The Road Trip Playlist

My dad and I drove from Chicago to my new college in Colorado in August. Sixteen hours. We decided to take turns picking songs.

His first pick was Bruce Springsteen. Mine was Taylor Swift. He groaned. I groaned. By hour four, we'd reached a truce: he learned all the words to "Love Story," and I discovered that "Thunder Road" is actually perfect.

We sang through Iowa and Nebraska with the windows down. He told me about road trips he took in his twenties, in a car with no air conditioning. I told him things about high school I'd never told him before. We stopped at a diner in a tiny Nebraska town and had the best pie of our lives.

When he dropped me off at my dorm, he hugged me for a long time. Then he handed me a USB stick. "The playlist," he said. "For when you miss home." I listen to it every Sunday.