Empty Nest: Remember the old songs?

(Editor's note: The nest isn't necessarily empty just because the kids leave -- after all, dad is still there, with time and opportunity for pursuits that have been on hold for, let's face it, a generation. This is the second in a series of reflections.)

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 14 (UPI) -- It's fair to say parenthood presented this dad with a good many experiences I never anticipated -- it's been expensive, demanding and exhausting but it's also been wonderfully educational, entertaining, amusing and, if I may say so, inspiring.

"The Child is father of the Man," the poet William Wordsworth observed.

"And how," I would add.

I never made a conscious decision to stop playing guitar. It just got harder and harder to fit it into days filled with teachers meetings, pediatrician appointments, dentist appointments, playground time, movies, kids' birthday parties and -- for eight years running, give or take -- coaching two YMCA basketball teams, my son's and my daughter's.

Time, in the big picture, may be limitless but your personal portion of it is, naturally, quite limited. One of the great surprises of parenthood for me was the realization that what I'd thought of as my own time wasn't mine at all. You belong to your family and whatever is left over after they've gotten what they need, you get to keep that and you can do what you want with it.

That's not a complaint. For me, it turned out to be a pretty good deal. I suspect I might never have become a full-grown adult without the experience.

So what if I wasn't playing guitar every day? There was always music in our house. Credit to their mom: She made sure the kids had lots and lots of music -- in the nursery, everywhere in the house, really, and in the car, regardless of whether we were on a long road trip or just going to the grocery store. It wasn't all recorded music, either. A lot of the first songs the kids heard were silly things their mom made up -- songs about going downstairs, going to bed and waking up, and songs about how wonderful it is to eat peaches, pears and green beans, and songs about how great songs are.

I made up one or two silly numbers for the kids but their mom was positively prolific. If we'd been the Beatles and made an album, I would have been George Harrison to her Lennon-McCartney, getting just a spot, maybe two, in the set.

In time, we all sang. I remember the first time I sang with my son as well as I remember his first baby steps. "Under the Boardwalk" was on the radio and I was singing along and darned if he didn't just jump right in. And he was good, too. Next thing I knew the kid was picking up harmony. Then, in (I'm pretty sure it was) the first-grade Christmas program at school he was picked to sing a solo chorus in what I consider a legendary rendition of "Jingle Bells."

My daughter got off to a somewhat less promising start in music. Her voice was OK but her ear did not serve her well. She would change keys indiscriminately while singing something as simple as "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." Glad to say, she grew out of that and became a very good singer -- an award-winning singer, in fact, which I'll (ahem) get into in more detail in a future post.

Around the time 2006 was giving way to 2007, the big one picked up a ukulele and, no surprise to me, developed a fairly nice touch with it. When I finally got my guitar out of storage he and I actually played together -- just a few times as it turned out, but enough to give dad a genuine thrill. On top of that, there have been times where he's shown me songs he knew that I didn't, which kicked the thrill factor up a couple of notches.

Child is father of the man, indeed. Inspiring, you bet.

Oddly enough, it was an encounter with someone else's children that helped motivate me more than anything else to play every day. It started with an e-mail -- the kind most everybody gets, a blast from the past that drops into the inbox -- from an old college classmate. You've probably received such e-mails. Like me, you may have sent a few, searching out long lost friends/acquaintances out of -- what? Idle curiosity? A sense of guilt for not having kept in touch? A shot at a do over? It's been my experience that these attempts to reconnect have a tendency to misfire. Happily this one didn't.

My old classmate, who works in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, was just thinking, she said, about a song that I wrote and she sang in those days, going on 35 years ago now.

Wow. I remembered her. I remembered that I wrote the song, but I had zero memory of her singing it and I could not for the life of me remember the lyrics. She invited me to join her and her family for a regular Wednesday jam at their place in Venice, Calif., where a family friend was giving music lessons to her two kids and a small group of others kids. Before long I was, for the first time in decades, singing one of my own songs.

It seemed like a good idea to stay with it -- see if I could get my touch back on the instrument and see how much of my catalog (such as it was) my memory would allow me to recover.

(Next: 'New' guitar, more changes)

-0-

(originally moved Tuesday)