Funny thing……I never knew the words to La Bamba until my daughter taught them to me. My daughter, Coco, shouted the lyrics because she hasn’t quite got the concept that we can’t hear what she’s grooving to. I had to turn off the podcast I was listening to because I couldn’t here it. I gave her my CD player because I was tired of hearing children’s songs. I also thought the CD player and mounds of CDs were a waste – just sitting there – unused because I’d discovered newer, shinier.

Stacks of cassettes have been replaced by disks - DVDs, CDs, CD-RW, DVD-RW. Instead of decreasing the amount of items I store in plastics bins, I accumulated more. And, I keep buying machines to copy the outdated copy. There’s piles of photos, backup photos, movies, backup to movies. I can’t get myself to part with the celluloid, so I store them until they end up getting moldy, which they will all eventually do here.

Why do I keep all these copies, all these photos, all this information? We’re all creating this information, this history. I see parent after parent filming that once-in-a-lifetime event: birthday parties, weddings, school plays. But the truth is: who ever watches them? Am I desperate for a sense of permanency, when really, there isn’t any?

I’m tripping and bumping over information everywhere I go - even here in little ol’Costa Rica. There are little gadgets I’d like to buy. But, it gets to be an addiction and a distraction from the actual making, doing, listening, or enjoying the information packed on all that petroleum.

I decided to pull out a small stack of photo albums of my daughter. She looked through every page, reminiscing like an old lady of her childhood. “Look mami!” she exclaimed. “Its me and grandma when we went to the zoo and saw that seal. What was his name?”

“Sparky,” I said.

“Sparky,” she said like she was warm all over.

When I told everyone in our house about Coco’s singing in the car, she got so excited, she fetched the CD player and walked around the house shouting La Bamba – over and over again. Everyone in the house was whistling and singing. Now we all know the song, each and every word.