cold Red Stripe beer at my fingertips. I could almost smell the unmistakeable mix of salt water and Caribbean blooms. Then, when I grew restless for maybe a talk-show in a language I knew nothing about, I'd spin over to Rome and find a channel that had some that passionate Italian spice I heard while visiting the Vatican in 2016... so many incredible memories!

And finally, I often seek out a radio station in Ukraine and wonder if it's the music I'd be listening to today had my grandparents not taken a leap of faith and left the Motherland for Canada. 

That always gives me the shivers.

I hope you find some pleasure in this new technology and awesome new means to 'travel' the world.

TRUFFLE IN PARADISE

Jamaica is a lovely island get-a-way. For anyone but me.

In 1983, when I married my second husband Mark (second in my trilogy!), we flew to Jamaica for our honeymoon. Our ‘Just Married’ matching T-shirts scored us a bump up to First Class and it was bubbly champagne, bonbons and legroom all the way to the land of Reggae and Rastafarians.

Within ten minutes of arriving, we were offered some local ganja (a.k.a: marijuana/dope/weed/wacky-tabacky):

Luggage Boy: (toothy grin at Mark) Hey mon...your bag says you be a doctor. I am a doctor too. I can make you feel real good, mon.

Denise: No thanks. We’re married now. We aren’t supposed to feel good.

Luggage Boy: (determinedly) No problem, mon! Every ting criss...I get you anyting you want! Just ask m...

*POLICEMAN ROUNDS THE CORNER

Denise: (to Mark) Where’s our luggage boy?

If you would have seen me poolside the next day, you might have thought I was a mighty poor excuse for a thief, blatantly hording my stash out in the open: mounds of cigarettes in small bundles, neat piles of matches, a stack of monogrammed hotel napkins and an impressive array of empty glasses and beer bottles. This was an all-inclusive, all-you-can-eat/drink/smoke resort and I wasn’t going to diet or cut down on a single vise for the week I were there. This small-town prairie girl was taking no chances and I stockpiled as much as I could just in case they changed their hotel policy midweek. Sure I got a few odd looks, but I felt invisible. Nobody knew my name, shoe size or was even remotely related to me. It was unlike anywhere I ever had been before...it was an emancipation!

Late in the afternoon I waved off the chance to water-ski in the warm Caribbean Sea (I adhere to the belief that playing in areas where wildlife can swallow you whole should be avoided) so I was left to my own devises and chose to read on the beach. The sun was brutal and the ocean immediately in front of the hotel was protected by a high-tech safety net, so feeling uncommonly adventurous (and admittedly a bit wimpy for not skiing) I decided to go snorkeling.

The fact that I couldn’t swim nor had I ever snorkeled, failed to register in my mind. The self-preservation portion of my brain had been fully cooked in the blistering Jamaican sun and was set aside to simmer.

The resort lent out free gear and I taught myself the basics quickly, setting off along an exceptionally long pier jutting out into the crystal clear waters close to where I had been lounging on the beach. The panorama below me was entrancing: such an alien, delightful world! But soon I noticed, directly underneath me, a hard-plastic cup from the resort embedded in the ocean floor. Usually, this object wouldn’t cause a stir (save being a piece of unfortunate litter in such pristine surroundings) but it dawned on me that these over-sized tumblers were normally quite large in my hands, and this one was very tiny. Itsy bitsy, even. Two things were immediately obvious: I was way too far out and there was a lot of water between me and that cup! To give myself credit, I did not panic, but quickly snorkeled back to the beach. I had just turned to sit in waist-high water and was taking off my mask when I heard the first scream.

People were running down the pier and yelling, pointing to a massive ripple in the water, utter horror stamped on their scorched, lotion soaked faces. The sinister ripple was in the precise spot where I had seen the tumbler just seconds before.

I didn’t know then what had caused all the excitement, but I knew that I had just missed a personal introduction to it. An ice-cold sensation doused me from the top of my head fully down to my toes. That was how tangible the shock was. I wanted to scoot further back out of the water onto the dry, safe sand, but I was frozen solid. A shark could have slid past and looked me over like a pork roast at Safeway and I couldn’t have budged an inch.

After a few minutes, I finally made it shakily to my lounger and sat down. A staff server came to me and asked if I would like a drink or a snack.

Denise: Do you know what all the screaming was about by the pier?

Server: (naively honest) I heard a Moray eel broke through the netting, mon! A big one too! But no problem, mon...they don’t usually attack humans.

Denise: Where is our luggage boy?

I am nobody’s fool. I know bloody well that this particular giant eel had not accidentally passed through a breech in the netting but had sniffed a rare delicacy, a pure 100% fresh Ukrainian/Canadian hors d’oeuvre and it had chomped clean through that net looking for the buffet table.

I was the Truffle Of The Sea. 

Now, how many people do you know can say that?

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**ADDED: a screen shot of one of many comments on this story on FB: