Listen up

When my boys were little, we lived in a house with a walk-in pantry. On the bottom shelf was where we kept crayons, coloring books, glitter, construction paper, scissors, glue and other artsy-craftsy items. The boys knew that whenever they had the urge to create, all they had to do was pull what they needed off the shelf and have a seat at the kitchen table.

The year that we purchased a CD player, the music never stopped. Sometimes we listened to the Doors, the Grateful Dead and Stevie Ray Vaughn, sometimes it was Elvis, Hank Williams Sr. and Ella Fitzgerald, other times it was Mozart, Hyden and Hayden. My observation that year was this. Whenever chamber music played, the boys would head toward the panty and commence to draw, cut, glue, and glitter. Sometimes I could see the wheels turning inside their heads. The response to the music was so predictable that whenever I felt the need to lie on the couch for a break, on went the music to babysit my boys.

But when number one son entered adolescence, he entrusted his loyalty to Blink 182 and the cocky, self-assured attitude the band portrayed. No longer would he pay any attention to that "classical crap" I once had been so successful to subliminally impose. We fought the teen battle about freedom and control, a battle that parents must learn to accept compromise or lose in the end. His grades were good. He never fell into mischief. I owed it to him to allow him to embrace his music. Eventually, the sounds of the great masters subsided and were replaced with angst-ridden pop-punk.

More palateable to teen passengers in the car, I eventually shifted my radio interest to the public jazz station, which has been the accepted neutral genre of our family for the last several years. But lately, my radio music taste has returned classical; and with that shift it occurred to me that the complaints from angry adolescents are no longer there. I noticed that when I hear the same kind of music that inspired a five-year-old to create art, what it now seems to inspire is civil and creative conversation. Needless to say, we listen to quite a bit of classical music once again. I just hope that he doesn't figure out what has become delightfully obvious to me.

That old saying is true that music soothes the surley boy savage beast.