I am the owner of exactly one cassette tape. Okay, a few other things first…

I’ve started taking real Spanish lessons. (It was time to start getting real.) This morning, I have to prep my English classes: break apart the present perfect, string it out on a timeline that will make visual sense, make worksheets for test review, make sure all the new vocabulary is covered and then covered again, so that my students know the difference between “Logistics” and “Training.”

But right now I’m interested in the point-of-view I again share with my students. For, I too, am reading helpfully contrived conversations to reinforce the new words, the new grammar… in Spanish, that is. In my case, I’m reading about Paolo and Chacha (yes, Chacha). In their world, it’s the mid-80s and they’re talking about their occupations (arquitecto and fotógrafa, respectively). Based on the video exercises that line up with the workbook, it’s fairly clear they’re hitting on each other. Chacha’s sunglasses are also amazing.

I love to take pictures of really old things that used to be so useful and ordinary.

Subplot and style aside, and perhaps because my textbook is stuck in the ’80s (the nostalgia fiend in me simply loves it), last week I found myself struck by the fact that “cassette tape” will no longer be included in the dictionary, at least not the abridged version of the Oxford English Dictionary. As reported by the The Mommy Files on SFGate, “cassette tape” has simply run its course. Cars no longer come with tape decks, nor do stereos.

I had a big sidewalk sale before I moved to Chile. And like you used to be able to find classic vinyl in some cardboard box on some fold-out table in some garage, I unloaded my cassette tapes. I know, what is an obsessed-with-the-past girl like me doing getting rid of such recorded relics?! Well, I mentioned the move to Chile, right? That cut a clear path between what was worthy of packing and what had to stay behind, be given away, or sold for a buck on my sidewalk. So shoeboxes filled with Madonna, Paula Abdul (I was 11 in 1991, just FYI), and Erasure, among others, went on sale.

I gave the old typewriter away to a cousin, but that didn’t stop me from framing a picture of one. This sits on my desk… next to a computer.

Let me pause to explain Erasure’s “The Innocents,” which was, dare-I-say, a rather hip choice at the time. The tape was a gift, courtesy of the coolest babysitter I ever had. I was 7, she was 21. We were both named Jennifer and her birthday was the day after mine and the tape was my birthday present when I turned 8. By then, I was well obsessed with the band, which would come through the tape deck (gasp!) of her forest green VW Bug. As would The Cure, Depeche Mode, and other Live 105 staples of the day, which would stream out of the car’s manually-opened windows after she picked me up from school. I would extend my arm to catch the breeze and pretend I was older and we were best friends and I had finally arrived in the passenger seat of the life I was waiting so earnestly for. My love of music may well have started right there.

By high school, Erasure was no longer in the circulation when it came time to make the mix tapes that seemed to define my generation, as I came through middle and high school and even the beginning of college all in the ’90s, where music and technology collided on tape. There in the shoeboxes were songs by the Grateful Dead, R.E.M, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Beatles, and Led Zeppelin all scrolled in my 14-year-old bubbly handwriting. Girlfriends and I exchanged the tapes more often than boys and I ever did, which seems to be the tradition mix tapes (and later CDs) are remembered for and perfectly archived in films like “High Fidelity.” Given our slice of available technology, we would record the songs from CDs or from another cassette tape that we used to dub songs off the radio, and swap mix tapes like letters between pen pals we just happened to see every day at school.

Said antique pencil sharpener.

I’m writing about the divide between nostalgia for the past and future gains thanks to technology more than I ever thought I would. Sure, I can go gaga over an iPod Touch just as much as the three-year-old in your life, but when I scrolled through that list SFGate’s Mommy Files compiled to pay homage to the pieces of the past our children may never know about: the typewriter, photo film, pay phones, car window cranks (like the kind I remember vividly from that VW Bug), rolodexes (I still have two from my early career days), analog clocks, or even cursive writing, I couldn’t believe how few years had to pass for me to be one of those people pining for the past. I thought this wave of nostalgia would come much later in life, but perhaps it’s always been there, as I stake out antique shops, collect things that aged well before my birth, and want to talk to older generations about what they saw and did. Not all the now-obsolete things I’ve collected (an old-school pencil sharpener, a compass, a typewriter) made it to Chile, but some did. Maybe my future kid will pick one of them up some day and stare it in absolute wonder, as he or she might of the bronze-embossed spines of a World Book Encyclopedia.

This past weekend, The New York Times‘ Technology section ran an interesting piece on the local Waldorf School back in California, which is eschewing early exposure to technology in the classroom in favor of paper books, wood pencils, drawing, and what I’ve come to call “realia” (real life objects brought into the classroom to see and feel, such as an actual apple instead of running a search for images of one online). I’m not judging here on whether or not or when children should be taught via technological devices. I understand the pull some parents must feel — you don’t want your kid to fall behind what all the other kids are learning and working with, but (and maybe this will end with my generation… in fact, I’m confident it will), isn’t there some part of you that wants to protect the child from all that for a little while? Make it possible for them to live offline for as long as possible!? Before they, like we, are chained to a series of screens… phone, computer, iPad, iPod, and whatever else is coming down the pipe.

What’s a cassette tape worth?

So, after all this, you think I would have kept the Erasure tape? For posterity if nothing else, right? Or the mix tapes? Wrong. Suitcases are only so big. What didn’t sell was left out overnight where it was soon swooped up by the swarms of SF sidewalk scavengers that hunt down disguarded relics on any given weekend, and the empty shoeboxes were recycled. (Plus, I have a vague recollection of listening to Erasure so many times, the filmy, squeeky black tape actually broke. So what I recently had on hand may well have been the broken tape or a replacement… nostalgia only takes my memory so far.) I did keep one tape… Pink Floyd’s “Piper at the Gates of Dawn.” I have zero recollection of acquiring this one (it may have again been courtesy of babysitter Jennifer), but I kept it for three reasons:

1. I’m married to a serious Pink Floyd fan.

2. A neighbor checked out the tape and said I should keep this one, that it was the most valuable. I offered to give it to him, but he wouldn’t even buy it. There was something in the way he told me to hold onto to it, so I listened.

3. I thought we might just have a tape deck in the old stereo that came with our Chilean apartment. It turns out we don’t. So we have no way of actually playing the tape. But I have it, 6,000 miles away from where all those mix tapes scattered with Ocean Beach winds. I like that image. That “playlists” I compiled with such effort in the mid-90s are being played somewhere.

Said compass. So much is north these days.

Maybe that’s why I’m so stuck in the past. Will we ever feel this way about our outdated iTunes libraries? Versions 1-5 of the iPhone? Old digital cameras that no longer work? The tangled bouquet of power chargers, USB cables, and the like that also usually end up at a sidewalk sale if we no longer recall or need what connects to what?

Maybe it’s just me, which begs the question: Anyone got a tape deck they’re not using?