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“One night, my 3-year-old asked me if she could sleep in my bed. I told her no. She said, “That’s not fair! Why does Daddy get to sleep in your bed?” READ MORE
Fatherhood
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When I was 7, I entered first grade, joined my first soccer team and started taking piano lessons. I think of the years before that as The Unscheduled Years. Yes, there was preschool, but those were half-days, ending with the sun still high and the promise of a long, lazy afternoon with my brindle boxer on the backyard lawn. Life, of course, has accelerated since then, and though my wife and I have tried to prolong our 4-year-old son’s Unscheduled Years, this summer our efforts were irrevocably defeated. The defeat came not in the usual form, with registration in a soccer league, but with the enlistment of a jazz drummer named Guido to give our son lessons. Please understand that we don’t watch “American Idol,” and we have no inclination to train our son for some pre-K version of it. In all honesty, it wasn’t my wife and I who ended our son’s Unscheduled Years those golden days when the extracurricular has no curriculum but the boy himself. After a year-and-a-half of passionate untutored drumming, he decided it was time for lessons. If you don’t believe that this whole thing was engineered by our son, look at it this way: If you were forcing your kid into a musical career, would YOU choose the drums? Last summer, when my son was 3, we started going to Saturday evening outdoor concerts at a nearby shopping plaza. My son never watched from the front of the stage, always from the side, so as to better study the drummers’ movements. They noticed the way he watched; they called him over during breaks, let him take a couple whacks at the snare, gave him their spare sticks. My son got to know them: Guy Bush and DJ and Guido, and when Guido mentioned the possibility of teaching him, he never forgot it. For a year he asked if he could take lessons, and for a year I resisted the idea, trying in vain to keep the Unscheduled Years going: Just let him have fun, I thought. What I didn’t understand was that, for a musician, nothing could be more fun than learning to play the right way. And so now, each Thursday afternoon, the best jazz drummer in town comes over and shows my son the rudiments of the craft. My son had already taken three lessons learned a rock beat, a surf beat when his preschool teacher invited him to bring his drums for the last day of school. He played along with Beatles songs that day—“Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!” and “Ticket to Ride.” The kids danced around him; he showed them what he’d learned. And he loved it. Greg Blake Miller writes from Las Vegas. |
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