EVERYTHING
FOR YOUR FAMILY
Fatherhood
|
||||
|
My wife was working, so I took my son with me to interview a rock band. We met at the library amphitheater on the far side of town. It was a warm mid-August evening; the musicians seemed hot beneath their long hair. They shook my 5-year-old’s hand; he told them he was a drummer; they believed him. It was as if he knew the secret musician’s handshake. Sam, the singer, asked him what music he liked and he told Sam that he liked the Beatles. I began to ask questions. We were talking about the difference between false nonconformity and true originality when Sam reached into his pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it. “What’s that smell?” said my son. I looked at Sam and Sam put out his cigarette. “Sorry ‘bout that,” he said. On the way home my son couldn’t stop talking about Sam. Specifically, he couldn’t stop talking about the fact that Sam had lit a cigarette. “Daddy,” he said, “I don’t want Sam to get sick.” My son’s attitude toward smoking is not mere repulsion; it is, for better or worse, closer to scholarly fascination. It all started with Ringo Starr, who in the movie “Help!” plays the entire song “You’re Going to Lose That Girl” with a cig hanging limply from his lips. My son began asking for Tootsie Pops when he played the drums, not because he wanted candy, but because he wanted to drum with a thin white stick protruding from his mouth. But the questions persisted. Perhaps I should have accepted this fascination as innocent preschool emulation of a hero, whose questionable health-maintenance habits could be discussed at some later date. I suppose I should also have recognized deeper issues: My son has always been afraid of and intrigued by fire, and in times of anxiety such as this past summer, when he was girding himself to start a new school he uses it as a stand-in for whatever he’s actually anxious about. So the image of his favorite Beatle breathing fire while hitting a crash cymbal couldn’t help but provide the boy with food for thought. In any case, he fielded my blunt parental warnings and whatever other information he could glean, or invent, and came up with this: “When you put a smoke line” that’s what he calls a cigarette “in your mouth, and you light it on fire, the fire goes into your lungs and then you throw up.” Much of which is really not far from the truth. Greg Blake Miller writes from Las Vegas. |
||||
RSS Subscribe
Digg This ArticleSEARCH THE SITE
