Today’s story:
“Juno Broccoli and The Stongstealers”
by James Warner
As I stumble out of my bedroom, to turn down the volume on the CD player, my daughter Serena calls, “Come on, daddy, let’s play Juno Broccoli.” It’s her name for Junior Monopoly. Serena only has the attention span for grownup Monopoly as long as she’s winning, so we got her the faster-moving variant of the game, where you accumulate ticket booths instead of houses or hotels. “Can I be blue, daddy? I want to be blue,” Serena demands, twisting to the beat.
“Sure, honey,” I say, reducing the decibels, “you can be blue.”
It’s Saturday morning, and I have time to play a game with my daughter before going to work. Serena likes to start the day with a randomly selected disk, which she always plays far too loud. She gets that from her mother. We misnamed her bigtime.
I’m still trying to place the track that’s woken me up, an uptempo number that carries me back to the 1990s . . . Beyond that, I’m drawing a blank. Serena selects CDs by color—more common than you’d imagine, according to our marketing department—and I’ve thousands of CDs, stacked on the floor, mostly in the wrong cases, many that I’ve forgotten ever owning.
A song sounds different when you haven’t listened to it for a long time. As I reread the instructions about how much money each Junior Monopoly player starts with, the back of my mind recedes through a progression of where-are-they-now artists, trying to recall who I’m listening to, while Serena incants, “I want a six, I want a six,” willing the game to go the way she wants, as she jives to an intro that makes me think of listening to LPs in a wintery light, back when music was my life and not just my job…
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