Tuning In

I am bonding with my morning people. Not my morning kids; they’re kind of grumpy in the morning. My son’s okay, after he shakes off the weight of his slumber – tail starts wagging, a little morning hug and hungry as a bear. But, my pre-teen daughter ... well, that’s another story: she doesn’t want to bond in the morning. In fact, come to think of it, she doesn’t want to bond in the afternoon or evening either. In subtle ways, she’s asking for more space and, in not-so-subtle ways, she wipes away my kisses with a back-handed swipe of her hand.

No, the morning people I’m bonding with are the members of morning radio team on a St. Louis station. I hadn’t realized how much I was missing morning radio! In Belgium, I walked the kids to school and used my bicycle to run errands, so I wasn’t in my car much. When we were in the car, we’d surf for good stations, but the strength of the signals is not great in and around Brussels so, ironically, you’d lose French stations not long after crossing the “language barrier” into Dutch-speaking Belgium and vice-versa.

Not that losing the station was worth crying over anyway. I’ve never heard so much Barry White and ABBA in all my life. Also, do you pay lower royalties for not playing the whole song? I mean, what was with that? No matter what station you tune into in Belgium, the songs get cut off at the end with some goofy announcer naming the song or some enigmatic ad for grocery stores, computer repairs or dish soap.

In addition, there was this weird voice-over thing that would interrupt any station to give VERY LOUD TRAFFIC UPDATES. They reminded me of those weird station identification/ emergency preparedness signals we heard as kids. Do you remember that? I grew up near Toronto and from time-to-time, you’d hear a startlingly loud, long, solid tone not unlike a ship’s whistle but with no rise at the end. After about 30 seconds, you’d hear a man announcing, in a serious but mildly urgent way, that we had just heard a practice emergency signal and that, in the case of a real emergency, instructions would follow. Well, the traffic voice-over in Belgium was like that. As if announcing an impending air raid, a loud voice would urgently reel off a list of all traffic obstructions and accidents of which to be wary or avoid.

I did okay with the traffic updates in French, although it was faster than I or anyone I have ever met would (could?) speak. The Dutch announcements, however, were a real mystery. All I could ever catch was blah, blah, E411, blah, blah, and then Barry White would be back on. The Dutch channels only played English (by that I mean mostly North American) music, albeit two or three decades old. The French channels played a mix of French and English songs. On some stations, you’d hear a hint of what I’d classify as a morning program, but it was usually pretty silly.

Here in St. Louis, I spent the first month or so looking for radio stations I liked. While stopped at traffic lights, I’d use my scan button to jump from one station to another, depressing a pre-programmed key when I heard something I liked. Then, my husband would drive my car and change the stations to baseball play-by-play and talk radio channels – yuck. So, I’d start all over again. I have to say that there’s a lot of preachin’ and cryin’ (religious and country ‘n’ western) available here, but I’ve been gravitating towards more of the soft rock genre. At least with the soft rock stations, you get some new songs, as well as the tried-and-true, so my 11-year old girl will stop asking me to change the channel all the time.

Mostly, I tune to 98.1, where my morning people work. It is a soft rock station that plays a lot of new songs. They don’t bill themselves as soft rock, but they are. It reminds me of a station that I liked in Toronto before I moved; just a good mix of music, banter and news. When I was a kid, I remember thinking it sounded soothing, but super boring, so I forgive my daughter for impatiently asking for MUSIC whenever the talking comes on. Now that I’m super boring, I like that kind of station. I love the banter and I usually turn up the volume to catch the funny stuff.

Here in St. Louis, my morning team consists of two men and two women. I know their names now and I can tell their voices apart. I know which one is more serious and which one will tease the serious one. I find myself listening closely and laughing along with the jokes and stories. After I drop the kids at school, I turn up the radio louder. Today, I nearly drove off the road for laughing! They were doing some kind of improvisation comedy thing where each person had to start the next sentence with the subsequent letter of the alphabet. They got stuck at F and although no-one swore, it was obvious what they were thinking and, as they broke into giggles, so did I.

Bonus: no emergency signals so far!