When I was a kid, I had a crystal radio. At night I would lie in bed, put the earpiece in my ear, and listen to a rock and roll station broadcast the hits.
The nice thing about a crystal radio is that it takes no additional power to operate. It requires no batteries and you don’t have to plug it in. It gets its power directly from the radio waves it receives. With my little white mono earpiece, I could lie in bed and hear The Drifters, Elvis, Brenda Lee, Chubby Checker, Sam Cook, Fats Domino, The Shirelles, and other early artists who had no idea that in a couple of years, the Beatles would show up and knock them all off the Top Twenty.
As a child, my mind was, for the most part, my own. Yes, there was school, where teachers demanded my focus. And there was an hour or so of radio at night as I drifted off to sleep. And there was a bit of television. But for large chunks of each day, particularly in the summer, my mind was my own to do with as I would.
I could wonder about things. I could spend 45 minutes using a magnifying glass to burn my name onto a fat stick. I could imagine myself flying, and dream about where I would go. I could flip a nickel 100 times and keep track of the heads and tails. I could work my way through ‘Horatius at the Bridge’ by Thomas Babington Macaulay, an epic poem beyond my reading level, but not my fascination. I thrilled as Horatius stood alone, blocking the way across the Tiber River.
“Alone stood brave Horatius, but constant still in mind; Thrice thirty thousand foes before, and the broad flood behind.”
I could lie on my back and search for animals in the clouds. No one told me I had to do this. No one listed which animals I should search for. No one offered rewards for ‘finding them all.’ I remember one summer afternoon I stretched out on top of some monkey bars and studied the white, puffy cumulus clouds. The next thing I knew, I woke up. Fortunately, I had not fallen off my precarious perch. Unfortunately, I got the worse sunburn of my life and looked lobsteresque for several embarrassing days.
My mind was so much my own, that some nights I would choose not to listen to music in bed. Sorry, crystal radio. Sorry, Elvis. Sorry, Brenda. Sorry, Fats. I could listen or not listen and it was okay.
There was no way I could imagine then – and I could imagine a lot – that the day would come when giant corporations would spend billions of dollars trying to steal my focus. Their very livelihood and responsibility to their shareholders demand that they, like ancient Etruscans, attempt to cross the Tiber River and sack my mind.
Often today I feel like Horatius at the Bridge, with thrice thirty thousand distractions before and a mighty flood behind.
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