The change was subtle, but in a fifteen-year marriage, you notice subtleties. For a decade, the car’s radio presets had been a perfect map of your shared life. Preset 1 was the news station you listened to during the morning commute. Preset 2 was the classic rock station he loved. Preset 3 was the pop channel your daughter always switched to. It was a comfortable, established rhythm.
Then, one Tuesday, you got in the passenger seat and reached for the button to silence the news. The digital display flashed, but it wasn’t the news channel. It was a smooth jazz station, one you hadn’t heard in years. Puzzled, you clicked through the others. The classic rock was gone, replaced by an “80s & 90s Hits” station. The pop channel was now a public radio station featuring storytelling podcasts.
Your heart did a small, uncomfortable flip. This wasn’t an update. This was a erasure. It felt like someone had quietly rearranged the furniture in a room you both lived in, and you were the last to know. The narrative that immediately suggested itself was a midlife crisis. A silent, sonic rebellion against the life you’d built. Was he trying to reclaim a youth you weren’t a part of? Was this the auditory signature of a man who was, in some way, leaving you?
You didn’t say anything. For a week, you rode in silence, the unasked question hanging heavy in the air between you. He seemed the same—kind, present, but somehow far away.
The truth revealed itself on a drive to the home improvement store. He was in the aisle comparing types of grout, and you’d gone back to the car to get your phone. As you sat in the passenger seat, your hand absently drifted to the glove compartment, clicking it open. There, sitting on top of the car manual and a pile of old napkins, was a small, leather-bound datebook. You recognized it instantly. It had belonged to his father, who had passed away five years ago.
Curiosity overpowered propriety. You opened it. It wasn’t filled with appointments, but with song titles, carefully written in his father’s precise, architect’s script. At the top of the page, it read: “Road Trip Mix for David, 1998.“
And below, a list of stations. The smooth jazz station. The 80s & 90s station. The storytelling podcast. They were all there.
The pieces crashed together. The “80s & 90s” station wasn’t a rejection of your life; it was a bridge to his father. The smooth jazz wasn’t a midlife cliché; it was the sound of long, quiet car rides with a man who offered advice not in lectures, but in the spaces between songs. The storytelling podcast was a replacement for the baseball games they’d once listened to together, a different kind of narrative to fill the silence.
He wasn’t pushing you away. He was trying to find his father.
When he got back to the car, you didn’t mention the datebook. You just looked at him and said, “I like this station. It’s peaceful.”
He looked at you, and for a fleeting moment, you saw the boy he’d been in 1998, a young man trying to impress his dad on a long drive. “Yeah,” he said, his voice soft. “It is.”
He changed the car’s preset radio stations to ones you both used to listen to with his father because the silence in the car had become too loud, and the only way to fill it was with the ghost of the man who taught him how to drive, how to be a man, and how to love. It wasn’t a rejection of his present with you. It was an attempt to bring the best of his past along for the ride. And in that moment, you realized that the most profound conversations in a marriage are sometimes the ones you have without saying a word, simply by letting the static from a forgotten radio station fill the space, and understanding that it’s not just noise—it’s the sound of someone trying to find their way home.