Consumer Non-Professional Audio Products

This is a short story that I really wanted to turn into a submission for NPR's This I Believe. It decided to be something else, though. In the end it knew better than me and I am happy with what it is. I'm going to give this story to my Dad for Father's Day. It's all true...


I believe in big, black headphones. The kind that cover your ears and have soft padding on the insides. The kind that you know, if pressed, you could use to protect your extremities on a cold winter night should you lose your earmuffs or hat. The kind that are meant to block everything else out, and make a statement to anyone who should see you- I am not to be disturbed. I have chosen to remove myself from the real world.

The pair that currently belongs to me is black with silver lettering on them, showing the company’s brand name. After 8 years, they still work perfectly. Tracing their history backwards in time, they have moved to graduate school with me, to a go nowhere desk job in Minneapolis, to my first apartment alone during my undergrad career, to my disastrous living arrangement with the one insane roommate everyone gets in their life, to a cramped inhumane state college dormroom reminiscent of those PETA films on the living conditions of chickens.

I got them as a gift the day before my father was going to drive me to college. And leave me there. I was a year younger than everyone in my class- I had been since I skipped a grade just before high school. That summer I worked at the public library in between slipping further into anorexia and severe depression. I liked moving among the silent books, touching them, adjusting their order. I loved bringing order to the world in some way, when I could not seem to find any in my own life. Sometimes I would open some of the art books just to touch the pages, because they seemed so perfect and totally smooth. My dad got me that job. That job where I could chatter away to myself in my head for 12 hours a week. He probably sensed I wasn’t ready to leave for school. He certainly wasn’t ready to let me go- but who knows if he ever would have been. I am his youngest- ten years separate myself and the oldest of my 2 older brothers. And I am his first and only daughter.

My father is man of worries. He is somewhat feminine in that way, I guess. He gets a wrinkle between his eyebrows. A vertical one, about an eighth of an inch long, appears whenever something is bothering him…usually this involves fearing for the happiness and wellbeing of his loved ones. As a small girl, I remember him as a man with less grey in his hair than he has now, with skin tighter near his chin and neck, and thinner- a whisper of the gangly figure he had been as a young man. But that little vertical mark has always stayed.

One of the ways my father deals with his worries is to direct them as small, solvable issues or tasks. He is a list maker and an organizer. Hell, I’m an engineer, he’d joke. What do you expect? In catering to wired parents everywhere, my chosen future alma mater had published a list for all incoming freshman. Like one of those lists you’d get in the mail before going to summer camp, advising your parents that most campers can do with a flashlight, a bathing suit, and an investment in insect repellent that would make Solomon himself blush. To this list for college freshman, which included things like a laundry hamper, shower flip flops, phone cards, and easy mac, my father directed absolutely all of his nervous energy. If the list suggested a good pair of walking shoes for the sprawling Midwestern campus, we had to go to three specialized hiking shoe stores in the mall before special ordering a pair of day hiking shoes from somewhere in Canada. When the list suggested some elementary pharmaceuticals like ibuprofen and vitamins, Dad went to Sam’s club and bought me 800 ibuprofen pills and the tub full of calcium pills that I could probably have bathed out of when it was empty. As though it ever would be.

Onto this list he had projected all his fears and worries over his rapidly shrinking daughter, so silent and grey in comparison to the bouncy little round girl with pigtails and a never ceasing verbal narrative on the world around her. Perhaps in the excess of his purchases and the attention to detail, he hoped he would pass on some notion of excess to me. Get me to feel that slight sense of abandonment that one needs to believe that the world is a safe place to walk in. That notion of excess that preaches- go ahead, taste the heavy soft fruits of this earth.

Last on the list were a few accoutrement aimed at dealing with possible roommate friction. In such small quarters at such a difficult life moment, I later thought they would’ve done better to simply assign us all therapists, or build larger dormitories. Instead, they recommended headphones.

