The Horror of the German Kinderlieder tape

Back in the fall of 1995, when I was nine years old, my family decamped from the recession-ridden backwaters of San Diego to the hippy-strewn wilds of the San Francisco Bay Area. My dad, a professional piano technician, had gotten a job with a new company up north, and so we packed everything we owned up and off we went.

That winter and spring were spent getting used to the newness of our surroundings (easy version: San Diego=desert, NorCal=forest). The following summer, my parents decided that it would be a good idea for us to learn even more about our new neck of the woods, and to that end, arranged a vacation for us. It was simple, elegant, and destined for disaster from the word go: a week-long family road trip up to the Redwood National Forest, and back again, staying in hotels and seeing historical sites (forts, mining camps, thousand year old trees) along the way.

We set out on a warm summer's day, crammed into the car with enough books, snack food, and music to last us at least a month. One of the tapes we had was a cassette of German Kinderlieder that my aunt had sent us, that we had occasionally listened to because, well, we're German. It was actually a really cool cassette: a large children's choir singing all the German standards. My little brother and I would put on our fake German accents and sing along, sending our baby sister into gales of laughter. We set out on our adventure with this cassette playing merrily along. It was still in the player when we stopped for lunch.

It was the hottest part of the day. Our car had a malfunctioning air conditioner. The cassette melted into the player.

Now, such an occurrence would render the tape unplayable, right? Wrong. That tape lived in the tape player, merrily singing away, for six months.*

To be honest, most of what I remember about that trip is learning every single song on that tape by heart, and trying to sing it in a variety of accents, or with farting noises (the glories of being ten, right?). By the time we got the tape player replaced, we could ALL sing the songs. All of them. To this day, there are certain songs that I simply cannot hear without going into gales of semi-hysterical laughter. My brother and I were out and about in Berlin the other day and heard one of them (I don't know the names, just how they go) and nearly died.

"Do you remember that tape?" he asked me.
"Dude, I will never forget it," I replied.

Never, ever. :)

*Somewhat to my horror, all of these songs are on YouTube.