“Some kids don’t even like Elvis,” my grandson says, running away from me as he says it.
He knows to give himself a head start, scampering down the hallway. I have a tea-towel in my hand and I run after him, trying to hit him on the back of his legs. I know corporal punishment is now frowned upon but surely this is a case of lese-majeste. He’s just insulted The King. If this was Thailand, he’d be in prison.
“Who are these kids who hate Elvis?” I demand of Pip, once I have him cornered, my tea-towel ready to strike. “And why don’t they like him?”
“They just don’t,” he says. “I don’t know why. I don’t like him, either.”
Few people mention Elvis these days, so I realise Pip must have said something about my enthusiasm for The King to one of his friends. Maybe it was even a bit of a brag: “My Pa likes Elvis.”
“Elvis?” the friend would have said. “Oh, he’s no good. No one likes Elvis.”
And Pip, the apple of my eye, found himself agreeing. Who wants to stare down the opinion of their peers? Even for the sake of Elvis. Even for the sake of your Pa.
It’s a hinge moment. Up to now his world has – pretty much – been lived in a land he could call My Family. Now, suddenly, he’s off into the world. This week he started Big School. Already he’s part of a swimming class. Soon it will be a football club. Five years old and half his life will be spent in this world outside his family. A world full of Elvis detractors! What could be worse?
Of course, I realise this is the point. His parents have raised him to be a confident young person, one who will seek adventures outside his front door. As I chase after him up the hallway a second time, my tea-towel still swishing, I know this independence is to be treasured. He’s suddenly free from the burden of liking a thing just because his Pa – or anyone else in his family – likes a thing.
His life is opening up, full of possibility. How would Elvis himself put it? Follow That Dream.
There’s a great phrase about parenting and grandparenting: “The days are long but the years are short”. How can it be that Pip is starting school, all dressed up in his new school uniform, beaming, excited, looking up at the camera? It was only a minute ago I was teaching him to use a fork.
And how can it be that he’s suddenly beating me at football?
Only a minute ago I was adept at letting him win when we played games. With theatrical panache I’d throw myself at the ball, only to purposefully fumble it. Goal to Pip. Or I’d build a Lego tower, knowing it would be remiss to make mine taller, or grander, than the one he was building beside me. Victory, always, was to Pip.
Now, a second later, he’s slamming the football into our homemade banana-chair goal, strike after strike, despite me throwing everything at the task. Or he’s building something spectacular in Lego, so spectacular that it makes my effort, to which I’d contributed all available creativity, look pathetic.
The “me pretending to let him win” days are over. The “me trying to desperately hold on to my dignity” days have begun. It happened, on my reckoning, over the course of the past two weeks.
Maybe children know they are about to go to Big School. “OK, enough dawdling,” they say to themselves. “I have two weeks in which to grow up. I shall do so now.”
And then, shockingly, we come to this defining moment: “Some kids don’t like Elvis.”
My own child, the father of this child, said much the same thing. Although, as I remember it, he waited until he was six to criticise The King. Kids, they say, grow up quicker these days.
That son, the Space Cadet, requested an Elvis birthday party when he was five. It included a version of Freeze Dance in which all the songs were by Elvis, as well as an Elvis cake in the shape of a guitar, and a round of what we called “Pin the crown on The King”, in which the children, blindfolded, had to correctly Blu Tack a golden crown onto a poster of you-know-who.
I realise some of you are thinking “poor children” and wondering whether you can make a retrospective call to child services, but the point is that the Space Cadet finally found his freedom. He continued to like music but not particularly Elvis. In fact, he developed extremely wide tastes, enjoying American blues harmonica music from both 1957 and 1958.
Pip will be his own person, just like his father. That’s my point. He will always have the security of a family who love him but now he’ll have so much else.
All the same, if I had my way he would have waited another six months before he dissed The King.
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