When I’m driving now, I listen to the latest of my favorite podcast, or even better, a book on Audible. Also—pro tip, if you go get a library card at your local library, you can get an app (the one I have is “Cloud Library”), where hundreds of thousands of audiobooks are available for download, for free. Anyone with a driver’s license in the state of Texas can get an Allen Public Library card, and from that you can have access to all of their books, to their sister libraries’ books, and to the millions of audiobooks in their catalog. Libraries are worth their weight in gold.
When I am in the car by myself, it is my alone time. I get to listen to these podcasts and books. My commute is a little under thirty minutes, so maybe I’ll get about an hour of content in the car going to and from work. If you work from home, you miss this opportunity, but you can get it going on a run or a long walk.
I also now miss this opportunity when I take Jack to school. I must say that he is very tolerant of my audiobooks. He sits back there and listens, understanding not a word as I drive us to his “school” at our church before heading into work. Big Magic comes on by Elizabeth Gilbert and I imagine Jack is saying what is all this shit, Dad? Just start creating! A self-help book might come on and I wonder if Jack is thinking ‘Man, I sure hope daddy is OK.’
I fear this will change, what I listen to. It’s a good fear, like a nervousness, having butterflies. What is going to happen is that Jack will soon be asking—demanding—that we listen to his songs. I’ve built him a playlist, loaded up with Moana and Encanto songs (all bangers—thank you, Lin-Manuel Miranda), and an eclectic spread of the Grinch, James Brown (“I Feel Good”) and the Jackson 5 (“Santa Claus is Coming to Town”). It’s Christmas year-round in our household, and on the radio.
My dad, during those long drives to school in the 90s, would have the radio on country radio, or an alternative station. He had the Matchbox Twenty album with Push and 3 AM on it. He had Brooks and Dunn, the album where Ronnie Dunn says “Maria” in an elongated fashion no less than 30 times. Dad had the Hootie and the Blowfish Album. You know, the one. Mom had the Dixie Chicks (er, the Chicks), Tina Turner, and Natalie Merchant. To this day, I still know every word to “There’s Your Trouble.” These are the sounds I grew up on. I don’t recall my parents ever listening to music from the 60s or 70s, or even the 80s. Maybe some Bruce Springsteen. I mean I’m sure they did, but they were into the new stuff of the time. What’s the “new stuff of our time”? Is it as good? Will it last?
Sometimes I would request a song. Most times I would just look out the window and listen to what was playing. “Goodbye Earl” by the Chicks came on and I yelled to my dad LEAVE IT! Don’t touch that dial, daddy. And when we listened to that song together, me for the fourth time, him for the first, I would be sitting in the backseat imitating Natalie Maines’ granny-style screamvoice while she laid out the plot about a loyal but sinister group of girlfriends who took a redeye midnight flight into town to visit a bestie while they worked out a plan to murder the bestie’s abusive husband by feeding him some poisonous black-eyed peas, and when it was over, and my blood was running hot, my dad simply lamented, “woah.”
Of course I only had a vague idea of what the song was about, but I was smart enough to pick up the tenor. “Earl had to die!” I’d proclaim. “Na na na na naaaaa na, goodbye, Earl!” I’d sing along from the back, as the bestie and her girlfriends wrapped Earl’s body up in a tarp.
When I’d hear Hootie and the Blowfish sing Let Her Cry, and I pictured the young woman sitting alone by a lamppost saying she loves her dad the most, I had no idea that her second-most favorite was Michael Stipe from R.E.M. Didn’t matter. The words still hit me. If only we knew that 20 years later Hootie would transmorph into a band that covered Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show, we’d all agree together that that tidily sums up the last 20 years of country radio.
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