By yesterday morning I was cranky. After spending the week home with all three kids on vacation, still working to drum up story ideas for editors and crafting a mother-daughter website and catering to a 7, 9 and 10-year-old--to really be with them, really enjoy our vacation, I was exhausted. Robert spent the week mooning over a bass guitar we'd found in All Music, a store not far from our home on Long Island.
"Let's go back," he would beg repeatedly each day by 10 am. He had it bad and pined for a metallic blue Ibanez electric bass, pre-owned so it was cheaper (smart kid) but fit perfectly in his smaller 10-year-old-hand. His blond scruffy surfer dude hair in the musician persona was a fitting accessory against the bright blue.
I know this obsessive, burning passion he has for music. Did I do it to him? Can you project all your stuff onto your child and then live vicariously through them? Been done already by fathers on various fields. Ya think?
"Okay kid, let's go." We spent three separate afternoons at the store, Robert plugged in playing the same four riffs he somehow plucked out by ear on his upright bass; "Smoke on the Water," "Iron Man," and two he wrote.
I wandered around the store circling him, a satellite in our bond and love for sound. The guys who worked there, musicians in their own right, smiled at my indulgence of his need to play and fielded questions about price, case, amps, etc.
Finally yesterday, after much cajoling and reasoning, Tom and I decided instead of making Robert wait for his July birthday, we would see how much of his saved allowance he could gather and we'd add some and buy the bass to put him out of his misery.
Robert had squirrelled away $100 and by trading in Xmas gift cards, Easter money, advances on his allowance and a bag of change totalling $11.50--he hit the magic number--$140 to buy it outright himself!
So Sunday morning off we went in a religious ceremony--the whole family his witness. He walked into the store proudly with a fist full of cash in his hand, marched to the back where the basses hung from racks in front of sheet music boxes with Paul McCartney smiling down from a photo to anoint the moment. Robert selected his first guitar, pulled it off the rack and began the ride of his life.
He talked through the issues of not getting a amp yet (use mine, I said) and a strap and a case but stood taller and was more mighty than the overpowering storm of musical obsession that overtook his life.
Since we got home yesterday, we haven't seen him. But the house is alive with sounds of real music in low, thumping rhythms drowning out the drone of video games and lifting my mood.
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