For your listening pleasure

I heartily recommend that every couple take long car trips. Long car trips are great. They give couples a chance to really connect, to find out more about each other, to get beyond the superficial, everyday talk.

This is why when WE go on long car trips, we get books on CD.

For our latest trip, I got some CDs from our local library and asked Joe to get some from the library near his work, which has a better selection. "And no more Ben Franklin," I warned. He opened his mouth. "That goes for the other Founding Fathers, too," I added. "They may have done great things for this country, but they put me to sleep."

He frowned. "Well, Jane Austen puts me to sleep," he said. "I'm not getting any Jane Austen."

It might have been easier to forget the CDs and just talk.

Between the two of us, we got enough listening material for interplanetary travel. With our respective restrictions, we ended up with some interesting stuff. Car Talk. A story about a woman supposedly being befriended by a baby gray whale while swimming in the ocean (it sounded enough like fiction to be interesting to me, yet factual enough for Joe to listen to). NPR's Driveway Moments, with stories ranging from a young girl's frank discussion of her cystic fibrosis ("This better not have a sad ending," Joe said. Then, "I can't believe this had a sad ending!") to an interview with the author of The Sweet Potato Queen.

But what was most telling of us was that we both got the exact same CD: Don't Know Much About...Anything.

With all our differences in listening material preference, we can agree on at least one thing: We don't know much...about anything.