The human brain is just plain weird. Someday I hope to ask God how he got the idea of connecting seemingly insignificant details, such as a smell or a sound, with a specific event.

I’m not a huge Brian Adams fan, but I enjoyed a few of his hits back in the early 90s. I was thumbing through my wife’s CD collection earlier this evening and stumbled across the same Brian Adams CD that I’d seen before. This time I picked it up and was surprised to find that I actually liked most of the songs on it. So I popped it into my disc changer.

I hadn’t heard many of these songs in years, but I really didn’t expect to enjoy them as much as I still do. And I certainly didn’t expect quite the wave of nostalgia. When Do I Have to Say the Words cued up, I sat back in the couch smiling. As to chorus played, I remembered a time when I picked up some food at a drive-thru in Wilmington in my 1986 CRX.

That CRX was such an excellent car, and I was very blessed to have it as my first. When I bought the car, it had a lousy JVC stereo in it with a cassette deck with no auto reverse. Heck, I don’t think it even had a rewind button. Being a poor college student, I figured my best bet for a cheap replacement was at the junkyard. I remember picking through that yard in Loveland and stumbling across the first Honda Accord SEi I remember noticing. It had a high-power auto reverse cassette player stereo in it that looked like it would fit right in my CRX. But the best part was that it had my holy grail of stereo equipment in it: an equalizer.

I didn’t know how I would make the equalizer fit in my CRX, but I had to have it. The owner sold the deck and EQ to me as a set and I quickly figured out a plan. I’d buy some brackets and hang the EQ under my ash tray. The cord should just reach the stereo. Perfect. And believe it or not, it was. It was a Jerry-rig no doubt, but it looked great. And man, was I excited when I fired it up for the first time.

The first time I ever saw an equalizer in action was at my best friend’s brother’s house. He had the mother of all EQs hooked up to his home stereo. The job of the EQ was to tailor the music to his personal taste, and it did that job well. But it also had these little light bars at each lever that jumped up and down with the music. We’re all used to such things nowadays with all the digital music players on our computers. But in the late 80s that was sweet. Trust me. What I didn’t know was that the EQ I’d just bought did the same thing.

When I turned on my “new” stereo the first time. I immediately noticed the EQ lights. They weren’t exactly like ones I’d seen in the past, as there were only two, one for the left channel and one for the right. But they jumped with the music in a way that reminded me of KITT. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t ask.) I was enthralled.

I had that car for almost 4 years, longer than I’ve owned a car since. At one point I put a CD player it in for a week or so. As neat as it was to have a disc player, it just wasn’t the same without that EQ. I used to glance down at that thing as I drove, particularly at night when the orange bars glowed their brightest. I almost drove into the ditch once while heading to Wilmington down Stone Road.

My wife thinks I get all excited about the silliest things. Maybe. But I think it’s the simple things that count. To this day, I remember listening to some of my favorite music of all time in that car. And when I picture it in my mind, I can’t help but to look at that EQ.

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