Q is for Quest

The prize table was laden with huge colorful water bazookas, the only thing that mattered. That damned race.  On vacation at a resort in Oregon, a kid’s triathalon!  So fun! 

boys

As soon as the kids started the swimming leg, it was immediately obvious who wasn’t a swim team kid. I wanted to pull him out of the pool and wrap him in his towel, but my son pushed me away roughly as he hurried to put on his shoes, one of the last out of the pool, and he began to run.  He ran and rode his bike and crossed that finish line well in the middle but never quitting.  But I wanted to die for him as he struggled with the swimming and saw how far back he was. I wanted to pull him into a hug and sneak off into the pine trees. He would have none of it.  We walked past the prize table featuring the huge cartoon water gun after the race, not really looking this time.

I admired his perseverance and dealt with my own maternal guilt

by putting both my boys into swim team as soon as we returned.  Not to win races, but I felt I had overlooked some fundamental basic childhood necessity. They had swim lessons, I felt confident they could swim, but lanes and strokes and laps were not in their playbook, and it seemed every other kid but mine was on a swimteam.  I felt like I’d accidentally forgotten to teach them how to use a fork.  Actually that might still be some peoples opinion. 

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L is for Lessons

I didn't grow up in a home that contained musical instruments. We had a stereo and lots of my parent's LPs: Zeppelin, Paul Simon, The Stones, the Who, Rod Stewart, Phoebe Snow, Linda Ronstadt, Willie Nelson and Judy Collins are the album covers that immediately come to mind. I also was taken to many concerts as a kid, but not out of a sense of exposing me to music as much as not wanting to pay a babysitter.  There was a guitar at one point. I might have been twelve when my father, living with his second wife in Santa Fe for five years at that point, bought me an acoustic guitar for Christmas. Extravagant. It served as a constant reminder of what I wasn't: a kid who took music lessons. I couldn't afford to learn how to play it, didn't know how to tune it and it sat, mute, and ultimately was sold when I moved out of my mothers house and left for college.  I think I got 50 bucks for it and put it towards my first semester's books, so it served some useful purpose.

My kids started playing instruments when my middle son was in fourth grade and Santa brought a drum kit.  His older brother started taking classical guitar soon after. Then the drummer added bass lessons, and his older brother added electric guitar, then suddenly they both played everything you could shred. My daughter was in fourth grade when we inherited my mother-in-law's piano, so I had my first piano player.  At one point I was employing four musicians for six lessons a week divided amongst the three kids.


It goes without saying that I feel very fortunate to be able to do this. I am grateful that my kids love playing music and very blessed with the caliber of musician mentors in their lives.  It is a language of expression I never had, and I appreciate how it grounds them and enriches their lives and their interactions with others. 

This weekend I took my middle son to check out the college he will be attending in the fall.  I hung back as he strolled the campus and eventually fell into a conversation with some music students.  He became a different person before my eyes. We stopped at a music store on the way back to the hotel and he happily sat for 30 minutes playing a vintage dobro.  Total bliss. Harmony.

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