We should have suspected ill fate when we got the stereo home those many years ago, unpacked it, played with the fancy buttons, and the display said "goodbye" when we turned it off.  Unnerved by such affable plastic, we looked at each other, smiled skeptically, but in the end decided to keep it.

You must understand, it’s not like we don’t like technology.  We respect it.  We’re glad it’s in our walls and our computers, for example, and that by and large our car tends to run.  It gets us places.  We like the way those little switches make lights come on at night, and how you buy something at the store called "bulbs" when the light stops and soon enough it starts again.  We know all about this kind of stuff.

When it comes to many fancy buttons, however, we’re mostly glad to push them with the power turned off, at least when their host is new, and then hope against all hope we can discover, by color or texture, which ones make the host do the function we bought it for in the first place.

So this stereo.  Not only does it have many buttons, and by many I mean lots, but it also has a bar that takes batteries, just like our TV, which is also lined with many buttons, and come to find out (a sideways glance at the owners manual turned this one up), many of the functions of the machine can only be accomplished by use of that bar.

Lucky for us, turning the stereo on, playing CDs, and even little things called tapes, which we feel much endearment toward because they remind us of days when everything was far less complicated–all these most important functions happen without that bar, and we know how to make them go.  We’ll even show you if you like.

So a few years back when N was on a trip and I got woken up in the middle of the night to the stereo blaring, I was only confused about how it came on; I knew exactly how to make it stop.  This happened the next night, too, twice, and only once the night after that before it occurred to me the machine must be unplugged each night before sleep.  I’m sure you understand.  It was always kind enough to say goodbye when I stopped it, but never enough to ask whether I wanted it on in the first place.

The next trip N took (his work had a few during that season), I fell asleep on the couch, listening to the beautiful sounds of my friends C and L, who are musicians, and were kind enough to copy me a tape (nastalgic sigh) of some of their current stuff.  I fell asleep listening to them, only to wake up hours later to the sound of the radio.  Crap.  Didn’t unplug it.  It wasn’t loud, thank God, but it was on.  "Goodbye," I said as I yanked the chord from the wall and headed off to bed.

Well.  The next morning, I decided to finish the tape I had started the night before.  I pushed play (the button with the tipped over triangle on it, for anyone who’s interested), but lo and behold, the tape was at the end already.  Must have really slept hard, I thought.

I rewound it (two tipped over triangles, pointed to the left), and pushed play again, but the only sounds on that tape, the only ones left at all, were the staticy voices of late-night call-in shows.  From the radio.  The machine is possessed, I tell you.  Not only did it stop the tape, but it rewound it, and recorded the radio over the entire thing.

I was speechless.

Needless to say, I don’t keep tapes in that deck anymore.  Seasons changed, though, and we moved, and I don’t know, maybe something about the air in our new place, something about the angle of the moonlight or the lack of nighttime power surges has meant the radio stays plugged in 24-7.  No midnight blastings.  No illicit radio recordings.  Just darkness and quiet through each entire night.

Or so we came to expect.

We have a baby now, who loves buttons.  The more the better.  Buttons and dials–dials, especially.  We lay our fan flat on the ground, unplugged, and baby spends solid minutes, often many of them in a row, working on its dial.

So on the rare occasion that he gets a glimpse of the radio, hidden well behind the doors of our armoire, he’s transfixed.  Understandably.  So many fancy buttons.  We’ve indulged him more than half a dozen times with a good ten minute session of dial-and-push, laughing at having to turn the radio off repeatedly to avoid blasting our neighbors away.

What we didn’t bargain for, what we had no idea he could do, was operate the deeper and more complex functions of that machine without the bar.  And by deeper and complex, I mean functions no one should ever need to learn.  The child has learned, possibly in cahoots with the demon or demons that inhabit that thing, how to set it to go off every night at 11:53.  The radio.  For anyone who’s interested, that’s right in our deepest, most necessary cycle of sleep.

Whether this is merely a sign of the times, yet another clichéd example of child-knows-more-than-adults-about-technology, we don’t know.  The kid isn’t even eleven months old. 

What we do know is we have a post-it note on our table now, scrawled in the angry hand of a man half-asleep, that reads, "RADIO", which I think means something like "make it stop doing that–TODAY". 

Wish us luck.  Bedtime fast approaches and the mysteries of the box remain.  Even if we have to unplug the darn thing, we half expect a cackle to come with its goodbye.

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