Junkies And Juicers

It sometimes occurs to me that I have a weird kid. I mean, usually he doesn't seem weird to me. He seems perfectly normal. But then I think that maybe that in itself makes him kind of weird.



He says lots of weird things.



Like last night.



Last night my son said, over and over and over again, very loudly, and for no particular reason, while he was playing with toys and with a quirky smile on his face, "junkies and juicers."



Like this:



"Junkies and juicers! Junkies and juicers! Junkies and juicers! Junkies and juicers! Junkies and juicers! Junkies and juicers! Junkies and juicers!"



It struck both my wife and I that this was an unusual thing for our cute little two year old to say, until we remembered this line from Neil Diamond's "The Good Lord Loves You:"



This song goes to the men in your prisons and jails

To the junkies and juicers and every good man that's failed



Neil Diamond's September Morn is one of Sam's very favorite albums, and so of course he'd see the need to shout "junkies and juicers" throughout the evening. The good lord loves them, you know.



The other day, Sam and I were both in the kitchen when he turned to me and said, with that same little smile, "God is too big for just one religion."



I'm really hoping he brings that up at day care, or in the grocery store with a stranger. It makes his sound smart and deep.



It'd be coolest if he mentioned it to a stranger who never heard the Spearhead song from which that line was lifted.



Spearhead is Sam's very, very favorite band. Because of Spearhead, Sam often lets me know that "revolution don't come with a warning, revolution don't send you an omen" and invites me to "yell fire."



When I picked Sam up from my mother's house the other day, she said that he kept repeating some line that she couldn't understand, as if he was speaking some other language. It turns out that he was just sort of talking very fast, and slurring his words a little. Once I realized that he was singing some more Spearhead, his words were crystal clear:



From the banks of the river

To the banks of the greedy

All of the riches

Taken back by the needy

We come from the country

And we come from the city

You can play us on a record

You can play us on a CD



I'm not sure what it was that my mother didn't understand. It's just "Yell Fire." She should have known from the "oh-ee-oh-ee-ay-oh" refrain.



The kid really likes music, and he hears more than I sometimes realize he hears. He knows the Indigo Girls from The Beatles from Spearhead from Bruce Springsteen from Neil Diamond, and he hears the lines, repeats them back. When he was born, my wife and I knew we'd have to edit our musical choices in front of him a little, would have to avoid songs laced with profanity. It hadn't occured to us that we'd have to keep an eye on them for philosophical or political content that he's not quite ready for.



Or creepy stuff with catchy melodies. Hearing him sing the Violent Femmes refrain "I hear the rain, I hear the rain, gotta kill the pain," or realizing that he has most of the lyrics to "Never Tell" ("don't you know... you never tell on someone... sink down to the bottom of the river") is a little chilling. But he sings it all with a smile, and seems to think it's just about rainy days, so it's not so bad.



Like I said, the kid loves music.



I pulled out my guitar before I had to head out to an NEA meeting tonight, and I started playing "Erie Canal." He started shouting along, and worked himself into a pretty frenzied dance. When we got into "Froggie Went a-Courtin'," he was starting to slow down a bit, but my wife managed to get out the video camera and catch a good 41 seconds of action before he saw her and demanded to be shown "Sam in the picture."



Weird, weird kid.