I’m listening to a talk show on a new radio that I bought a few weeks ago. It’s an AM/FM solid state white plastic radio. I very seldom buy anything new, so it was quite a surprise to my economy when I went into an Italian appliance store and bought this radio.

The salesman was very nice and told me that he had sold over four hundred of these radios to Italians who wanted to listen to an Italian language programme that was on FM.

I don’t know why but somehow that impressed me a great deal. It made me want to buy the radio, so that’s how I surprised my economy.

The radio cost $29.95.

Now I’m listening to a talk show because it’s raining hard outside and I’ve got nothing better to do with my ears. While I’m listening to this new radio, I’m remembering another new radio that lived in the past.

I think I was about twelve years old up in the Pacific Northwest where winter meant that it was always raining and muddy.

We had an old 1930s kind of radio that was in a huge cabinet that looked like a coffin and it scared me because old furniture can frighten children and make them think about dead people.

The radio was in pretty bad shape sound wise and it had become harder and harder to listen to my favourite programmes on it.

The radio was beyond any kind of real repair job. It was holding on to a pathetic sound by the skin of its dial.

We had needed a new radio for a long while but we couldn’t afford one because we were too poor. Finally we got enough money for the down payment to buy a radio on time and we walked over through the mud to the local radio store.

This was my mother and me and my sister and we all listened to brand-new radios as if we were in paradise until we had narrowed it down to the radio that we finally bought.

It was breathtakingly beautiful in a fine wooden cabinet that smelled like a lumberyard in heaven. The radio was a table model which was really nice, too.

We walked home with the radio down muddy streets that had no sidewalks. The radio was in a guarding cardboard box and I got to carry it. I felt so proud.

That was one of the happiest nights of my life listening to my favourite programmes on a brand-new radio while a winter’s rainstorm shook the house. Each programme sounded as if it had been cut from a diamond. The hoof beats of the Cisco Kid’s horse sparkled like a ring.

I’m sitting here now, balding fat middle aged years later, listening to a talk show on the second brand-new radio of my life while shadows of the same storm shake the house.