April Love

The title refers to the song, not the month, although the month of April has much to praise.

I listened to Pat Boone’s April Love on the car radio during a short drive on a lovely April day last week. As with so many melodies from the past, April Love evoked gentle memories – or perhaps merely soft sensations – from my youth. I was 10 when it was recorded.

Later that day, back in the car, my wife and I endured the one-note, repetitious, crude, pounding lyrics emanating from our grandson’s iPhone, prolifically available to any child, courtesy of Spotify and other apps. He is 9.

I don’t write primarily to offer a musical critique, although my view is probably evident. I am not – nor was I – a Pat Boone fan. His amiable voice and pop repertoire are safe and saccharine, although his inseparable and insufferable religion and politics leave much to be desired. His tunes and songs like Perry Como’s Catch a Falling Star, formed a sound track of my early childhood.

Also last week, Tennessee enacted a horrid piece of legislation authorizing – encouraging – teachers and staff to carry concealed guns in school. And also last week, separate incidents placed our grandson’s and granddaughter’s schools on secure status. Each incident involved an openly armed man walking in the neighborhood. Open carry is legal, so securing the kids was the only option.  The idiocy of guns in schools should be self-evident, but apparently not evident at all to the morally-disabled Republican cretins who believe an armed America is a charmed America.

These apparently unconnected observations brought a sense of real sadness. I wonder and worry what deep harm is being silently etched in our children’s senses of their world.

I am neither naive nor irrationally romantic. Life in the 50s was far less idyllic than selective memory believes. But there is – was – a simple innocence implanted than endures in some wispy form into adulthood (and geezer time). Through the 5os and 60s, popular culture offered easy laughs and upbeat songs about surfing and cars, catching stars and April loves. On my April Love drive I also listened to Johnny Mathis crooning that it was Wonderful, Wonderful. Is there any person of a “certain age” who didn’t slow dance dreamily to Johnny Mathis or dream of slow dancing to Johnny Mathis?

Go ahead. Call me sentimental, as I am indeed sentimental. Recalling the songs and other experiences of childhood can be sad, tender and rich. It reminds one, of course, of the accelerating passage of time, the losses along the way, and many feelings and experiences that cannot ever be fully recaptured – or forgotten. But those early feelings – emotions – can never be taken away either. Each twinge of nostalgia is part of our emotional and psychological reservoir, filled with the sounds, sights and smells that impressed themselves on our subconsciouses.

To an extent, these early sensory experiences form who we are and inform how we respond to life thereafter. I am convinced that my relentless personal optimism is rooted in part in the innocent sense of love and possibility that surrounded my childhood, despite some of the to-be-expected dysfunction and disappointment in those early years. I have no doubt that songs like April Love introduced the capacity for and possibility of the love I’ve experienced with my life partner and family. It is these innocent, often trite, invitations to dance with life that prepare the soil and plant the seeds for a full, rich, loving life.

But what are we allowing to flood today’s children’s emotional and psychological reservoirs? Obscene and violent lyrics that are relentlessly assaulting their tender minds and hearts? Video games that sanitize the worst kinds of violence? Sending them to schools where the doors are locked because the community allows anyone to strut around with a deadly weapon on a sunny Spring day? Or encouraging their teachers, who should be exemplars of tenderness and safety, to carry weapons because it is supposed to keep them safe?

We have limited capability to reverse this reality. The saturation of popular culture with violence, misogyny and crudeness seeps into childhood like toxins into the soil. It’s profitable and thereby sacrosanct.

But we can give our children, grandchildren and students unconditional love, exposure to beauty and alternate experiences. My relentless optimism includes the belief that children exposed to beauty will seek it out, that Mozart can supplant Lil Kim and that parents can buy board games instead of video games.

We must all do our part. You can even play April Love and invite your child to Catch a Falling Star and put it in her pocket.