Memory

After two months I finally got around to taking my malfunctioning ipod into the Apple store on Friday.

It was a mob scene. There was a ten-minute wait to check out. I cringed at the thought of what lay in store for me at the repair desk.

I grabbed an employee as he walked past.

“Excuse me, but my ipod’s not working. Could you help me out?”

“What’s the problem?”

“Well it’s been a couple months. I’ve been busy. I moved, I had a beach share, I⎯”

“And the problem?”

“Right. Well it was doing this thing where it was skipping through songs without stopping on them long enough to play them through.”

It’s true. I wrote a blog entry about it in June entitled ‘nano.’

He attempted to turn it on.

“It’s been two months. The battery’s dead,” I said.

He led me over to the wall and plugged my ipod in. It then proceeded to work perfectly.

“That’s so weird,” I said.

“Sometimes you just need to reset it,” he replied.

He demonstrated how to reset an ipod by holding down a couple of the buttons on the wheel.

“I think I tried that,” I said.

He didn’t believe me. Who can blame the guy? But I did try it back in June. Double stuff Oreo swe-ar.

A few minutes later I was free and clear on the streets of SOHO. There I was, preparing to spend a half day in Apple store purgatory when boom, just like that, my ipod stepped up to the plate.

This little incident begs a metaphysical question:

Do electronics, like people, just need a little time off? A vacation, if you will? I just returned from a two-month hiatus. Why shouldn’t my ipod get one too?

They say time heals all wounds. Not all, though.

Yesterday while I tried on a dress in an East Village boutique I overheard the woman working behind the counter, a white chick with dreadlocks, on a cell phone call with her mother.

She was recounting how, in the yoga class she teaches, there had been a woman who sobbed during the latter part of the class. Afterwards the woman apologized to the teacher and explained that her husband, who had suffered from bipolar disorder, had taken his own life nine months ago. Not only that but she had been pregnant when he died and had gone on to lose the baby.

“It’s all still fresh for her,” yoga teacher/shopgirl said to her mom.

Yes. I imagine that course of events still is, and will be for quite some time.

If only we could all have the memory of an ipod.

But maybe not.

Not that, God forbid, anyone should have to go through what the woman in the yoga class went through. But if there weren’t dips, albeit ideally smaller ones than that described above, there also wouldn’t be highs.

And then there’s always time. It doesn’t erase things completely. But enough of it does always seem to help.