The battery on my son’s MP4 player has eroded, but he’s going on a road trip so I wanted him to have the option of some music and some audiobooks. He’s at a great age, where juvenile fiction includes such things as the series about the young James Bond, stories of adventure when tweens go places without their parents and have to figure things out by themselves (with a little help from some non-parent grown-ups or at least a good Sorcerer or two).
In a pinch, we borrowed an old iPOD back from a relative who at one point gave it to him when she bought a newer, shinier personal player for herself. I looked through it to see where the books would end up on his playlist, and I saw the list of music on the player. Kid dance music (he made a list of fun music for his last birthday party although technical difficulties kept the actual party soundtrack to giggles and laughs and shouts and shrieks), a bunch of Glee songs, some artists that were clearly left over from the original list when the iPOD belonged to the relative: Phil Collins, Sarah McLachlin, Celtic Women, Alison Krauss. Nothing wrong with these tunes, but not exactly ones selected by 5th graders.
And then I came across the music he listened to dating back to his infancy. Really. Politically correct World Music compilations of lullabies; a four-disc set of toddler music designed to expose kids to the fundamentals of music, rhythm, rhyme, harmony; several CDs from a local children’s music duo, identical twins who introduce somewhat older children to composers and instruments; and the one that broke my heart, “The House at Pooh Corner.”
I called my son in and we played snippets of the songs and he selected which to keep and which to delete. He chose to delete just about everything except the kid dance music and the irresistible Glee songs. I cajoled him to keep Alison Krauss, because, well, I can’t relinquish all aspects of control to him just yet. It has been so many years since he heard these songs – not on a personal player, but on CD, nights of the endless dang-blasted lullabies without any success in getting my precious non-sleeper to sleep, toddler CDs on an infinite do-loop – but he didn’t remember them. He laughed and laughed at the songs, words, the lovely happy narratives between songs. He had no recollection of these songs. His eyes were wide with amazement and astonishment; he simply could not imagine being so young that these puerile sounds were ever something he enjoyed. I’m sure they’re embedded in his auditory cortex. They’re certainly embedded in mine.
Which brings me to back to the Bear. [I had no idea I’d be writing again about a stuffed bear. How many stuffed bear postings can a grown woman write?] Anyway, for those of you who have a different cerebral soundtrack from your kids’ early years, The House at Pooh Corner was a Loggins and Messina song. It’s a song for grown-ups about longing for the time when we were allowed to have imaginary companions who knew us in our small, scared selves, and the time just an eye-blink after that, when we left the safety of make-believe adventures with bears and rabbits and owls and donkeys for real-world adventures for which we’re not fully ready.
When will I ever hear these songs again? When will I ever get the wisdom that A.A. Milne and other children’s authors provided, lessons I prayed my son would absorb in the 30+ times I read the story to him, and later, the times we watch the Pooh movies? For as much as Milne was writing to children, he was writing to the parent in all of us (and himself – it was, after all, his own son’s bear that inspired the story). I have cried at every Pooh story, every Pooh movie. Cried because I don’t remember anyone spouting such simple words of wisdom to me, at the time when I must have needed it most. Like the one when Christopher Robin is realizing he will be going away for school, and leaving Pooh behind. He offers these gentle words for the moments of existential crisis he knows his sensitive friend will encounter, when the Bear of Very Little Brain believes he is less than he actually is:
If ever there is tomorrow when we’re not together… there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we’re apart… I’ll always be with you.
You are filled with wondrous things, the message says. It’s your thoughts and beliefs about yourself which are not always to be trusted. Trust my beliefs in you, instead. I will never think you’re less than you are.
My son is preparing to leave our House at Pooh Corner; he is venturing farther and farther into the world beyond our Hundred Acre Woods. He is amassing his own adventures that don’t always include his parents, just as Christopher Robin did. He has left behind much, although not yet his own bear. He’s leaving the music of his early childhood, which has come after shedding his picture books and early readers to a friend whose son is 8 years his junior. He is reading young adult fiction, in which friends and adventures take the place of home and hearth; he will eventually leave this for adult fiction, and the building of his own home and hearth.
Maybe I should start my own playlist, the one I’ll transfer from device to device to device and have with me when I’m old. So old that I’m alone most of the time. So old that a once-a-week call from my middle-aged son will be the calendared event around which I plan other senior-center activities. I’ll plug myself in and turn on the lullabies, the toddler sing-alongs, the music that brings with it all the memories of sleepless nights and dances with my baby. I’ll move my shoulders and tap my fingers to the Glee soundtrack. And I’ll play “House at Pooh Corner” and remember. All the things a parent remembers, the dual lives of our own childhoods superimposed on our children’s. I’ll invite an old woman friend over to watch my worn copies of the Disney Pooh movies. We’ll cry and sip tea. We’ll go online and read Winnie-the-Pooh quotes, nodding our heads at the sage, sage words. And I won’t mention a word of this to my son, who might get worried about his strong old Mom getting soft.