My Marantz tape recorder is as big and heavy as a flour sack. It records so authentically that I plan to capture on it the voices of those dear to me so I’ll always remember what they sounded like. The Marantz was once the Rolls-Royce of recorders, but it uses cassette tapes, and that technology is pretty much obsolete now in the journalism world.

Two months ago, the newspaper bought me a digital tape recorder. It is as small and light as a child’s hand. The voices it records sound both tinny and tiny. I’ve been using the digital recorder all week, because we are in the middle of campaign endorsements. My editorial board colleagues and I will have interviewed candidates in nearly 50 races before the month is over.

The endorsement process is the most difficult part of the job for me, because we pass judgment on people’s qualifications. But this year, I have taken an unusual comfort in tracking the campaigns and participating in the endorsement process, because these rituals arrive each fall and – unlike technology – the rituals don’t change much year-to-year.

This summer, I experienced a techno brain freeze. I resisted learning any new technology, because I needed to grieve the rapid way things grow obsolete.

I quizzed fellow boomers born in the 1950s. Didn’t we listen to transistor radios for decades before Walkman radios emerged? Didn’t we manually change channels on the TV for years before remotes were invented?

At Sunday School one August morning, I played a record on Teacher Ann’s brown-and-beige plastic phonograph. I eased the album on the turntable, moved the switch to the “on” position and then carefully placed the needle on the thin line of the song. The music began, and I nearly wept in front of those preschoolers, remembering how easy it was to play records on my phonograph in my childhood room. Meanwhile, the digital tape recorder languished on my desk in a white plastic bag.

My techno brain freeze eventually thawed, and the candidate interviews have been captured in tinny and tiny ways on the digital recorder. And now we even Webcast a few of the endorsement interviews. We sit at a conference table in the newsroom with the candidates and ask questions. A camera picks up the action. We look as small as figures in a not-too-exciting video game, but the audio is fairly clear. These are shown on the newspaper’s Web site at www.spokesmanreview.com/webcast.

These webcasts are the future, and the technology will improve, but I believe that most local campaigning will remain a low-tech and tactile enterprise far into the future.

Candidates still place campaign signs in lawns, doorbell in neighborhoods, debate at community meetings, shake hands, catch colds, grow hoarse, suffer sour stomachs and feel panic arise when trapped by cranky citizens.

In the same corner of my office where the lonely Marantz now languishes, I also store my father’s Grundig Stenorette dictation machine. In the early 1960s, we children were fascinated by the way our voices sounded when we spoke into the fancy machine in dad’s law office.

My dad back then was a big fan of Washington Gov. Albert D. Rosellini, who faced some contentious races during his time in politics. After one of Rosellini’s debates, my dad picked up the phone and tried to leave a message of support. But there were no answering machines in those days.

Politics is messy, the adage goes, but the way candidates meet and talk with citizens and editorial boards is a good mess and not yet obsolete. I feel honored to witness it – in person – during this 2006 election season.