Tag: Seth

This Might Make You Smile

On By Peter WatkinsIn 20131 Comment

Dear Will:

About a week-and-a-half ago we got an email from a friend with the link to an online video. Her note said simply: “This might make you two smile.”

She was so right. The video shows her son-in-law and granddaughter (his four-year-old daughter) singing “Tonight You Belong to Me,” while he plays along on a pink toy guitar or ukulele. Dana and I watched it again and again, then shared it with some friends.

We weren’t alone. In that quintessentially Internetty way that some things catch on, “Tonight You Belong to Me” exploded into the collective consciousness. Since the video was first posted on September 17, it has been viewed over 3 million times (and counting). They even showed a clip on Good Morning America. It seems that pretty much everyone who has seen it has had a similar reaction. The question is: Why?

There is no doubt—no debate whatsoever—that the four-year-old is irresistibly cute. But the world is full of cute four-year-olds. YouTube, for that matter, is full of cute four-year-olds. That she can carry a tune helps too, of course, but that’s not it either. The true magic of the video (and if you haven’t stopped to watch it you should go do so right now) is in the interaction between the dad and daughter. The video isn’t about music—it’s about the clear and unmistakable love that sparkles in the eyes of a father completely smitten with his little girl.

Now maybe that’s the bias of another father who is himself completely smitten with his little girl. But there is a moment about a minute-and-a-half in when he looks at her and you just know. Just know. It’s love, unspoken but undeniable, clear, genuine, eternal. Read the comments of the strangers who confess to watching “Tonight You Belong to Me” over and over and over and you know that they see it too. “Every day when I get up I am going to watch this as it puts me in such a good mood!!” “Can’t stop watching this adorable video!” “The greatest thing I’ve ever seen.” “It’s impossible to watch this and not smile.” “This brings me so much joy.” “I cry every time that I watch this! Happy tears of course! The love is such a gift.”

The comments come from all over the country. From Japan, Malaysia. the Middle East. Comments in languages I don’t even recognize. People all over the world seeing and hearing and feeling something familiar and supernal in this three-minute duet, recognizing in it an element of truth and goodness and virtue in their purest sense.

I know a thing or two about that kind of love. I felt it surge within me when I held Luke in my arms for the first time some 23 years ago. I have never felt closer, more connected with God than I did in that moment, knowing that in some way Dana and I had helped Him bring another soul to Earth. And I still feel it today when I talk to Bryn on the phone or watch the ballgame with Seth.

I do not have science to back me up on this, but I believe that the love we feel for our kids is just about as close to godliness as we can get in this life. No wonder one prophet said that pure love is “the greatest of all” (Moroni 7: 46). And no wonder I find myself watching—for the 27th time—as another dad turns to his little girl and sings: “You belong to me.”

PW

Solving for X

On By Peter WatkinsIn 2012Leave a comment

Dear Will:

We’re doing geometry. Or I should say, Seth is doing geometry. His old man, meanwhile, is staring at a page full of triangles and barely familiar symbols (AB||CD, anybody?) and thinking to himself: “Did I really know this stuff once?”

Probably not. I do remember enough about the ninth grade at Goddard Junior High School to recall my teacher’s name, and I may even have received a reasonably good grade. But I also remember that even before I left high school it was clear to me that I hadn’t really managed to catch the geometry wave. So it is with no small amount of trepidation that I respond to Seth’s desperate request for help with his homework.

I stare dumbly at the page. Nothing clicks. I resort to the standard parent fallback ploy of reading through the textbook in a vain attempt to relearn what once I must have known, but I’m missing the foundation necessary to make the examples comprehensible. So I take to asking Seth questions of my own, and suddenly it is as if Seth were helping me with my homework. His patience wanes.

Then, a breakthrough: I review Question 22 and it occurs to me that it can be solved using algebra. Algebra! I remember algebra! I think I can even DO a little algebra! Clearly more excited than Seth, I set to work, cross-multiplying happily and even deploying something I think we used to call the FOIL method. I proceed a little awkwardly, with uneven jabs and starts, but before long it’s clear that I have calculated my way to the right answer. And I can prove it! Alas, Seth has long since given up on me and headed off to get ready for bed. I consider high-fiving myself but think better of it.

