To The Greatest Boy in the World — A Tribute

My boy, my oldest, is turning nine tomorrow. He is still young, but in the last six months, there have been these strange flickers of the future, a shadow of the young man he will become running through him. There are wry asides, hair that he stubbornly refuses to cut, questions about his identity — “Mom, should I become a musician or a computer nerd?” —  smiles about his secret admirer at school and a growing obsession with music.

My husband  and I were bursting with pride when our boy found his first favorite song — Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out.” At two, he sat on Jared’s lap for hours, wanting to watch it over and over again, occasionally allowing The Darkness or Tenacious D’s “Tribute” into the rotation. In subsequent years, we hid our smiles, as he thrashed around the living room with his sisters during the NME countdown, pretending that the mast of his wooden pirate ship was a guitar and perfectly mimicking Green Day or My Chemical Romance. In time, he became self-conscious, demanding that we “weren’t allowed to look at him” during their nightly freak outs, until, one day, the dance parties stopped.

And, then a few months ago, he came up to me while I was doing the dinner dishes and asked, “Mom, what is punk rock?” The YouTube tutorial that followed yielded some interesting results — my boy is partial to The Clash and still likes Green Day, he can take or leave Fugazi, Minor Threat and Bad Religion. But it also heralded the return of his interest in music and another first — his first favorite band. Why my boy has found himself in Late of the Pier — an obscure off-kilter post-punk band — is hard to say. I do know that he has memorized all the song titles and lyrics and we’ve been listening to it on the way to school for months. He has enthusiastically shown his new find to other, somewhat bewildered, nine-year-olds and taken to hiding out in the study, listening to the album on iTunes and belting out the songs when he thinks no one is listening. I can see the thrill of discovery, Late of the Pier was in our music library, but this is something he owns.

I remember when that happened to me. Growing up, my home was also filled with music and music lovers, albeit of a less rocking variety. My parents were passionate about musical theater and my childhood was filled with rehearsals, opening nights, film scores and original Broadway Cast recordings. My dad loved to listen to music during dinner and we often ate our grilled chicken breasts and salad to the soaring soundtrack of Laurence of Arabia or Ben Hur.

My mom cleaned and drove to Motown and my parents were early fans of music television, staying up late to record videos. We loved the rock videotape and watched the Pointer Sisters, Billie Joel, Stray Cats, Elton John, Toto and Michael Jackson over and over again, until it was tragically taped over some years later. (During a recent Christmas, my dad spent hours on YouTube lovingly recreating the tape for us) There were completely unselfconscious renditions of Madonna songs, performed for the college students my parents taught (“Like a Version, touched for the very first time …”), but I was a musical theater geek through and through and spent most of my young life pretending to be Éponine, belting out “On My Own” in my bedroom. I awkwardly stumbled into pop music a few times — the Christmas when I was 11 and asked Santa for cassettes of Tiffany, Whitney Huston and Whitesnake (boy, did I want to be Tawny Kitean in that beautiful white dress). But, I didn’t really find something that was my own until I was 13 and heard the lead singer of the Violent Femmes’ plaintively snarling, “When I’m out walkin, I strut my stuff, and I’m so strung out …” Suddenly, I knew what it was like to have music speak for you and through you — I was hooked, in love.

And, so, on the eve of his birthday, I give my boy this tribute — I love you and think you can be anything you want to be (a musician and a computer nerd, if you want) and welcome to the club.