Songs I Don’t Play in the Car Because They Would Surely Kill My Elderly Dad
It makes for a boring drive
If you have followed my Mayberry Chronicles over the past year or so, you know that the adjustment from living alone in Dallas to living with my 87-year-old stepfather in East Texas has not always been easy. Keeping up with daily meds and being 30 miles from the nearest bookstore have been two of the bigger challenges, but there has been one thing I’ve had to give up that I never gave much thought to until it was gone: heavy metal music while driving.
Because he has both vision and balance issues, my stepdad has not driven a vehicle other than his beloved riding mower for more than a year, which means that I drive everywhere. He also hates to be alone for any extended length of time — he nearly lost it while I was at Mass on Saturday night, yet refuses to attend a Catholic church, so we are at an impasse there — and thus I rarely drive anywhere by myself anymore. And though he regularly sets the volume on the TV at a level than can be heard in Houston, any music above a whisper in the car irritates him beyond belief.
Most of the time, this isn’t a problem. I can play The River, Born to Run, or The Queen is Dead at a volume that I can hear but that he barely can and just need to resist the urge to crank it up when “Born to…
