The Sultans and Other Parental Observations

 

Within his first three months of attending a new school my wife and I have scolded our son, Lucas, far too often for having too much fun and for being a disruptive student, and for bringing his newfound affection for “bad” behavior home with him. It has been a stressful time. My wife and I attribute this new behavior to Lucas associating with one boy who we are convinced has an emotional disorder. His association is more likely the cause of the obvious change in our son’s disposition in a class environment. Lucas is drawn to this troubled boy.

I’ve not met the other boy's parents, and yet I feel they must be troubled, too, perhaps they voted for McCain, and if so I am sure I wouldn't feel comfortable inviting them to my house to watch the San Diego Chargers lose another football game for in the midst of anger the conversation could turn to politics, as if to assuage the situation. I want my son to have as many positive influences in his life. Of course, I cannot control everything, but I am certainly going to try and to also resolve this “situation” by introducing something more positive in his life. I thought music might do the trick, even sports, and decided that I would have Lucas try music, mainly the guitar, and see if he could channel some of his energy into a more positive outlet. Nothing like the vision of my kid playing the guitar!

Our son’s behavior is so wildly different we’ve had to take away most of his toys, and his favorite movie of all time, The Bee Movie, as a means of altering his malevolent side, and to help establish a connection with the son we knew him to be of the past; we miss the sweet innocence of Him. We miss the little boy we could count on obeying us. We now must supervise the consumption of his breakfast, and kindly request many times over that he not chew on the straw he uses to drink his chocolate milk, and request that he put away his Legos, and other toys that hurt when you step on them. Lucas defies us again as we implore him to get dressed each day, and yet he resists our instructions repeatedly. He is acting every bit the 5-year-old child.

We will not, by any means, no matter what his behavior, take away his Saturday afternoon guitar lessons. I am convinced the world needs another Mark Knopfler, and I am quite sure someone (why shouldn’t it be my son?) must be such a person. Knopfler is god (in the mythological sense). I share this with you with great confidence because I had front row seats to one of his concerts a few years ago. Mark was glowing, and no it was not the lights, and he did not use a pick, and when he played “Six Blade Knife” all the great poets who claim to be great and who write desperate tales about their woeful parents, some of them even committed suicide, seemed so ridiculous to me in the face of Mark, the gruff-voiced natural poet and guitarist.

I want my son to play the guitar just like Mark. When Lucas is in high school, I imagine leaning back in my La-Z-Boy chair, Schlitz in hand, eyes closed, as I melt away in the beautiful sounds, forgetting all the while the cruel world in which we live, filled with government hypocrites, mainly white pasty men, and occasionally not, in blue suits who say fancy things only to protect their financial security and their positions of power.

Perhaps through music my son’s behavior will improve and I won’t even have to entertain the notion of entertaining his friend’s parents. I take him to guitar lessons every Saturday, promptly at 1 pm, make him practice in the morning, hoping that disturbed children at his school (and their parents at home) will have much less of an influence on him than the great guitar, and certainly the government, will.

Lucas is drawn to the insane and comical, not less than any other child his age. He laughs randomly, and points out things 41-year-old fathers have forgotten are truly funny. I catch myself and attempt to correct myself for forgetting that all beings die and along the way it is worthwhile to be crazy and happy and to forget rules and regulations precisely because all living things are temporary. There is plenty of time for Lucas to fake it in the real world, to be rigid in his business clothes, to pretend the products or services he sells are important, and to understand things like profit margin, residual economics, recession, and fuel cell technology, as the DOW plummets.

After evaluating his favorite movie’s central message, I recall The Bee Movie reminds us that without bees there cannot be pollination, and that bees are the conduit for a level of life important to us all. You can’t have a chocolate cookie without flour, and you cannot have a flower without a bee. All things are interconnected. Laughter is the conduit to personal peace, which I also seek, and yet am I somehow stamping this out of Lucas by enforcing discipline, and by assuming my MBA means something to my eventual and certain death? No one cares about how serious I want to be than me, maybe my clients do, and perhaps his laughter and fun is the flour the cookies in the world need.

