On the Road in the ‘Sip
My soon to be college freshman and I drove up to Jackson from the Bay a few days ago. We are sort of doing our normal summer away from Beverly Hills, but with milestones like college orientation, friends and family get togethers and Fourth of July parties along the way. Patriotism is BIG in Mississippi and we are here for it!
Tonight there will be a little gathering of some old friends here in my former hometown to meet my son before he becomes an official college student. As I lie in the hotel room while my husband and son have breakfast together I was thinking about the drive.
Our drive from the bay to Jackson - three short or very long hours, which as a child of divorce with one parent on the Gulf Coast and one in Jackson, I traveled quite frequently and in many modes of transportation, from my own BMW to the Greyhound. I had lots of comments along the way about nostalgia I had for certain weird places on the road that I had no idea what they did when I was an child and still don’t.
The best part of the drive with my boy is our music. He plays DJ with his phone using Spotify and he chooses some tracks, then I choose some songs. His genre is rap; that’s it, nothing else. Mine of course is all kinds of music and on this drive, I was particularly interested in songs I could sing along to; songs with great lyrics.
Certainly, he would roll his eyes and gag a little at my Jackson prep choir voice riffing along to Stevie Wonder’s “Love’s in Need” or James Taylor’s “You Are my Only One” or Carole King’s “You’re So Far Away”. I requested those songs because I wanted nostalgia and I wanted to sing but also because of the WORDS. I’m an adult now. I now understand a lot of these songs in ways I didn’t when they were new, so it occurrs to me that my son is not listening to songs in which a boy is telling a girl he loves her or a woman wails about her cheating man, and how much it hurts. Or how distance makes the heart grow fonder. Or how they’re dreaming of having a big life one day.
That was probably my main revelation as a parent as we drove through the thick pine forests all the way to the bold new city. Next week: Ole Miss!
