Although I'm sure my father has long since forgotten it, I remember an evening in high school, in our nice home in Libertyville, IL (a suburb which all us teenagers made a point of groaning about when we lived there, but, having since returned as an adult, is an almost idyllicly pleasant place to live). Everyone else was away, so my Dad and me sat down for dinner, and he put on one of his old records - as I remember, it was Surrealisitc Pillow by Jefferson Airplane. And he started talking about the larger cultural context of the record (the whole counter-culture movement of the '60s), the subtexts to the songs, the different ways they were talking to their audience.
The reason I'll never forget that conversation is not because of that particular album, or even because we talked about the '60s (which, to be honest, are ancient history to me). The reason I'll never forget it is the complex way my father was making evalutions: not condemning the whole thing as evil, even while keeping his guard up; trying to listen for what was really being said. He was not naive, but neither was he judgmental. And it meant the world to me that my father would try to engage with the surrounding culture in that kind of way - literally.
The reason I'll never forget that conversation is not because of that particular album, or even because we talked about the '60s (which, to be honest, are ancient history to me). The reason I'll never forget it is the complex way my father was making evalutions: not condemning the whole thing as evil, even while keeping his guard up; trying to listen for what was really being said. He was not naive, but neither was he judgmental. And it meant the world to me that my father would try to engage with the surrounding culture in that kind of way - literally.
3 comments:
Wow. Thanks, Eric!
Like Francis Schaeffer...
Very much like him!
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