Remembering an MP3 Player - A Retrospective on Possessions

Mar 4

My memory isn’t the greatest any more. Two bouts with covid and getting older has taken a toll on what used to be a pretty infallible ability to recall facts, events, and how the weaknesses and resistances in Pokemon work. Fairy types always trip me up. Mostly I struggle with names now, so if it seems as though I am hesitating before saying your name, it’s not a reflection on our relationship or on you - it’s my brain.

A funny thing happens when you’re in your thirties and you start forgetting things. Everyone you talk to about your memory, your family, your friends, your other friends because you don’t go to the doctor as often as you should and I needed a third group for this list, tell you it’s just a part of getting older. And for a while, I was gaslighted into thinking this was what was going on with me - I’m just getting older and my memory is very suddenly worse. Never mind that my memory struggles only happened after I came down with covid in August of 2022. That was just a coincidence! It’s your age, silly! Anyway, here’s an article about covid’s long-term effects on people’s memories. Oh wow, here’s another from Harvard published in March 2022. Crazy.

Anyway, the memories that do pop up feel somewhat more magical. Funnily, I can’t remember what I was doing when the shitty MP3 player I bought with the saved up earnings from my job as a recreational soccer referee popped into my head. But for the above reasons of my memory no longer being great, it stuck with me.

Wait, Soccer Referee? A.K.A., The Sweet Gig

For a brief period of time spanning no more than three years, I was a recreational soccer referee for St. Charles Parish. For transparency, I was mostly a “line judge,” or an Assistant Referee (AR), but I did eventually get promoted to Referee for a few games in the 12+ Division.

It was a pretty sweet gig. The entire operation was seemingly run by a single person - an old man whose name I can’t recall who dressed in the full referee kit even though his main duty was to ensure that every game had the appropriate number of referees. He paid in cash stuffed into envelopes that he’d give you either after the game had concluded or at half-time if he had somewhere to be. I want to call him Giuseppe and I have no idea why.

Pay was straight forward and completely dependent on the age group of the game you were reffing. It topped out at $22 for the 18+ Division (I believe it was called Division II, but [gestures to first paragraph]) and bottomed out at the 10+ Division at around $12 a game. They typically didn’t allow refs to be younger than the people playing the game, so I was stuck around the 12, 14, 16 year old divisions getting about $14-16 a game on average. More if I center ref’d the game, but that’s another story.

Game length also depended on age group, so we’re talking around 50 minutes to an hour and a half per game with half lengths of 25 minutes to 45 minutes. All half times were 10 minutes. I’m sure if we did some math here, we’d be approaching near minimum wage, but the prospect of being paid somewhere in the ballpark (excuse me, soccer pitch) of $15 for one game was very attractive for a teen-aged me.

There were always games being played. Every weekend, multiple leagues, all available for signing up to referee. School cut in a bit, but the main time obligation was to my own soccer team (go STC United). And there was this whole ordeal with getting to the game to ref, since I couldn’t drive (luckily, my dad also refereed and we typically signed up as a pair with him handling either the other line or the center). Point is, opportunities were limited, time was limited, energy was limited, but there was money to be made.

Here’s the rub: every game was one of the most stressful moments of my life. Responsibility is a word people like to throw around, usually when doling out obligations to people who might not want to fulfill those obligations. It means something completely different when parents are yelling at you for missing an obvious penalty. Or when a player and fellow referee yells at you for what they think is a missed “offsides” call, but they didn’t have the vantage point to see their teammate was even with the striker on the opposite team.

Or when everyone is looking at you to determine who kicked the ball out of bounds and you can’t remember which team is on what side, plus they switched at half, so you make a call and raise the arm holding your flag toward one of the goals and see if people roll with it or not.

Out on the soccer pitch, when you’re part of the three person team keeping the rules in order and determining if goals are goals, if the winner is the winner and the loser is the loser, responsibility means getting things right. No room for error.

There was a lot to pay attention to, a lot to learn, a lot to remember and keep track of, all the while dealing with players, coaches, parents, and hoping your center ref remembered to start their timer because it’s been some time now and you’re just now realizing that you never started yours.

Amplify all of this by 1,000 if you find yourself as the center referee.

So like I said. It was a sweet gig.

Why’s Everyone Got Earphones? A.K.A., The Target

Around this time, the iPod debuted. You remember the iPod? Or maybe you came into this world blinking and curious after the whole MP3 player/iPod craze had ended. Either way, let me explain: we used to curate music collections. It started before my time on vinyl moving to 8-track, cassette tapes, and CDs. If I left any out, don’t let me know.

Music collections are great. You can tell a lot about a person by the content and condition of their collection. A loose collection of CDs on the floor of someone’s car could contain anything, but most likely had some degree of metal. A well-manicured portfolio of CDs tucked behind the sunvisor of someone’s car usually contained a lot of boy bands or classic rock, no exceptions. Someone with a cassette collection was either your uncle or someone you shouldn’t be riding with. There was an entire society that could be navigated by the state of someone’s music collection (as long as they happened to keep it in their car, and frankly, a lot of people did).

MP3 Players changed that, for the most part. Collections were no longer physically curated, but digitally. A lot of people who had never touched an Apple computer had iTunes accounts. We bought songs by the .99 cents and listened to 15 second demos of other songs to see if it was worth the dollar (but they never featured the good part). Limewire became big. You could Peer 2 Peer with some server from who knows where and directly download a virus with the name of the album you wanted to listen to for free. We learned about executables. We learned the wrong bands performed songs they never performed. For some reason, I had a song set to the theme of The Legend of Zelda that was mislabeled as being performed by Slipknot. I still don’t know who sang it.

