I want to tell you about the day my father threw Skeeter Davis out of a moving car.
We were on a road trip. Just the three of us: my dad, my sister, and me. A two-hour drive through the Kenyan countryside, the kind where the landscape rolls past you like a slow film and you have nothing to do but exist inside the moment.
My dad, being my dad, was making it educational. As we crossed each river, he would announce its name. Deliberately. Clearly. The way a man who expects the information to land properly delivers information.
I was not absorbing it the way he intended.
I was singing.
There was a Skeeter Davis tape in the cassette player, the same songs cycling around and around on repeat, the way only a cassette on a long road trip can, and I was happily inside it. Singing along, watching the countryside, existing in that particular state of contentment that only music in motion can produce.
I was not writing anything down. I had no notebook. I was not cataloguing rivers.
I was feeling the trip.
Towards the end of the journey, my dad turned to us and asked us to name the rivers we had passed. In order.
My sister did better than me. I could remember perhaps one.
He was not pleased.
He reached over, ejected the Skeeter Davis cassette from the player, and threw it out of the window of our moving car.
Just like that. Gone. Into the Kenyan countryside, somewhere between the rivers whose names I had failed to retain.
I have thought about that moment many times over the years. Not with bitterness, my dad is a good man, and this was one afternoon in a long, loving relationship. But with a kind of recognition.
Because here is what was happening in that car: two completely different minds, trying to experience the same journey.
My dad’s mind said: we are passing rivers. Rivers have names. Names are information. Information should be stored and retrieved on demand.
My mind said: we are moving through something beautiful. There is music. I am here. That is enough.
Neither of us was wrong. We were just wired differently.
I have never been a person who memorises and regurgitates. Ask me to repeat back what you just told me in the order you told it, and I will disappoint you. I am not built for that particular task and I have made peace with it.
What I am built for is something else entirely. I ponder. I imagine. I connect things that were not previously connected. I sit with a question the way other people sit with a crossword, not looking for the answer so much as enjoying the shape of the problem.
If I need the information, I will look it up.
What I cannot look up is the insight that comes from turning something over slowly in my mind until it reveals itself. That has to be lived. That has to be felt.
Skeeter Davis understood this. She was just trying to help.
I hope that cassette landed somewhere soft. I hope someone found it on the side of the road and put it in their own car and sang along without being asked to remember anything.
I hope they felt the trip.
Come back tomorrow for Day 42: the dream that waited.
Sign the guestbook
Leave me a birthday note, tell me which post was your favourite, or share your own way to shine. I read every one.
