Clancy and I were due for a conflict. We arrived in Colosse but needed to drive to Beyreuth on the opposite side of the state to visit her family. Fortunately my parents have an extra car. I figured we’d be driving my old car, which has a tape player. I bought Dad a tape-to-MP3 converter and figured we’d use that for the drive. But then Dad suggested that we take the convertible because my old car was having some troubles lately and he wasn’t comfortable with the 200 mile trip taken in that car. the convertible has a CD player. I had no CDs. She did.

Car music is one of those areas of inequality in our marriage. I tend to dominate it though I do take care to put in CDs that I know that she likes. There is a fair amount of music that I’ve introduced her to that she’s taken a liking to. I’m not sure I’ve been quite as broadminded with listening to her musical tastes. There have been times in the past where we’ve been stuck with CDs or for whatever reason had to rely on her music. We listen to Melissa Etheridge and a Delosian band that we both discovered and liked independently (a story for another time). She’s been in an Indigo Girls mood lately and they’re one band that I have not been able to get into (though I’m not sure how good a chance I’ve given them). But given how often she listens to my music, I was not comfortable with the prospect of tuning out hers by listening to something on an earpiece or something like that.

Then I remembered that my old CD collection was stationed at my parents house and sure enough, I was able to uncover it. The collection is spotty at best. It’s mostly stuff I liked and listened to years ago and never took with me because I had it all ripped. I figured a tentative solution to the conflict was that we could switch back and forth between a CD of mine and a CD of hers. If she put in Indigo Girls, that’d be her right, but I also might put in something that I knew she was less fond of (though nothing that she absolutely hated, of course, since I don’t hate the Indigo Girls).

The solution came in the form of CDs that were already in the car. Mom’s CDs! Well, Mom doesn’t actually own CDs, but for Christmas Dad took all of her old tapes, downloaded as many of the tracks as he could, and made CDs out of them. Clancy looked it over and found some of her classic rock stuff that she likes. I looked it over and it had some of the schmaltzy easy listening hits that, while I can’t say I’m a really big fan of anymore, have extraordinary nostalgic value.

So we listened primarily to my mother’s CD collection. A lot of Willie Nelson and Anne Murray. Some Janis Joplin and Janis Ian. James Taylor and Dolly Parton. It was really quite fun. We passed through the songs that neither of us liked. There were some that she liked and I didn’t care for, but I listened through them. There were more than I was fond of but she wasn’t. Some of the songs I really didn’t like much at all, but I liked how they took me back to when we’d be driving back from Ouachita having visited family and I’d be laying in the back of the van listening to those songs with my parents. I was surprised at how many of the lyrics that I remembered to songs I have not heard in over a decade and how easily they can get stuck back in your head.

{Singing to myself, “Nobody robbed a liquor store on the lower part of town. Nobody OD’ed, nobody burned a single buildin’ down. Nobody fired a shot in anger, nobody had to die in vain. We sure could use a little good news today…}