Talk Radio

I remember my father sitting in his office, with the low hum of talk radio in the background. How could he listen to it all day? Why didn’t he listen to music? I couldn’t imagine opting for endless chatter over the Jackson Five and Credence Clearwater Revival that came to me through my A.M. radio speaker. As I got older I switched from A.M. to F.M, listening to Alison Steele the Nightbird and the other hip DJs of WNEW. Music got me through college papers and exams. I still hear certain songs that transport me back to another time. 

Music has always been my background of choice. I listen when I’m sad, or stressed, busy or bored. Music keeps me company. Lately though, music is slowly being replaced with talk radio. I still listen to music, but talk radio has become my background as I work. John Fugelsang’s voice accompanied me as I wrote this post. Talk radio tethers me to the outside world which I can sometimes lose track of. It gives me a sense of companionship and a shared worldview. On the weekends I enjoy the endless array laid out for me by NPR. When I drive in the mornings Terry Gross, not Jesus is my co-pilot.

Years of listening to music, have inevitably filled my head with lyrics. I joke that my hard drive (aka brain) is so loaded with lyrics there isn’t much storage room for new information, and my delete function isn’t voluntary. It feels like no matter what else I forget, those lyrics persist. I recently downloaded the soundtrack from Hamilton, but had to stop listening to it because I was waking up in the middle of the night with the lyrics insistently running through my head. John Fugelsang is never talking in my head. 

Have I turned into my father? Am I old now? What does this transition say about me as a human? I grew up in the era of never trust anyone over thrity and now I can barely see thirty in my rear-view mirror. Old people listen to talk radio. I remember once sleeping at my grandmother’s house after my grandfather died. I was there to cheer her up and keep her company for a couple of days. That meant sharing a bed with her. I didn’t sleep for two nights because the radio crackled all night with voices of talking heads. (And I don’t mean The Talking Heads.)

I can’t say for sure when this started. It used to be just weekends when I’d listen to NPR.  Car Talk, Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, and the TED radio hour were my favorites. Somehow that crept into weekdays, and then I got Sirius radio and the talk shows are interesting. I’d drive and listen, I’d write and listen, I cook and listen. What has become of the girl who used to crank up the music and sing at the top of her lungs to Whitney Houston, the Doobie Brothers and Stevie Wonder?

I would defiantly tell you I’m nothing like my father. He was tense and easily agitated, he had little patience for interruptions from little kids. An aggressive diver. he drove hunched over the steering wheel madly chewing his tongue. He sat in his office listening to talk radio. Of course there was more to him than those characteristics; he was funny, generous, and very smart. We don’t get to choose what traits we inherit from our parents, and it feels like we don’t choose those we absorb either. Rather, nature and nurture are often at war with how we want to see ourselves. 

Naturally there are many sides of me, I am a mosaic of my parents (all three of them), myself and the many people who have influenced me. While I don’t want to be the woman who sits alone typing while listening to talk radio, sometimes that is who I am. Other times I am still that girl singing way too loud.