Sunspots

There have been sunspots lately and we have been lucky to pick up stations from from the Midwest and New England, getting the news from the Grapefruit League and from all over, even a station that Anne (who took Spanish at Chapel Hill and volunteers legal services to a local community of migrant workers) swore was from Matamoros. This morning, nothing too exotic: WBRF out of Gretna, streaming gospel and old time music, and prompting a nearly instant spout of sarcasm from Thomas in the back seat.

“AM radio, Paul?” he says. “Seriously, have you ever heard of digital?”

It is an unfortunate state of affairs that we are no longer, and haven’t been for some time, “Mom and Dad.” Kate started calling Anne and me by our first names when she was seven and thanks to our reluctance to discourage her precocious streak, the affectation has stuck, sadly, ever since, Perhaps the only thing to successfully stick with our youngest offspring.

I did Scouts with Thomas for three years, collecting badges and Jamboree-ing until we were blue in the face. We did slot car racing and ice hockey and archery, rocket ships, fingerprinting, photography, coin-collecting, cooking, radio building and even fly-tying using a sheaf of feathers Father Reynolds provided us from a recent pheasant shoot, but nothing seemed to grab on and hold. I did, however, get a decent short wave radio out of the deal and can now, on clear winter nights sitting by the fire place with a glass of Oban, pick up Stockholm, Montevideo, and Medicine Hat.

Then, in middle school, Thomas fell into music, and it has seemed to stay with him. I attribute his sustaining interest less to the music itself than to the many accoutrements that famously come with the territory: picks and strings and amplifiers and effects pedals, gear bags and cords, and of course the possibility of female attention. At the first sign of interest I offered him my old Martin dreadnought but he recoiled at the very sight of the acoustic guitar and after some haggling we agreed together to split the cost of a used Gibson electric.

Now he plays in a cover band (“Spyware”) and though the only song he knows all the way through from opening riff to bridge to coda is “Black Dog,” he is all about “fidelity.”

Fidelity of sound, I suppose, but not fidelity of feeling or fidelity of purpose. He has a ways to go before then.

“Dig-what, Sonny?” I use my best crotchety old-man voice and turn up the static and the old-time fiddle until I am afraid I will blow the speakers. Anne holds her ears; Kate, her nose. But “Rocky Top” never sounded so good.

“What’d you say? I can’t hear you; I must be going deef.”

“Whatever,” he says, and puts his nose back into his paperback book, a tell-all biography of an mostly unknown 1960s hard rock band from the Netherlands known to a select few connoisseurs for once upstaging Led Zeppelin in a tour incident involving a monkfish, a pair of Italian nuns and a water gun filled with booze.