I guess I do all of this disciplining because I want to be a “good” father, one that raises a civilized human, not an Anarchist, certainly not a bailout-minded Republican, a soulless criminal. My wife and I fret over the change in his behavior, and so we think we need to intervene, to address the situation. We are hopeful that proper guidance will produce a mindful, Buddhist-like child, a person who will mature and remember to assist old people crossing the street as well as develop a true concern for democratic ideals. My hope is that he will challenge himself and his nation to become more intelligent, curious, and fight for just causes like the Family Medical Leave Act, and other “socialist programs” that truly promote family well being, not just superficial reflections of family values like anti-choice laws and other instruments of deception that belie the very nature of concern for family and friends.

I want him to want to vote No on propositions like the 8 in California, and other human rights issues in Florida and Arizona, the ones the Mormons especially fought hard to defeat, even though their own level of hypocrisy is evident with polygamy, clearly an interesting way to demonstrate “family values.” I want my son to share more than air space with Putin, perhaps even visit the former Soviet Union, to learn another language and appreciate different cultures, and I want him to contemplate archaic Supreme Court Justice rulings, and to question their validity in a changing world when perhaps I am too old and tired to contemplate them on his behalf. And so, I supervise him and, yes, I probably raise my voice far too often in hopes of encouraging his questioning, in hopes he will want to learn more about what is really important and just in this society.

Lucas will have many influences in life, some more pleasant than others. My wife and I wrestle with this fact knowing that we cannot protect him from all events and other people and their bizarre antics. We can, however, hope that he learns to play the guitar, and play it well with or without a pick. Knopfler is god, and perhaps Lucas should acquaint himself with this god and hopefully be influenced in a positive way as I was years ago.

I was 11 years old in 1978 living in Athens, Greece. I attended a private American School, Hellenic International School, in Ekali, a suburb about 10 miles from our apartment. Traditional Greek schools had traditional school buses. Private American schools, on the other hand, had Pulman buses. These buses carry tourists on European tours. In a Pulman bus you can leave Athens and end up in Sweden one week later, and feel the whole time that you were really on vacation. These buses are plush and comfortable. They have big seats and large windows. And so, each morning the large, luxurious Pulman bus, air conditioned in the heat of the day, would carry me away to my school in the relatively affluent suburb north of Athens.

There are influences everywhere, and I will never forget one in particular. His name is James. He was definitely cool and seemed rebellious. Maybe it was because he was a senior in high school, an old man with significant wisdom and life experience and peach fuzz on his upper lip and, if I meditate even longer, I think I recall greasy hair, unwashed for at least three days, and Converse shoes, even Jordache jeans. He smoked cigarettes with the other seniors because they were allowed to in a special part of the high school campus, far away from others. In a word, James was the epitome of “cool” and I wanted to be like him, especially after he talked to me, and allowed me to listen to a new god…not the one talked about in Church.

Even though my mind recalls a great degree of disgusting facts about James, he had two redeeming features: a Sony Walkman (one of the first to grace our bus) and a tape of a band hailing from Scotland. James was, of course, cool. He would lean back in repose, as if reflecting upon some social unrest in Bolivia or Central Europe, the look in his eyes of a Beatnik poet at a jazz bar in New York City, dissatisfaction evidenced by a furrowed brow, a metaphor about life and its existential meaninglessness no doubt pouring from his skin.

I asked him what he was listening to on the new, very cool device called The Walkman. He pressed stop and asked me to repeat myself. Once he understood the question, he rewound the tape, and put the earphones on my ears. He told me the guitarist on this tape was spectacular, one of a kind, god-like. His name: Mark Knopfler. He told me to sit back and enter the world of the Sultans, the Sultans of Swing, which I did and have hardly left since.

It is my hope that if Lucas could absorb some of the peace of mind and spirit through music, his guitar playing, it might open him up to a whole new world of possibilities that could perhaps translate into more appropriate behavior in school and cause him to be a bit more reflective and introspective, something that music has always done for me when it touches my heart. And if the guitar does not prove to be the conduit to a more settled and stable nature for him, perhaps sports and a competitive, yet team-building approach, will provide him with a safer and more socially acceptable outlet for his boundless energy and enthusiasm.

After all, Lucas is only 5 years old. He has plenty of time to learn how to have less fun, which is exactly the opposite of the way it should be, but it is what it is. Eventually all living beings die, and just before they do so they realize how much time they wasted trying to be what others want them to be.