My little guy had his seventh name day not long ago. He was over the moon to receive what he called, “birthday love” from all the kids in Sunday School, grinning from ear to ear when they sang to him. We don’t do big birthday parties for our boys, so he doesn’t usually have a bunch of kids singing to him. We worried that he would be embarrassed, but that wasn’t at all the case. The birthday love led him to search for “birthday songs” on my Apple Music account. These are the results that came up. All explicit.
It reminds me of the scene near the end of Catcher in the Rye, where protagonist Holden Caulfield discovers vulgar graffiti in a museum and gets all bummed out about how it will affect the little kids who see it.
Somebody’d written “F**k you” on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought about how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they’d wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them - all cockeyed, naturally - what it meant, and how they’d all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days.
Later on, when he sees another instance of the same graffiti.
That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, someone will sneak up and write “F**k you” right under your nose.
