Bring on the music by Connie Jenkins

As she got older, my mother was convinced that you had to talk louder on the telephone according to how far away the caller was. As a result, when my brother from Maine called her at home in the Northern New York, I could just about hear her end of the conversation from my apartment in New Hampshire.

Poor Mom would be very distressed by the situation I encounter almost every day now. I don’t know who, but someone runs out before me and replaces all the road signs with ones that have itty-bitty printing. Now that’s frustrating! My mother sure was right when she warned me: “Old age isn’t for sissies.”

Middle age (well, assuming I live to be 108) has required some adjustments, to be sure. There’s strength in numbers, though, so we baby boomers are rewriting the rules. Imagine us at senior centers some day … far in the future. They won’t have to orient us with Big Band Music – we’ll be rocking to Bob Dylan and the Stones and maybe even disco.

My secret hope is that by the time I get to be that old, I will have mastered the iPod I got for Christmas. Since I haven’t yet been able to get the music into it, I thought I’d do the next best thing and get a little case for it, like I have for my cell phone.

Beware.

I swallowed my pride and asked the 20-something clerk about cases and he pointed to an aisle. So a friend and I ventured over there. After a while, it was obvious that there were no padded bags or pouches but there were many plastic shells for the credit card-sized iPod.

“Oh,” My friend and I said together. “You must just protect it with that.”

They had red ones and blacks ones. Some featured cartoon images. Others were plaid. They all cost about $40, which is a heck of a lot more than I had expected to pay.

“Hey,” I eventually realized. “These are for iPhones, not iPods.” So my friend and I looked again at the signage on the racks and moved down to the middle of the aisle.

“Is your’s 4G?” my friend asked.

“Uh, I don’t know,” I replied and looked at the cases again.

Finally, a man down the aisle intervened: “You want the rack behind you.”

Oh.

So I have a nice protective case for my iPod and it only cost $9.99. The red ones were sold out but mine has little peace signs all over it. I still don’t know how to load the music. Luckily for me I still remember a lot of it.

Connie Jenkins of Malone is a longtime newspaper editor and freelance writer.