Buzzkilling

True story: We were riding on a highway in Connecticut – I was driving – and on the back of the truck, just in front of us, I saw this:

Behind a rolling ball comes a running child

I thought, wow, that’s a beautiful phrase, and I asked my daughter – riding shotgun – to please text it to me so I wouldn’t forget it. I thought it would make a good song lyric, or maybe a title. (Or a band name. Everything sounds like a band name for a half second.)

I did wonder whom this message was meant for. It seemed that such an admonition would be addressed at least as much to the truck driver – who of course couldn’t see it – as to me, but in any case it was a nice phrase.

I thought I had discovered some real poetry “in the wild”, so to speak, and I promptly wrote a song that included the phrase as the “hook”. Then, some time later, my sister-in-law reported to me that the phrase was quite well known. Where had I been all this time? In my defense, a Google search for the phrase turns up some images of it on trucks and not a lot else. (FWIW there is a pretty nice free-ish jazz track with the full phrase as its title by a now-defunct band called Debris.)

Do you treasure that childlike wonder
If you’re like me of course you do
They’re not so jaded and they’ve got that hunger
No cynicism spoils their view

As is my way, I ended up turning a simple PSA into an exploration of a soul that’s tormented in various ways: fear of failure, cynicism, … You know, the uzhe (click the image to hear the track).

Thinking about this otherwise innocent PSA has reminded me of a reaction I would sometimes have when the kids were young. There’s nothing better than seeing your child’s unalloyed joy when at play: running with wild abandon, or swinging, or scooting across the playground. When something would go awry, like they would slip down, or crash into something, I would feel a particular kind of sadness triggered by the sudden dashing of my child’s joy, as if their exuberance was somehow being punished. (NO! YOU CAN’T HAVE FUN. YOU CAN’T JUST LET IT ALL GO. BE CAREFUL!)

I can still conjure up this feeling when I think about it; it’s sad and depressing. I don’t like it. And we’re supposed to make mistakes, right, learn from them, bounce back, get back on the horse, school of hard knocks, etc etc? I certainly had plenty of, for example, accidents on my bike when I was a kid, and I didn’t get all sad and weepy about them then.

A few years ago I wrote a song, “The Jake Shuffle”, about my mother’s father. You can find it on our first and only album Welcome to Storytown. I’m pretty sure my grandfather suffered from organophosphate-induced delayed neuropathy, a kind of paralysis that was brought on during Prohibition by drinking Jamaica ginger extract (“Jake”) that had been adulterated with TOCP as a way to avoid the Prohibition laws. This was essentially a family secret, something to be ashamed of, and when my brother asked our mother if this is why her father walked with a cane, she began to cry, sharing that life had seemed pretty hopeful in her family until this happened.

My mother was always skeptical of good news, always waiting for the “other shoe to drop”. She had a kind of negativity, a baseline cynicism, that I have since attributed to this Jake Leg event in her childhood. And now I wonder if my own reaction when my child’s exuberance takes a whack comes from that same place, some kind of world view that I learned from my mother. I will likely never know. But I don’t like it.

Kill the buzzkills! Let’s go forth with joy and exuberance. Are you with me?

Thanks for listening.