In honor of my CD player

Tonight, I was walking in the direction of my apartment building listening to my favorite song of all time when out of nowhere came a group of drunk college kids. One blond frat boy lunged toward me, pointed at my 2002 Sony G Protection CD player, Model No. D-SJ301 (Maybe. It's kind of wearing off) and shouted, "You need to get an iPod!," in a tone that suggested my precious CD player was greatly offending him.

He might as well have said, "You need to cut your right arm off!"

I left this country on a jet plane about two days before the iPod revolution. That's a guestimation. So I bought a nearly $100 CD player to bring with me to a place I knew nothing about. My father rolled his eyes, sure that it would break during the first week. I knew then that the CD player was going to become my most precious material possession, and it did. The CD player has been with me everywhere I've gone since then.

It survived dust storms wrapped in a handkerchief and a plastic bag. It kept me going on what had to be more than 100, 12-mile bike rides between my village and the closest town. It kept me company on hours-, and sometimes, days-long rides on ancient European tour buses or stripped down delivery vans retrofitted with benches and no doors. It survived months of 130-degree afternoons, even as the heat gave new meaning to CD burning. It ran three miles strapped to my arm every day. I dropped it on rocks more than once and it burst open, its two AA batteries spilling out. It has actually been to Timbuktu and back. It's also been to Thailand, Laos, Burma, Senegal, The Gambia, Paris, Madrid, and Cambodia, where it helped me keep my lunch down on a tortuously long and bumpy dirt road. I'll dare to say that it loved the Kuwait City airport as much as I did. When someone jacked my car stereo (the one thing in it that worked well), that CD player and some mini-speakers became my stereo.

And it's still kicking. Perhaps I'm being entirely too sentimental, but how can I so easily give up on something that never gave up on me? The drunk, blond frat boy assumed my CD player is just a nearly obsolete electronic device. I think we should make drunk, blond frat boys obsolete. They are an outrage.