My Father's Cassette
Fri Apr 16, 2010 3:37:11 pm

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I had a dream about my father. I believe it's the first one I've had in which he was completely dead. The few that I had since his death involved him either being a ghost or somehow mysteriously alive again. In this one, he was dead, but he was also not actually present. It was about finding a cassette that he recorded prior to his death. It had my name on the label, but I awoke before I had the chance to hear it. I don't need any interpretation on this one. I know what it's about. The part that I will publicly reveal is that there really is a cassette of his that has great significance to me, although it doesn't have my name on it, and it wasn't made for me.

When I was young, my father often recorded music onto cassettes that he never listened to again. He mostly recorded from other cassettes, but he also sometimes recorded from the radio, and occasionally from vinyl. My sister and I were looking at his collection of cassettes when I was around 6 or 7, and we found one that was labeled with"MCC". I won't spell out the full word, because it's my father's neologism, which would make this post very easy for my sister to find if she ever does a search for it. Up until that moment, we had thought that it was a real Chinese word. My father often used it to mean either "unclear" or "untalented". Something blurry is MCC. A singer who is off tune is MCC. An unattractive contestant in a beauty pageant is MCC. We realized that it was a neologism when we saw the cassette, because all the other cassettes were labeled in Traditional Chinese. The MCC one was labeled with a phonetic romanization.

I'm not sure why that discovery was so funny. My sister and I laughed a lot when we saw it. It apparently had as profound an effect on her as it did for me. At my father's funeral, my sister mentioned that she wanted to inherit that cassette. I had been secretly thinking the same thing. After more than 25 years, that cassette still symbolizes something of his essence to us. It evokes early memories of him spending many hours a day with his cassette recorder. It also reminds us of a time when he was more creative and humorous. This dream reminded me of puzzles that he made out of hangers, metal rings, and balls. I'm not sure what they are called, but I see similar puzzles sometimes at Barnes & Noble. It also reminded me that he was once very humorous and told jokes at dinner every night. I had forgotten about that, because he stopped being funny after he spent a year in Iowa alone. That journey still remains a mystery to me, along with many other details of his life.

We searched extensively for the cassette, but it still hasn't been found. Our agreement is that whoever finds it first gets to keep it.