This Christmas, one of my gifts was a Bluetooth-enabled portable speaker that I could use to listen to the music on my iPhone.   I unpacked it and found it surprisingly easy to pair with the phone, and in no time, I had it ready to play.

Unfortunately, the only music I had on my phone was an album (f they are still called albums) from U2, which I had no idea was even on the phone and don’t know how it got on my phone in the first place.  So, I opened an app for one of the streaming music services I had been using to listen on my smart TV, and selected “60s Folk Music” and right away Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence” began to play, through some magic completely unknown to me.

Hearing that song on my new device for the first time was an emotional experience for me.  You see, my father passed away in November of 1965, about the time that song was starting to gain popularity in the US.

My Dad and I were never all that close, mostly because he worked in a textile mill on the second shift for most of my childhood, meaning he would leave home about 1:15 every day and return about 10:30 that night, long after my brother and I were fast asleep.  Our times together were usually the 30 minutes or so around the breakfast table before we left for school, and some mornings during the summer months.  Back then, the mills ran six or seven days a week.

And much of his off time was spent hunting, fishing and gardening to provide for his family in the only way he knew how.

So, many of my memories of him are short bursts, and have been ravaged by decades of wear and tear, both on the memories and the folds of information in my brain.  Memories are similar to clouds, in that they can be distorted by external forces.  Some of mine are somewhere between what actually happened, what I wanted to happen, and what happened to others that I have adopted as my own.

But this one is clear.  A few days after my father’s funeral, I picked up a package from our local Post Office from either Sears Roebuck or Spiegel, one of the mail-order catalog giants at the time.  Turned out it was supposed to be my Christmas present that year.

Mom was not exactly in the Christmas spirit, having just lost her husband and only source of income, and facing the prospect of feeding and clothing two teen-aged boys.  Since I had pretty much already spoiled the surprise, she let me have the present, with the understanding there would not be another under the tree on Christmas morning.

It was a state-of-the-art, to me anyway, clock radio, complete with alarm and AM/FM/FM Stereo, and even had a sort of orange-colored back light for the clock and dial that could be seen with the lights off at night.  At that age, I was into The Beatles and Rock ‘n Roll, and it couldn’t have been a more perfect gift.

Since it was already past dusk when the local AM stations went off the air, and the FM stations’ only content was talk or classical/big band music, I naturally turned the lighted dial to WLS from Chicago, the go-to Rock ‘n Roll station in the 60s.

The first song that was played was “Sounds of Silence.”  I remember thinking while I was listening to that song, this radio was the last thing I would ever receive from my father, and that same memory came back to me as I heard it for the first time on my Bluetooth speaker this Christmas night.

I enjoyed the company of a multitude of family and friends over the past few days, as our families and loved ones gathered to celebrate the Christmas season, and I fully realized how blessed I have been over my lifetime.

But for a few brief moments, I also remembered how the “Sounds of Silence” can have a whole different meaning for some people during the Christmas season.

My heart goes out to them.