Priorities, People!

I happened to hear the classic Harry Chapin tune "Cat's in the Cradle" the other day on the local "New Oldies" radio station that plays your favorites from the 60s, 70s and 80s (um, what?). The song is, as everyone knows, an achingly melancholy ode to fathers, sons, and life happening while we are busy making other plans. An unbridgable gap between father and son played out over a lifetime lies at the heart of the song.

Listening to the lyrics anew, I was suddenly struck by the obvious source of their problem. "My son turned ten just the other day," Chapin sings, "he said, 'thanks for the ball, Dad, come on, let's play. Can you teach me to throw?' I said 'not today. I got a lot to do.' He said, 'That's okay.'"

No, no it isn't. Why does the son turn down the father's entreaties later in life to finally spend that precious time together? It's not because of any quaint notions of the son ironically following the father's too-busy-for-family path, reversing the generational stiff-arm. No, discord is sown right in the heart of the boy's childhood, planting a demon seed that would grow into a pestilent weed in the years to come, leading the son to reject the father with malice aforethought.

The answer is right there in the lyrics. The boy turned ten, and he asked his dad to teach him to throw. (Insert screeching LP sound here.)

The boy is ten and he doesn't know how to throw? Come on. If a kid can't at least throw a circle change under the hitter's hands in a fastball count by the time he's ten, he might as well just find himself an ice floe and head on out to sea. Are you telling me this Chapin son doesn't even know how to throw a ball at ten? Everyone know he should be able to turn the double play pivot at seven, and find the receiver on an up-and-out pattern in the back of the end zone by nine. No wonder the son resents the dad, and the dad is too clueless to notice. The kid probably spent most of junior high stuffed in a locker.

Clearly, Harry Chapin didn't spend any time in our neck of the woods. Whiner.

(Or maybe having a son who actually "turned ten just the other day" caused me to pay a little closer attention to the song. I can't explain why it got so dusty in the car at that moment, though.)