Sometimes he made me crazy

He tended not to understand how what was good for him was not necessarily the same as what was good for me.

Randy was a computer guy - he was just always comfortable with them and he welcomed every technological advance. Me, not so much. While I am not techno-stupid, neither am I eager to use technology just because it exists. When an update/upgrade comes along I avoid it for as long as possible because a change may require that I relearn how to use a tool when it was working just fine for me before. And if I can complete a task without using technology at all, that’s my preference.

When I met Randy he had a standard back-in-the day stereo setup. Turntable, receiver, CD player, speakers. Every time we moved he set it all up so that the TV played through the speakers and for some reason there were multiple remote controls.

But then he discovered Apple Music and that was “better”. I believe he digitized all of our CDs and bought more music, all of it “in the cloud”. That worked for him because he could download all the music and play it on his computer on the nice speakers he had attached. Because he wanted to play music at work. Which was fine, but he got rid of the CD player and the CDs. And I didn’t WANT to play music on my laptop - I wanted to play music while I was cooking or cleaning up the kitchen or whatever.

He set up an old phone to play music through the good speaker downstairs, but it seemed that every time I wanted to use it one of us (mostly him) had been charging something else and the phone was dead. Or the speaker was dead. Or something. I ragged about it frequently, about how I could never use the stupid thing and CDs worked fine for me. And he would groan, like he’d gotten tired of hearing about it. So daughter Erin got me a subscription to Spotify and a new speaker. But the same thing kept happening. And it was like a thorn in my paw because he did it without talking to me about it.

So now, as I’m going through the garage packing up art supplies and what-have-you for daughter Hayley and boxing things for hazardous waste disposal and categorizing things for donation, I came across the old CD/DVD player and two banker’s boxes of CDs.

I was flabbergasted - what is all this doing in the garage when I wanted to use it? Did he tell me he’d gotten rid to it? Did I just assume he’d gotten rid of it? And when I ragged at him repeatedly, why didn’t he say, We have all that stuff still - do you want me to set it up for you?

Generally speaking, we communicated well. But there were times like this when even though I thought I’d told him what I wanted, I didn’t get it and I didn’t really get resistance either. We were temperamentally different - Randy didn’t like angry confrontation and when I’m frustrated I’m an angry, confrontational person. So maybe he was just tuning me out? Maybe I was too busy being right to ask a question? I don’t know. I just wish I had him back so we could do better.

I’m mad about the CDs because I’m mad that Randy isn’t here. Now I can buy a small CD player and do everything exactly as I want - and it’s cold comfort.