Fatherhood

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The Beat Goes On

The CD player in our car died yesterday. Though I just might wait awhile to get it fixed.

By Greg Blake MillerPublished: February, 2005

The CD player in our car died yesterday. We have yet to show the deceased device to a certified technician, but I am prepared to conclude that it died from exhaustion. The poor thing had gotten little rest since our family’s summer trip to Squaw Valley. Its fate had been sealed on Aug. 12, a date that shall live in euphony, when our then-3-year-old son met a folk-rock band called Blue Turtle Seduction.

Since that day, we have not once fired up the old Subaru without hearing the sound of a fiddle. Behind us, our boy keeps the beat with a Frisbee and a purple straw. He calls the Frisbee his cymbal; the straw, reasonably enough, he calls a cymbal stick. He knows every change in tempo. His focus is absolute. Once I blew him a kiss in the rear-view mirror. “Don’t kiss me,” he said. “I’m a drummer.”

The band responsible for all this, it must be said, is very, very good. It is a credit to my son’s taste that after the Subaru’s 1,862nd, and, alas, final, playing of a song called “Mountain Soul,” my wife and I were not the least bit tired of it. (Well, maybe the least bit.) The Blue Turtles, as we now call them, blend bluegrass and soul and about a dozen other things into a sound that is at times sheer exuberance and at others conveys a bittersweet longing for at least one perfect day in a perfect place. Back in August, in a cobblestone plaza in Squaw, my son seemed to grasp all this within about three notes. In any case, that’s how long it took him to scramble up on stage behind the drummer and start studying his movements. Somehow, though he is not an owl, the drummer turned his head around in the middle of a solo and smiled at my son. Between sets, he let the boy take a few whacks at the snare. Obliged, I bought a compact disc. Two days later we listened to it for the entire 8 1/2 arid hours between Carson City and Vegas.

Recently, we told one of my son’s teachers about the intensity of his drum habit. She took a deep breath and looked at us with infinite wisdom and said, “That’s an obsession.” Maybe so, but when we embrace a thing with true passion, it’s also our way of choosing who we are, of deciding what parts of the world we’ll allow to inscribe themselves upon our being.

And I can’t help thinking that, in embracing the Turtles and calling himself a drummer, our boy has made not a bad choice at all.

Though I just might wait awhile to get that CD player fixed.

Greg Blake Miller writes from Las Vegas.

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