The Fisher Price Record Player

The Boston Herald

The Fisher Price Music Box/Record Player belonged to my first born. He’s 34 now. You go on eBay and this thing is called “vintage”.

It looks vintage. It's red, white and bright yellow plastic and has decals of birds and a banjo for decoration. But back when it was new and my son sat hunched over it, when he was a toddler, not even two and mesmerized by notes he could make stop and start by himself, it looked just fine.

He played with it every day. He'd take a little plastic record (there were five of them in different colors) and place it on the little plastic turntable, then take the small plastic arm and rest it on the record and a song would start. Not a song with words. Just the notes. But the notes were enough.

My job was to wind it up. Then to stand back and watch. 

I watched so much that I can see this time as clearly as I can look out the window and see my neighbors, Al and Katherine, talking in their driveway across the street. My son had hair as white as corn, chubby legs and chubbier arms. And he would sit on the blue rug in the big family room, the record player between his legs, and he would knot his brow and open his mouth wide and sing. And I would think, every time this happened, nothing is better than this. And nothing ever will be.

My son could barely talk, but he sang "Camptown Races,” only not so you would recognize it. But the "Do da, do da," he had down pat. "Do da, do da,”   It's in my head even now.

"Big" wasn't a movie yet, never mind a play. So the song "Stop Time" hadn't been written. But it's the song I would have sung then, had I known it.

"Stop time. Stay just this way. Don't move on.”

He moved on. He outgrew the record player. And when I put it away, I did it for me, not for him. I saved it even though it was missing a record, the purple one, and even though the notes had slowed down, like any old music box worn out by love. I wish I had saved his workbench and his play farm and all the multicolored plastic numbers and letters that covered our refrigerator. I would have if I had known that in their own way they stopped time because they held time, tiny pieces of it.

But I didn't know. Just as I didn't know and couldn't imagine that one day something would be as good again. That one day there would be another child I would love, my daughter's child, who would hear the music from this box and look at it in the same way my son had.

Lucy is only one, not almost two, and her hair is the color of wheat, not corn. But she has chubby legs and chubbier arms and, swear to God, the same furrow in her forehead as my son when she is concentrating.

I know the song “Stop Time” now and I sing it when I watch Lucy. "Birthdays fly, 7, 8, 9, I0. Every kid she becomes, I clutch and say, “‘Stop time.” And as I watch her play, I think that time does stop when I’m with Lucy.  And that in her hands an old plastic record player brings not just old memories, but new, unexpected joy.