The list indicated that every freshman really ought to come to school with this. The reason was that many roommates became irritated over each other’s musical taste and listening habits. Headphones avoided the problem all together. While I was not a particularly invested music listener, I was a teenager. And to a teenager, especially one mired in the fear and angst that has bred so much wonderful music over the decades, music was important to me. I liked U2 back then. A lot.

The night before I was to leave, we were sealing up boxes and zipping bags shut. I couldn’t tell my Dad this at the time, but as I watched him stretch packing tape over the top of a box with a tape gun, I hated him for just a tiny moment. I hated him in that moment for being nice and gentle and kind. In that moment, I wanted him to be like some of the fathers I knew other girls in my high school graduating class had. Tyrannical unfeeling men who sent the women in their lives crying and fleeing into other rooms behind slammed doors. Men who exerted control over people, not just objects, when they felt tense and who ruled their household as absolute patriarchs. I hated my father for not being that kind of man. That kind of man, I thought, would not send me away. That kind of man would forbid me to leave and trap me here, and I could pretend to be angry at him, never having to say I’m scared. I’m not ready. Please don’t make me go. I feel like we’ve just gotten to know one another.

The moment passed and I zipped my luggage shut and ticked off boxes on Dad’s self-titled master list, “MOVING TO COLLEGE: ANN 1999: MASTER LIST.” I had the urge to make some joke about how we really should’ve given the whole enterprise some kind of code name, like a military operation. But I couldn’t think of a clever name, which made the joke seem kind of lame. Making jokes had ceased to be in my immediate nature months ago.

I drifted out of the dining room where the boxes were stacked and went to lay on the couch. Anorexics get exhausted quickly. But dinner was cooking in the next room and the smell of food was making me sick. I thought I might begin to cry. So I told everyone I was leaving and rushed out the house, called my step mother’s old German Shepard mix to me and we set off, as we had so many times that summer, to walk the hot country raods of central Illinois. When I got to the old cemetery just down the road, set off on a hill, I sat down to watch the sun. I burst into tears while Brutus, the dog, sniffed and marked various lichen encrusted headstones that no longer bore any names. I had realized that this was my last walk before I would forever be a visitor. I was devastated by the finality of the moment, which so elegantly contained the enormous life transition I so desperately wished to escape.

Eventually I came back home. I had avoided dinner. My family had stopped waiting for me to eat with them that summer, knowing that I just sat silently at the table sipping diet Pepsi, or pushing the food around on my plate that my stepmother, in her attempts to help, would insist I take.

I asked her where Dad was. She told me he’d gone out. When I asked where, she said she wasn’t sure, just that he said he was “goin’ into town.” In our lexicon, that meant he was going to drive 30-40 minutes to the city to buy something he needed. I couldn’t figure exactly what he needed now- hopefully not a gallon of shampoo for me or a package of 200 tubesocks. With Dad, though, you never knew when he would just get a wild hare to go do something that had been lurking in his mind, unbeknownst to the rest of us for weeks. I assumed this was one of those things. He might come home with a bottle of champagne, wanting the family to see me off, or he might come home with a new camera, or he might come home with a pack of Big Red. You just never knew.

When he did come back, he had a yellow bag from Best Buy. He came through the door, and said with a tinny voice that was overly cheery- what’s this in here? I wonder what’s in this bag? I just don’t know. Can someone help me? Annie- maybe you’ll look in the bag.

This was his way of reviving a childhood game with me. We enjoyed doing this kind of thing together during that summer. It had an amazing way of relieving tension in the room- as though by returning in our verbal repartee to a simpler shinier time, we could revive those feelings of love and joy without having to talk about why my spark seemed so close to dying out.

I reciprocated as best I could. Getting up from the couch, I saw the room spin, as it often did in those days. I slowly made my way toward him, accepted the bag, and looked in side.

At the bottom was an enormous set of – yes. Big. Black. Headphones. The kind with the soft inside. The kind with the super long cord. The kind that said, go away. I’m on vacation.

