Just Like It Used To

Dearest Rachel –

It started off with a fairly frivolous announcement last week; during the orientation regarding the mission to Honduras, there was some mention made about the final full day in the area, which would not include much in the way of actual work, but would be a series of ‘cultural experiences’ as a sort of relaxation from the efforts put in throughout the week. These events include kayaking on the nearby river (or, for those not so inclined, a more leisurely pontoon boat trip alongside those who choose to kayak. There was also mention made of a karaoke night, which you should recall that we never got around to doing together in life, despite our fascination with Japanese culture (and this being a common aspect of it); our musical tastes weren’t exactly the most popular (and we knew next to nothing when it came to J-pop).

Now, I don’t know if that latter item was brought up in jest or not – they way some of the leaders talked about it being ‘mandatory’ practically made it sound like the setup to a mock hazing – but whether they were being serious or not, these days, there’s a way around the whole “I don’t know any of the songs in this catalog” problem. Now, I’ve told you about this before, but thanks to the wonders of AI, there are open-source programs out there that can be used to separate the vocals from the instruments, so one can create one’s own backing tracks.

In any event, it’s a surprisingly simple matter to create my own karaoke tracks, if this turns out to not be a joke. I’d rather perform something I know, something near and dear to my heart, than some random pop top-40 thing that I’ve never heard of. Those who do karaoke are already handicapped by not having the pipes of the original performers; why make it that much worse by having to perform something unfamiliar, or otherwise meaningless to them?

The trouble is, in order to work this magic on a recording, one must have the music file to drop into the program. In theory, that should be no trouble at all, as I have plenty of such files stored on a collection of portable hard drives. In practice, this is a challenge in and of itself, because those files are stored on so many hard drives – but not everything is on every hard drive, as that would be absurdly redundant.

The question is, which of these has the tracks that I’m looking for, so I can break them down between music and vocals? It should hardly surprise you that, in trying to answer that question, I went through about a third of these before finding one that had what I needed. In the meantime, I found all the albums I’d recorded from your folks’ collection that you thought we might want to listen to now and again (which we never did, and now I couldn’t bear to listen to even the ones I might enjoy), an entire library of translated manga…

…and a folder that was simply marked “videos,” which, being curious, I had to open up and see what was there. Once the folder opened, I realized what I was looking at; these were the finished products of my work on all the camcorder recordings we’d made and lost in the house some time ago. Yes, it’s been long enough since then (which, mind you, was already months after your passing) that I’d managed to forget where I’d stored those files – although in fairness, I also have copies on both of the towers I use these days at home and at the ‘office.’

Since a couple of files included our trip to London back in 2003 – good grief, has it been that long? Over two decades? – and Daniel and I will be heading over there again in a month or so, I let myself watch those files for the better part of an hour (I’ll probably load the two days’ footage up when we’re on our way there, just as a refresher). While I pointed the camcorder in a lot of different directions as we made our way about the city centre, I didn’t spend a lot of time aiming it at any of us, to see our reactions and hear what we had to say. We were too ordinary, too normal, for me to bother with, despite the fact that most of what is and was London will still be there when we get back, which can’t be said for us ourselves.

In fairness, it’s not as if you had a lot to say as we wandered about gawping as things and places that we’d never been, and didn’t know whether we’d ever return to (although I think we did get at least one other opportunity to do so, although I think by then, we’d set aside the camcorder – why, it may have gotten lost in the house by then – in favor of other cameras that had both still and video functions – it was still before we started collecting iPods, I think). The only exception was your trampoline flight in Covent Garden, which I did post way back then, despite being a small portion of the overall footage.

As I watched it all, it occurred to me as to how long it had been since I’d heard your voice, and I could not stop watching, even though I’d already given myself a task to deal with. I haven’t (and I’m not sure I plan to) converted this particular song, but it did come to mind, especially given the line about how your voice “sounds just like it used to”:

It’s been a long time since I even heard it in my dreams, honey, but I have to agree with the final line of the verse; whether or not I’ll hear it again (and while it may never utter a new phrase again, there are these recordings that I keep forgetting about and re-discovering to remind me of you), I do love you.

Until I reach out to you again, honey, keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.