Every morning my Dziadzio (grandpa) picks my sister and me up from our house at 7:35 am. Our routine is very simple. Every day he comes to our house and says “Let’s go”, and out the door, we go. Once we get in the car, we have some small talk about the weather sometimes, how our mornings have gone, and funny dogs that cross the street. The most important part of our routine comes next, which is turning on the radio. Either myself or my sister will say “Muzyka?” (which means music in Polish) to our Dziadzio and he’ll immediately press a knob on the dashboard of his car to turn on the radio, already preset to the exact same station we listen to every single day which is Boom 973. This specific radio station plays tracks found in crates, music from the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Every once in a while we’ll hear a song that sounds familiar, and we play a guessing game to see who can guess the song and the artist first (my Dziadzio usually wins). We especially enjoy it when Stu Jeffries, who is Boom937’s incredible radio show host, plays and sings along specifically to 80s pop tracks. It really brings up our moods when we are having a meh kind of morning. Once we get to school, he’ll turn off the radio and then we part ways. After school at exactly 3:00 pm, Dziadzio will wait in his old Honda, parked in the back lots of the parking lot by the football field. And every time we get in the car, the same routine repeats. We get in the car, and one of us will say “Muzyka?”, and then we listen to Boom973. God I love our simple routine.

I’m biased to say this but, I’d say my Dziadzio’s music taste is impeccable. Growing up in all of the crate digging eras, my Dzadzio has said that he has a special place in his heart for the older music as it’s the music that reminds him of past times. Every now and then he’ll tell me stories about him and our Babcia (grandma) going to small concerts here in Canada, and how he enjoyed them so much. They could not go to any events for leisure back home in Poland due to communist times. Moving even further back into the golden ages of music, my grandparents have told me that they were crazy for the 60s, crazy for The Beatles specifically. They told me that when an opportunity came to dance, they’d twist and shout.

I find it so fascinating how music can transport you back to a specific memory, place, and time in your life. For me, ABBA transports me back to a moment in my life that I wish I could relive all the time. It reminds me of simple, happy memories that I cherish forever in my heart, memories of living in my Babcia and Dzadzio’s old condo when I was 2 years old. My family of four crammed together with my grandparents in a small 2 bedroom apartment, living together for 2 years trying to raise two restless babies. I owe so much to my grandparents for staying with us in their apartment while my parents were off at work. To pass the time, my grandparents would keep my sister and me entertained, playing songs on the radio or TV (blue ray station). I have this one very specific memory that I can recall, and it was of me standing next to the sofa in between the empty space of the coffee table and the long china cabinet in their apartment, asking my mom to play ABBA on our old SONY CD player. The joy and comfort I felt listening to their songs then gives me the same exact feelings when I listen to them today. Over time as the years went by, and as I started to grow up, I forgot my roots of crate classics that my parents and grandparents would play for me countless times, and I reverted to popular music. I remember hearing ABBA again in my later years of adolescence, and it rekindled a flame in my heart that once lost its spark and overall importance.

Needless to say, the value that old music holds is quite large to me, and although some will argue that all music is valuable, I argue back that it truly is a noun and its association with the music that creates its value, the two things forever bonded in one person’s heart. A hazy and sentimental feeling that’s hard to describe with just words on a page.

By: M