I looked up at him and put my arms around his neck and thanked him. He told me I was welcome, and proceeded to re-enact the conversation he had about headphones with the salesman at best buy, who in all likelihood had been in a cap and gown with me for the commencement of the class of ’99, Glenwood High. Once again, Dad had ferreted out the facts, asked incisive questions to determine the best headphones for my needs. Because the list said I needed them. And they were the last thing left to get.

That last thing left to get saw me through many moments in life. Over the years that we have lived together, the headphones and I, I have become surprised at their versatility, their usefulness. First, they helped me transition to college. They helped me over that huge hump of fear. Totality and finality has always scared me. Even as a child, I remember eating Popsicles on hot summer days and thinking that I would never again eat this exact Popsicle at this moment in this day in the year 1986. Sometimes this concept would bring me to tears, exasperating my already hair trigger tempered mother.

The headphones, somehow, abated this neurosis. I cut off the plastic display casing, and put a finger on the soft insides of the half sphere ears. I loved that padding, the way it squished like a pillow. So inviting. I felt the same thing when I was a little girl, and again when I was ten, when I would play with my dad’s enormous harvest wheat colored 1970s headphones. The kind with the fat end on them that only fit into tuners for LP players. When I was little, we kept those in the basement near the TV, for reasons I still don’t quite know. They disappeared at some point, and I stopped sneaking down there to where them while I watched movies, turning the volume on the TV up very high so I could hear through the padding (the headphones themselves didn’t hook into anything). I liked thinking they were my dad’s. And I liked sitting and running my fingers over the soft circles on their undersides. It felt so completely tender. When I was ten, I saw the headphones resurrected in my father’s apartment where he lived when my parents were divorced. By that time he bought a jack that would convert the headphones for use on modern machinery. By that point, I felt jealous of them. They were a symbol of the young man’s life my father had once led. But now, no longer safely integrated and appropriately forgotten in our family home, they took on a wild, ominous quality. They indicated that he had outside interests, and that he did things when I was not there. He had personal interests like a real autonomous person. How completely unjust.

The fact that these headphones now brought me back to two totally opposing moments of faith and revolution gave me an odd sense of comfort. All in all, I wasn’t sad about those Popsicles anymore. In fact, I rarely thought of them. In the same way, I had lost my anger towards my father over his choice to obtain a life apart. I had made the same choice earlier that summer when I knew I could no longer be my mother’s keeper. And he who had gone before me was the one who best understood.

Even now, in graduate school, life is still overwhelming to me. I cry a lot. I’m a crier- it’s just who I am. I still struggle with food every now and then, although more successfully than before. If you saw me on the street, you would think I looked like any other woman, instead of a startlingly emaciated husk. My life is no longer grey, but very colorful. And I live alone now. Well, sort of. I share an apartment with a little 2 year old welsh corgi. But he is a tight-lipped character and keeps most of his opinions to himself.

On days when I cannot take the world anymore, when things scare me and I lost my sense of abandon, I reach for those big black headphones. They still work wonderfully, you know. Just like the day I got them. I plug them into an ipod now instead of a discman or desktop PC. And I listen to podcasts, music, and radio stories. Lots of radio stories. I lay in bed and stare, sometimes I cry, and my dog jumps up and curls up next to me with his head next to mine. I listen to other people’s stories and I go away for a while. I go away for hours this way, trying to regain a foothold on whatever terrain I’m fining so unfriendly.

I have three other pairs of headphones. The ones that came with the ipod, an old school pair that go across the top of my head but have lost the foam coverings for the ear speakers, making them scratchy, and a pair I use for running. My boyfriend gave me those, and they hook over the tops of my ears. Very clever.

But the pair I use for my vacation escapes, when I go far into myself and listen to the world privately, just me, are the big black headphones. They are so comforting, so soft, and as Dad said, have a great track record of lasting for years while providing good range of sound for a consumer non-professional audio product.