I subscribe to Apple Music, and last week, I bought a Beats speaker for the farmhouse, and for me (Maria has one). I don’t really know what too me so long. I love music, and it has always  been a part of my life.

But I’ve been so busy in recent years, I didn’t make enough space in my life for it.

I am old enough to remember when my cultural universe was a single portable radio I kept in my bedroom until my father, horrified by rock and roll and open to the demented rantings of ministers and members of Congress, took it out and hid it in the basement.

I found where he had hidden it, and often snuck downstairs to listen to my music, but that was the only way I could hear music at all in my world at the time.

Over Christmas, Maria brought in her portable speaker and I asked her to play Mary Lattimore, the wonderful harpist whose music I have loved for years, it is the loveliest backdrop.

It dawned on me that I was not using this miraculous new technology that allows me to add any music I love to my library for a few dollars a month in seconds.

I’ve got a couple of hundred songs in my Apple library,  Willie, Leonard Cohen, etc., Kendrick Lamar, Van Morrison, Iver, Dylan, etc., but I had a block about music and smart phones.The Beats speaker has helped me get over that.

As I write this, I’m listening to “Ghost Forrests by Meg Baird and Mary Lattimore, it is so beautiful and spiritual that I can write while it is in the background.

As a life-long music lover who just turned 70, I do not take this musical miracle for granted. I know it is hard for musicians to make a living these days, just as it is hard for writers.

All change is not good, but all change is not bad either. I did this video so you can hear what Red and I hear this morning.

This speaker is a miracle to me, holding off was  a kind of pointless and self-destructive resistance. I think I often balk at new technology sometimes to keep believing in the myth that I can control it.

I loved my little radio, it changed my life, and I guess I don’t want to forget it or be disloyal to it, even though it exists now only in attics and museums.

Like Van Morrison, I loved my radio, and turned it up whenever I could. It was very important to me.

Sorry, my friend, this speaker is so much richer and deeper than you ever were. So it’s time to let go.