I had a CD player around this time and pretty much three CDs to my name: Hot Fuss by The Killers, Franz Ferdinand by Franz Ferdinand and a collection of songs from Super Smash Bros. that came with a subscription to Nintendo Power. Music of the popular variety didn’t play a big role in my childhood all that much. If anything, I would boot up the sound test of Pokemon Pinball and listen to that for hours on end. I think the CD player was a hand-me-down from my sister. So naturally, I wanted an MP3 player.

The SanDisk Sansa C140 A.K.A., Love at First Sight

Now, I didn’t really know much about the technology. I only really knew “iPod” from the commercials of silhouettes bouncing around to popular music. iTunes meant nothing to me. I only knew maybe two dozen songs by name. And even then, I knew like…two lyrics? Is that enough lyrics?

So infected was I with the need for an MP3 player that I pushed my dad (who wasn’t young, mind) to book us for more and more games to referee so I could save up a whopping $125 dollars (plus tax) because this was the figure in my head that MP3 players cost.

At my rate of AR judging, which paid less, at my age bracket, which was in the middle, that meant anywhere from 11-15 games refereed. We could maybe do two games a weekend, if they were on Sunday afternoons and there were two games to referee. So to get to 11-15 games, that’d be somewhere around 10 weekends. I’m doing fast math here and averaging a bunch of things I can’t remember clearly, but let’s just call it a very long time. And remember, every game was a wracking of nerves and stress that I had to subject myself to or else I couldn’t afford this very coveted item.

And somehow, I managed to do it. $125, untouched and stuffed away in my Pokemon the Trading Card Game Collector’s Tin, collected over what could arguably be called “a long time for a teenager.” So obviously, I did extensive research over this long course of time and knew exactly which device I wanted when I walked into Best Buy and wait - why is the younger me in this story just walking up to the MP3 player aisle and just picking up the first one he sees?

More honestly, I think the younger version of myself spent approximately five minutes looking at the options available before picking up a black rectangle with a skinny digital screen and purchasing it. Only later would someone ask, oh what kind of MP3 player did you get, would younger Henry (he went by Trey back then) realize there were different types.

Anyway, meet the SanDisk Sansa C140. A triple-A battery powered MP3 player with 1 GB of space, a little circular wheel with four buttons, Next, Previous, Play, and Pause, and a 1.2’ LCD screen display. I found a listing on Amazon by a reseller to my and the world’s complete surprise. (There’s also one on eBay).

Through this little device, I would discover the joys of curating a digital library of songs that would grow out of the sheer necessity to fill this little bugger with more than the two CDs worth. I’d also discover the joys of CD ripping. Pirating used to be a lot more fun. Also, it wasn’t called pirating. It was called making your physical collection more accessible.

Wrap It Up, Old Man A.K.A., The Point

This small device and I went through a lot of things, namely, more than one pair of headphones and a weird high school obsession with Oasis a couple decades too late. It’s weird Wonderwall became the butt of the joke about guitar players, the song slaps. Mainly on bus rides to away games for the high school soccer team, a place where I never really felt as though I belonged. Thanks to the Sansa (gun to my head, if you would have asked me the name of the device before I sat down to research and write this article, I’d had a bullet in my brain right now), I could retreat into the lyrics and songs and sounds of a place that wasn’t on a bus in the middle of the night, coming back from a game I hadn’t played in (unless there was a J.V. game).

Point is, I hadn’t thought about any of that until randomly remembering my little MP3 Player on a given day in 2025. I have no idea where that little guy is. No doubt somewhere, as I never truly throw anything away, but I’m happy to remember that now, to remember having something worth saving up for and the little incidents along the way that lead to the purchase of a possession that gave me some solace during a troubling time.

Or, put a different way, I wouldn’t be able to reflect now on how putting myself through stressful moments in refereeing all those games would slowly build up my tolerance for being in charge of something, of being in front of people, of having to make difficult calls. I don’t think I’d ever go back to being a soccer referee (they’ve changed some of the rules anyway, offsides is completely different now), but the skills I developed while jogging up and down that line are skills that eventually lead to joining an improv troupe in college, meeting the girl who would become my wife, and making friends who I still talk to on a weekly basis to this day. And it’s all because of my silly need to have an MP3 player, even though I didn’t really listen to music much anyway.

So, thank you, SanDisk Sansa C140. You, apparently, were everything I needed.

A Broader Point A.K.A., What About Us?, A.K.A., This Isn’t Your Journal

If there’s anything to take away from this little journey through my personal possession history, I think it could just be this. In the consumption-focused life, it is very easy to bounce from the new thing to the next new thing. This is by design - a purchase once purchased does not new revenue create (minus subscriptions). There’s always the next new thing to purchase.

As the news of today becomes reality and we inevitably have to scale back how much we’re spending due to policies and a looming trade war (that is in effect as writing this final bit here), it might be a good time to take stock of what you have, what you’ve had all along, if you’re like me and don’t truly throw anything away.

And that’s your stuff. Your junk. The things you once wanted, purchased, and then well, sort of moved on to the next thing. Let’s hear it for the purchases of your life that felt big. A first car. A first book. Something that meant a lot to you before you had it, then got it. Reflect on your possessions because they all have a story. And that story is you. You’re the story.

Possessions, like physical music collections, can say a lot about the possessor. What do your possessions say about you? What stories are lying in storage, just under your messily curated collection of every Nintendo Power from 1998 until its close in 2012? (I still have the final issue sealed in the plastic wrap it came with. I’ve never read it).

Maybe write some of those stories down, just so you can remember them. After all, you can’t take it with you.

Henry Shepard