The miracles of modern high-tech can now take you to the moon in three days. In 30 seconds it can trace your family history back to the tree dwellers. It can change your sex life with one trip to the drug store and put you in conversation with 35 people on four continents with one click on the keyboard.

These are considerable improvements over the drab years of peace and quiet in America.

But all of this pales beside the transformations that take place thousands of times a day in the automobiles of America that are linked with the entertainment circus called Satellite Radio.

This is the 21st century version of the old vaudeville shows that featured ventriloquists, itinerant banjo players, talking bears and left-handed knife throwers. Today you have your choice of more than 250 frequencies that feature evangelists, the latest tornado warnings, the Marriage of Figaro, hard rock and soft soap. Undocumented oracles tell you how to get rich in the middle of the recession. You can hear intimate talk for truckers, screaming football experts, political quacks and daily Spanish lessons.

A lot of this can turn you into an immediate convert to the simple joy of undistracted driving. But a few days ago I found on one of my XM channels a service called Escape, subtitled Beautiful Music. This was not symphonic music, which is nice and often beautiful. This was not operatic music, which is nice and very often translatable. This was the music of my adolescence, and then a little later the music of my 20s, with those rites of passage that define our time, the roads we took, the fulfillments we experienced and the dreams and fantasies that recede.

And suddenly about the time I was making the turn to the fitness center here was the voice of Perry Como, 60 years earlier, singing one of the all time torch songs of the century, called “Prisoner of Love.” And I was back in high school years, listening to the family Philco, and Perry, the most melodious barber in history. He was crushed and grieving “what’s the good of my caring if someone isn’t sharing those arms with me…” and about now I was getting soapy and humming along to the part where he his voice reaches up into climactic dirge and cries “she’s in my dreams awake or sleeping, upon my knees to her I’m creeping, my very heart is in her keeping, I’m just a prisoner of love.”

Folks, that is true and uncontaminated misery.

In the face of all this grief one has to be respectful, of one’s distant youth if nothing else. And the tunes played on. “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” from “Oklahoma,” Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” The Andrew Sisters singing “Drinking Rum and Co-Cah’ Cola” from the Caribbean during wartime. I sat in the parking lot for a few minutes and listened to Linda Ronstad re-breaking my heart with Blue Bayou, where the fishes play, and then to the guy telling me what happened by the time he got to Phoenix, and then to Albuquerque and I was now trying to imagine a road map to make sense of the geography..

It occurred to me about then that there might be diminishing returns in this soapy little exercise in reverting back to another time and another pace, and that the real moral in all of this was simply an innocent sense of gratitude for having experienced this other time, with its wins and losses and above all its gifts. I was about to click off when Ray Charles started to sing “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” How can you hang up on Ray Charles? It wasn’t just the music. This was, after all, part of the times we remember. And one of those times was a Monday morning after the first Minnesota Vikings had lost a game and the first year coach, Norm Van Brocklin, called one of the writers(me) inviting him to have some coffee in the morning to assess the calamity of it. It would have been impossible today. Coaches and writers don’t have and shouldn’t have that kind of connection. And no coach imaginable today could take a Monday morning off after a Sunday game and go anyplace but back to the pits—film, analysis, next Sunday’s game, injuries, a hundred checkpoints.

But Van Brocklin was a tempestuous guy who wrote his own time tables, a brooding, snarling man, combative, ornery and brilliant. We quarreled all the time. But he was also companionable. We met at a 3.2. beer joint in a suburb and drank coffee and coke. Van Brocklin mourned the game. He wanted to talk. But before we talked he went to the juke box and played Ray Charles and I Can’t Stop Loving You. “Can’t get enough of this guy,” he said. He put in four quarters and played it four times. And we talked and talked and for the first time in while we laughed at each other because he also put in a fifth quarter.

We didn’t talk the last four years of his life. Whose fault? Who knows? It was a time long ago, but one to remember. So this was not the music of escape. The music of what? Well, maybe reunion. And you really can’t get enough of Ray Charles. Some times don’t change.

About Jim Klobuchar:

In 45 years of daily journalism, Jim Klobuchar’s coverage ranged from presidential campaigns to a trash collector’s ball. He has written from the floor of a tent in the middle of Alaska, from helicopters, from the Alps and from the edge of a sand trap. He was invited to lunch by royalty and to a fist fight by the late Minnesota Viking football coach, Norm Van Brocklin. He wrote a popular column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 30 years and has authored 23 books. Retiring as a columnist in 1996, he contributes to Ecumen’s “Changing Aging” blog, MinnPost.com and the Christian Science Monitor. He also leads trips around the world and an annual bike trip across Northern Minnesota. He’s climbed the Matterhorn in the Alps 8 times and has ridden his bike around Lake Superior. He’s also the proud father of two daughters, including Minnesota’s senior U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar.