Hi Friends,
I’m currently in Palas de Rei, a small Galician village on the Camino Francés. We are about 65 kilometers (40 miles) from Santiago de Compostela, which is where most people finish their camino. We’ve been walking a lot—more than 400 miles this past month. And when you walk a lot, you have time to think a lot, even when you’re listening to audiobooks like I am.
For the first few weeks, I listened to books and not music because I wanted to feel like I was doing something with my brain, like I was working at something. Sometimes I’m slow to figure things out, but finally, I realized that my job this month is the walking (and also maybe the thinking) and that’s enough. At that point, I switched to music (though I’ve listened to some really great books, many of them relevant to the camino). If you’re hiking the camino and want some recommendations for audiobooks, please let me know!
It was a rainy day, and we had already been walking for many hours, so I opted for something peppy, something that would drive me forward to the end of my walking day. I chose 80s music and although some of the music made me want to boogie down the trail, much of it sent me dancing down memory lane. I’m solidly Generation X, a child of the 70s and 80s. We never wore seat belts and often sat in the “way back,” which is basically the trunk. Our parents smoked in the car with the windows rolled up. We called our friends from a phone attached to the hallway wall, the long, curly cord stretched down the hall and underneath our bedroom doors.
And there’s nothing that brings me back to those times more than the music I listened to back then.
As I was walking down the camino, singing to “The Safety Dance” or “We Got the Beat,” I remembered the dance routines my friends and I choreographed to the music and later begged our parents to watch (they didn’t—our parents didn’t dote on us in that way). When “8675309” came on, I flashed back to the strobe lights of roller skating parties and how it felt to stand at the edge of the rink, front brake to the floor, hoping someone would ask me to skate couples (I learned to skate backward, so I would be ready for such an occasion, but none ever materialized, giving me the opportunity to show off my skills).
When Tina Tuner’s “Better Be Good to Me” blasted through my wireless earbuds, there was my mother, twirling around the living room, singing along. At the time, I thought she was “old” and “embarrassing.” Now, I’ve got at least a decade on that version of my young mother and wish I could go back and twirl around the living room with her one more time.
While it’s true that some smells bring us back to a time and place, certain songs do the same. I started writing a memoir about my relationship with my mother (which went into the drawer at 100,000 words—for now). To write scenes from the past, I