I spent the past few days back home in Ohio. I hadn’t had a vacation in two full weeks, so I needed to get out of town to unwind. I went home for Easter for the first time in 15 years.

Even though I hadn’t gone home for Easter since I was in college, it was heartening that as soon as I walked into the house, I picked up the same argument with my brother that I suspect I had last time: Why do we have rice pilaf at Easter dinner?! Rice pilaf sucks!

As a result, my brother would later place a dish of fettuccine alfredo in front of me. We are not a stereotype. Never mind that while this was happening, my mom was explaining how her parents and my dad’s parents were part of competing bootlegger operations in Connecticut when they were growing up.

I have no idea if that’s actually true, but it’s an excellent tale of Scaias thumbing their noses at authority even several generations ago, so I’m adopting it as a family story. Also, a story about my parents getting together even though their parents were competing rum-runners makes it sound like an adorable Italian version of West Side Story.

Baseball season had already started. I stopped in Cincinnati to see some of the decorations for opening day. But even though it’s already April, I woke up the morning after Easter, looked out the window and saw a fresh blanket of snow outside.

“I’m pretty sure, when I came back in December, we had a White Christmas,” I thought to myself. “But now we’re also having a White Easter?! Thanks a lot, Al Gore.”

This trip came together fairly late, and when I started pricing flights, I had to loudly holler at my computer screen, “I ain’t payin’ a thousand bucks for a flight to Dayton! Oh, and I’m certainly not payin’ 650 bucks for a flight to Cincinnati or Columbus!”

So I drove. 15 hours.

The CD player in my 15 year old truck recently broke [the truck itself, though, still works well enough that I didn’t give a second thought to driving 15 hours]. Apparently, Kids Today think they’re too good for CDs, so when I went to the store to get a new CD player, the clerk explained that a lot of people now just get a stereo where they can plug in their phone or a thumb drive.

I asked the clerk if I was old fashioned, still listening to CDs. She, very politely, like she might say something to her grandfather, said CDs are absolutely NOT old fashioned.

A technician was standing within ear shot and said he likes CDs because it’s a fuller sound and better quality than an mp3. I replied that I felt like that’s the exact same thing my dad said in defense of vinyl records when his punk kids started listening to CDs.​

​I bought a stereo with a CD player but also a plug where I could shove a phone or a thumb drive. They took me out to the car, and the clerk started showing me how to use everything.

“I’m never going to use this USB port,” I explained, but I agreed to plug in a thumb drive where I had saved some music.

“Wait, how does the car know this is a BTO song?”

“The information is embedded in the file,” the clerk said. She broke out of the grandfatherly tone by continuing, and this really happened, “But if the first thing you play is a Bachman Turner Overdrive song, you might be a bit old fashioned.”

​I am not old fashioned. I was about to drive hundreds of miles! I needed the motivation: How else are you going to move down the highway unless you let it roll!?

I also hit the Jerry Reed pretty hard. I was, in fact, east bound and down. But that was always on a different CD than his last album, so I used to have to change CDs if I wanted to hear his later work where Jerry Reed was the only artist with the guts to tell the devil to stick it. Having them together on one thumb drive is incredibly convenient.

So now, years of music saved on dozens of CDs that were strewn recklessly around my truck is now contained on a thumb drive. That feels wrong.

But having a thing tell me what song I’m listening to feels so right.