My son and I went to music trivia tonight. Country music.
We went twenty for twenty. Every song, every artist, plus the bonus question at the end. Perfect score.
I walked out of there feeling pretty good about my ear.
Then I did the math on the way back and had to admit something. Of those twenty, I got three he didn’t get. He got the other seventeen.
He’s eighteen years old and he knows my music as well as I do.
Not music from his life. Music from mine — the stuff that was playing in the truck and the kitchen and the garage for the whole time he was growing up, absorbed without either of us noticing it was happening.
Which is the part I’ve been turning over since. If he picked that up off me that easily, he picked up other things the same way. Some of it good. Some of it probably not. I’ve been in the room the entire time and I don’t get to choose which parts landed.
Here’s what I can see from where I’m sitting.
He loves ferociously. He takes care of his mother the way he’s seen me do it. I showed him how to treat a lady and he does it. He’s devoted to this family, and he is a good friend to his friends — the kind who shows up, not the kind who means well.
He’s also more creative than I am, and I say that without any complicated feeling about it. The things he makes with his hands, the way he comes at a problem sideways from an angle I didn’t see — that’s not from me. Some of it’s his mother. Most of it is just him.
And this morning, on vacation, with nothing on the schedule and every excuse in the world, I looked over and he was reading his Bible.
Nobody asked him to. Nobody was watching except me, and he didn’t know I was.
His mother and I taught him that faith. It isn’t ours anymore. He’s got his own, and he keeps it whether or not there’s anyone around to see him do it.
I’m hopeful he’s been watching us all these years. I’m a little afraid of it too, for the obvious reason.
But he was sitting there this morning with a Bible open, and tonight he carried us both through seventeen questions I had no business getting.
I don’t brag on him often enough. Being away from home for a week has been a good reminder.
David Willis 