The Wainwrights and us

In Chicago two weekends ago, I spent a pleasant couple of hours with an old college friend, who is always brimming with ideas, with modish cultural recommendations, and with online links that are worth trying. He's also a dad, and an enthusiastic one, and so his suggestions are occasionally simply infallible - like this one. Wonderfully, too, they're also usually completely novel to me, and so when I'm on my game I actually bring a pad of paper to our conversations. Given that, I was thus surprised (and a mite relieved) when he extolled a song by Loudon Wainwright, an artist I'd actually heard of (I think of him as a pleasant cross between Bob Dylan and Steve Earle). But I didn't know Wainwright's 'Daughter,' which, as Andrew pointed out, has a winning quality to it - a wide-eyed enthusiasm and a wistful poignancy that seem true to fatherhood.

Back in Baltimore, though, I kept coming across references to Wainwright and his even better-known son, Rufus. Rufus, I happened to read, has an equally emotional song about, of all things, the deep love that a girl visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art comes to feel for the art teacher who accompanies her to see the paintings in the gallery.You in the mood for an improbable ode to love? Try these lyrics on for size: "He told me he liked Turner And never have I turned since then. No, never have I turned to any other man."

Where does such a tendency toward on-your-sleeve love and such deep respect for childhood come from? Well, in all probability from no place but the Wainwright family history. Last Friday, the NPR show Fresh Air aired a 25th-anniversary special, with a number of pieces featuring past appearances by musical guests. And among them was Loudon, singing a song that he'd written about his dissolving marriage, for his children - who included a 14-year-old Rufus. It, too, is worth listening to, if only for the opening couplet, which includes the always-intelligent admission that we are merely fragile, fallible, and, yes, stupid creatures, despite our wishes that we could be the strong, capable beings our kids seem to initially imagine us to be. Indeed, might that be why some of us write songs that revisit childhood love and enthusiasm? We may not be what they see - but that only makes us want to see what they see all the more.