My bleeding heart already doubted a new TV. Where did all the old ones go? Shouldn’t I be reading more? I drop cell phones into toilets. I melted my last laptop setting it on the stove to study a recipe. Why should this tech dunce go digital?

But I couldn’t argue with Trevor’s “Service Superstar!” badge. And I couldn’t bear another football season calling friends for scores of the game I was already watching on the square analog set I’d had since college. I signed the keypad, a happy new member of the modern world.

Two days later, the delivery truck beeped slowly backward to my stoop. The drivers slid out a box the size of, oh I don’t know, a beluga whale, and deposited the TV into my living room.

Wow. The great thing about a 50-inch TV is…it’s 50 inches of high-def bliss. The “Hunger Games” resolution invited me to jump right into the action, like Mary Poppins and Dick the chimney sweep in his London street pastels. Except this was “Hunger Games,” and the dancing penguins would eat your face.

The problem with a 50-inch TV is…it requires 50 inches of space. More, actually. Which meant cleaning and re-arranging the living room, an exercise in dust bunnies, extension cord snarls and a “souvenir” from puppies I’d fostered in 2010.

The Blu-Ray player and cable box also needed homes, which required the worst cleaning of all: sentimental. I pondered the shelves of sleek Pottery Barn bins secretly stuffed with four decades of music cassette tapes. Madonna, The Clash, Prince, Elvis, Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. (What? He’s a serious actor now.)

I had nowhere to play the tapes, but how could I trash them? Especially the home-made mixes (play, record, stop, rewind, erase, yell at your mom for talking over the track, repeat…).

iTunes could never replace Richard Marx’s “Waiting for You,” scrawled with a summer camp crush’s devotion. Or “Casey Kasem’s Weekly Top 40, March 6, 1985.” Or “Chicago 16,” the last Christmas gift from my father before he died. Every tape bore the smears and tears from hundreds of rotations marking some adolescent event.

And let’s not forget the investment. Tapes in my childhood cost a scandalous $7, the bulk of one babysitting job. I now had in front of me…nothings of dollars in plastic. But immeasurable value in memories. And you can’t write a love note on an iPod.

I’m sure Trevor would laugh at these musical mah-jonng tiles—colorful, clackety, ancient—just like I laugh at his contemporaries’ devotion to the Next Big Whooseewhutzit. Every generation believes their music/hair/clothes/values are better than the other dullards’ decades.

And I am no different. I love my new TV, but I tense up every time it blinks, or the signal fades, or worst of all, the whole shebang goes black for no apparent reason at all. At least with tapes, a quick twist of your pinky did the trick.

Which is why I dumped the cassettes into a duffel bag and shoved it into the spare room closet. Maybe someday cassettes will enjoy vinyl albums’ revival. Maybe someone will find a nifty new use for them, like those t-shirt quilts. Maybe the Funky Bunch will get back together.

Or maybe when I give in and buy the Next Big Whooseewhutzit, Best Buy will have to haul the tapes away to some island of misfit technology, but where they will always be cherished among the TVs, the eight-tracks, the memories of technophobes past.

Photo credit: Generationbass.com

Elvis Presley

As usual, my sister Lynda had to go and ruin everything.

August 16, 1977, had started off just fine. Kindergarten was still a week away. My father had a rare day off from the Memphis Police homicide unit. And we were moving into our new home, the suburban “upstairs-downstairs” house I had always wanted.

I was bumping on my butt down those newly-carpeted dream stairs when Lynda came galloping over me with the news she’d just heard on the radio: “Mom! Daddy! Elvis is dead!”

Purple-mimeographed police notes I pilfered from Daddy’s briefcase a few days later confirmed it: There was no bait-and-switch, no wax figure, no Kalamazoo, Mich. gas station sightings. The King was gone. Forever.

Now 40, I have long felt cheated in having just missed the heyday of some of rock’s greatest acts. I envy you, Boomers. The Beatles broke up two years before by my 1972 birth. To me, Woodstock was just a “Peanuts” character.

But Elvis I could squarely claim as mine. I had missed the’68 Comeback Special and Aloha From Hawaii: Via Satellite, whose one billion viewers surpassed the moon landing audience. But he had performed in my own little lifetime. (And I thought those spangled jumpsuits were AWESOME.)

His death was particularly poignant for Memphians. He wasn’t just a worldwide superstar; he was our hometown hero. He tossed Cadillac keys to strangers, advocated for children’s charities. My mother knew him as a teenager, though she dismissed him as a “greaser.” Her now-boyfriend Dick played football with him at Humes High School.

Today Alzheimer’s lurks behind Dick’s sunny, strapping frame. He was recently found by police, lost, dehydrated and too disoriented to use his cell phone. At Christmas I always ask him for Elvis stories—how he helped the shy Tupelo transfer student with math; how the coach kicked Elvis off the team for refusing to cut his hair—to try and keep those memories, any memories, alive for him, my Mom…

And me. I’ve worried for some time that as Elvis fans pass on, they’ll take his legacy, on which blue-collar Memphis depends so much, with them.

But I was wrong. On a trip home last week for my mom’s birthday, my boyfriend and I toured all things Elvis—Beale Street, Sun Studio and of course Graceland. August 2012 marks the 35^th anniversary of Elvis’ passing.

To my astonishment, fans were already pouring in to the Jungle Room. T-shirts airbrushed with Elvis’ face; a German fan wearing dyed-black hair in sideburns; flower wreaths for the Mississippi mama’s boy competing for space around his grave.

Many visitors were half my age. Yet these “hipsters,” with their tattoos and pink hair and mismatched socks, knew more about Elvis than I did. Our Sun Studio guide, Lydia, was a paper-pale waif with an encyclopedic knowledge of the blues and a mean guitar riff. Now 24, she moved to Memphis from Michigan to learn recording techniques at Sam Phillips’ studio where Elvis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, B.B. King, Jerry Lee Lewis and Ike Turner got their starts too. That’s a hunk of burnin’ love that comforts me.

In 1977, I knew nothing about dubious doctors or the “Memphis Mafia” who allegedly enabled Elvis’ downfall—still don’t. Just those cool blue eyes, the curling lip and the hips I hope hipsters and many others will love for decades to come.

Don’t be cruel! Got a favorite Elvis memory or song? Tell us!

Photo credit: GAB Archive/Redferns/Getty Images