When you have children, everything becomes new again.
Occasionally, as a parent, you get such a clear insight into the cyclical nature of life that it takes you out of yourself for a moment.
As a kid, I loved Roald Dahl. And, when I say “loved,” I mean loved. By the time I was six, I’d read every children’s book he’d ever written (my favorite, then as now, was Matilda), plus his two half-for-children, half-for-adults autobiographies, Boy and Going Solo. When Dahl died in November 1990, my parents took me out for pizza to break the news. I cried. I’d assumed — fairly reasonably — that, like sunrises, Roald Dahl books would just keep coming, such that I’d get one on each birthday until I was no longer interested.
Anyhow, my eight-year-old is currently reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I know that book so well that, if you woke me up in the middle of the night and asked me to relay it in detail, you probably wouldn’t be too disappointed by the result. But it is fresh to my eight-year-old, and, because it’s fresh, he’s living the wonder of the story aloud as he reads. “Daddy,” he’ll say suddenly, in that tone of voice that people get when they know something you don’t and are quietly thrilled by it, “you’re never going to believe what just happened to Veruca Salt.” Over breakfast this morning, he told me that the only kid other than Charlie who was left was Mike Teevee and that, while he doesn’t know for sure, he’s pretty convinced that Mike Teevee is also going to get lost in the factory in some unpleasant way, although he doesn’t know exactly how, but if you look at what has happened to all the other characters, and the fact that Charlie is the good guy, it only stands to reason, doesn’t it? Listening to him talk, I was transported — not so much into my son’s mind as into an infinite generational loop of which I am only one small part. My mother read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when it came out in 1964. I read it when I was five, in 1989. My son is reading it today. Presumably, his children will read it, and their children will read it, and so on and so forth. In that sense, it will be forever new.
Previously, I have compared this feeling to the Droste effect. In a newsletter I wrote last year, I described feeling a similar sensation when taking my son — the same son, as it happens, although both were there! — to Universal Studios for his birthday to ride Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure at Universal Studios:
It was quite cold—by Florida standards, anyhow—so my seven-year-old was wearing a coat and a sweater. For whatever reason, in this particular coat and sweater he looked just like me when I was his age, right down to the hair and the smile and lanky way that he walks. And, all of a sudden, I realized that, at the age of 38, I’d become my Dad. It was a peculiar feeling. I looked down at my son, and, in that moment, he was me and I was my Dad and I could see the whole world through different eyes. This—exactly this—was what my Dad used to do for me when I was a little kid. A new ride would open, I’d get all excited about it, and my Dad would take me to the park at opening time so we could run to the back and miss as much of the line as possible. While the feeling lasted, it felt as if I was looking into one of those trippy Droste effect pictures, in which a given image appears inside a larger version of the given image until the eye can no longer comprehend it. Certainly, our surroundings helped my subconscious along in this realization. It was cold and damp, as it is in England; the theming of the ride—all hollowed out gothic architecture and forests and greenhouses—felt familiar; and the pre-recorded voices that you hear in the line have English accents. But, whatever it was that prompted the thought, it was powerful; as if the universe had turned around me and made formal the generational shift.
As a parent, you get into Burkean rhythms. For no particular reason, my six-year-old likes to come with me when I go to buy wine at the wine store. It just so happened that, the first time I asked if either kid wanted to come along, the younger one was less busy doing whatever he does. Now, it has become our “thing.” As my readers and listeners will know, I am a music nut. If I’m in a car, I’m playing music. And so, slowly but surely, my six-year-old has been introduced to a bunch of music that he might not have heard too often otherwise. We’ve played Fleetwood Mac and Ella Fitzgerald and AC/DC and Dire Straits and Mozart’s 20th Piano Concerto and Fats Waller and Creedence Clearwater Revival, and so forth, and I’ve been delighted to watch as — without any input from me beyond pressing play — he has picked up on some of the same musical moments that I did as a small child, and done so in the same way, with the same delight, and for the same reasons. Often, he will get home and relay what he’s heard to his older brother: “We listened to this loud song that went, ‘DUH DUH DUH DUUUUUUH!'” he’ll report, of Beethoven’s Fifth. Or “I liked the one that says ‘Back in Black!'” Occasionally, he’ll completely mishear the lyrics, which is funny and endearing at the same time — especially if he then sings them around the house.
I have a pretty extensive music collection, and all of it is familiar to me. Indeed, if you rifled through and picked a track at random, I could likely play the whole thing in my head, from start to finish, without ever having to involve a pair of speakers. But, for my six-year-old, it’s all new — just as it was when I was little, and my Dad would take me with him to the hardware store, and pop a beaten-up cassette tape into his car stereo that, through my virgin ears, may as well have contained the entire universe.