You Can't Always Get What You Want

Sometimes I'm amazed at the degree to which my children respond to my generation's culture and music. My youngest playing CCR or Clapton on the guitar. My son enjoying the Beatles. My daughter responding to Beluchi's Samurai. It's kind of fun.


But then they go and spoil it all by doing something stupid (sorry, Frank) like staring at me blankly when I make a perfectly reasonable cultural reference. Take last night for example. My wife was walking down the stairs and asked me, "Do you have a hammer?" I had to say "No, but if I had a hammer. . . . ," and at this point I looked at my two daughters. Expectantly. Invitingly. They stared back at me.

"I'd hammer in the morning," I said. Nothing.

"I'd hammer in the evening," I went on. Silence. They looked at me as if I had broccoli growing out of my ears.

"All over this land!" I finished.

"Oh!" my daughter said, "it's a song!" It was clear that she didn't actually know the song. She had never really heard it, or anything. But she finally figured out that I must be saying the words to one of "my songs."

"Ohhhh!" the other daughter said, also catching on. "You are so weird, Dad."

But I will get even with them. Someday, I will be a grandpa. I'll be a grandpa with some money. Not a lot, you understand. Just enough to bribe my grandchildren. I will have them come over to my house a lot. Every day, if possible.

"Aw, c'mon, Grandpa, can't we play with the Wiiiiiiiii yet?" (That will be the name of the 4th generation Wii I will have bought to lure the little rascals over to my house.)

"Not until you've learned today's song," I'll say. "All right, let's try it one more time: Jeremiah was a bullfrog. . . . "