I pushed the wrong button and it was gone forever.
A couple of years ago, our son recorded the message on our answering machine. It started fairly routinely: “Hi, you’ve reached the Ash-Roberts household. We can’t take your call right now, but if you leave your name and number, we’ll get back to you.”
It ended this way, with a bit more urgency and all the authority an 11-year-old’s sing-song voice could muster: “If you’re calling for Evan, please leave a message.”
Evan is 13 now. His voice changed over the summer, dropping to the hard, flat sound typical of a teenager from the upper Midwest. The voice on the answering machine was our only audible link to the way he used to sound.
I wanted to record the recording, to preserve that memory. But I pushed the wrong button, or perhaps the right button at the wrong time. The answering machine erased Evan’s message rather than playing it.
I am as bummed about screwing that up as anything I’ve been bummed about in a long, long time. Of course, I still can hear Evan’s sing-song voice in my head. My only hope is that the memory lingers.
“Always Something There To Remind Me,” R.B. Greaves, from “R.B. Greaves,” 1969.
woah, great track
We tend to underestimate the importance of voices in our memories, I think. When my grandmother died a few years ago, one of my grandfather’s brothers came to the visitation. I could have talked to that man for hours, because he sounded *exactly* like my grandfather, who had been gone for 11 years at that point. I didn’t realize how much I missed hearing that voice. Similarly, I’m finding that as my mother gets older, she sounds more like her mother, who’s been gone for many years.
Fabulous post. Thanks a lot.
Arg. I’ve done that with messages from my niece and nephew, too.
Oh man, I nearly got a lump in my throat, identifying with the notion of the grievous loss of a such a record. My son is turning 14 next month, and while I have loads of video material from when he was four and five, I have nothing beyond that except photos and memories. I miss his previous “incarnations”, though not so much as I enjoy his presence right now.