Still, I’m amazed. I learned my algebra from Mr. Burgess almost 40 years ago. Nevertheless, there was the FOIL method (or whatever it was called), tucked somewhere in the folds of my brain, waiting to be teased out of hiding during an hour of father-son bonding over homework. And the rules that applied when I was learning algebra in 1973 or 1974 still apply today. If I had been given that same problem by Mr. Burgess, x would have equaled 14.5, just as it does tonight.

That’s the singular beauty of math—or, at any rate, the kind of math that an English major like me can understand. There is always a right answer. In just about every other discipline there is an element of subjectivity, so that personal preference or judgment or opinion play an important role in determining what’s right or what’s true. And that truth might change as new theories are tested and new facts established. But with math, 2+2 will always equal 4, today and tomorrow and for generations to come.

There are other absolute truths much more important than those that govern algebra, of course. The existence of God, for instance, and our divine relationship to Him. The eternal purpose of life and the Plan that governs all human existence. The divine Sonship of Jesus Christ. These things are absolute, unchanging and unaffected by one’s personal opinion or belief. And just as the laws of mathematics can be proven, so can the eternal truths I’ve mentioned.

Years ago, Spencer W. Kimball gave a discourse (highly recommended) in which he said the following:

We learn about these absolute truths by being taught by the Spirit. These truths are “independent” in their spiritual sphere and are to be discovered spiritually, though they may be confirmed by experience and intellect (see D&C 93:30). The great prophet Jacob said that “the Spirit speaketh the truth. . . . Wherefore, it speaketh of things as they really are, and of things as they really will be” (Jacob 4:13).

The prophet Moroni put it even more simply: “And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things” (Moroni 10:5). All things. Absolutely.

Except for maybe geometry. I’m still not so sure about that stuff.

PW

To Be Honest, It Was Up To Him

On By Peter WatkinsIn 20121 Comment

Dear Will:

My grandparents lived in a large home on a quiet street in a small town in western Wyoming. It was the home my mother grew up in. It had a lovely front entryway which opened into a spacious living room where you would have found the first piano I ever played.

One of my sisters taught me a simple song on that piano (you might know it yourself). It’s played with the knuckles of one hand, only on the black keys. To play it requires no training and even less talent, but I remember how magical it was to produce music from that big, grand piano. I immediately told my mother that I wanted to learn to play.

To be clear, this was not a historic moment in the annals of music. Although I could more or less keep a beat, I wasn’t much of a prodigy. And like any normal, low-talent kid, I didn’t like practicing. I liked the idea of playing the piano, of course; I just didn’t care for the work required to play it well. Although I can still play to this day—and even have come to enjoy it—I never learned to read music well enough that I could ever perform for anyone but myself. Forty years removed from five brief years of lessons, I still play like an eighth-grader who needs to practice more.

Come to think of it, I have just such an eighth-grader right here in my own home. Although we don’t have an entryway and our living room is much more modest than my grandparents’, we do have a grand piano where Seth slumps each day to suffer his way through 15 or 20 minutes of unenthusiastic practice. Occasionally, he might even give off a subtle hint that he would really rather be doing something else. He might pause mid-song, for instance, and say, “I hate the piano” or “I HATE the piano!” or maybe even “I HATE THE PIANO!!” In fact, he goes so far as to set a timer lest he play even one minute beyond his prescribed time. All of which makes him a pretty normal eighth-grader, if you ask me.

Except for this:

On Saturday night my wife and I were sitting in the Carpenter Center during intermission of Musical Theatre West’s production of 42nd Street. (Highly recommended, by the way. Our friend Zach Hess plays one of the leads and he is fabulous.) As we waited for the show to resume (it was around 9:30 p.m.), my phone rang. It was Seth.

“I just realized that I forgot to do my practicing,” he said. “Do I have to?”

Excuse me? What sort of eighth-grader, left home alone on a Saturday night, calls his parents to admit that he has not gotten around to doing the thing he hates the most? A lesser 13-year-old—which is to say, just about any other 13-year-old on the planet—would simply have watched a little more TV and then slipped off to bed, knowing that no one would ever know whether he practiced or not. But not Seth. Throughout his 13+ years of life, he may not have become a concert pianist, but as you can see he has become something much more remarkable than that. Actually, I misstated that. He hasn’t become anything. Rather he has remained that which he has always been: a model of integrity and honor.

As for Saturday night, I was so impressed by his honesty that when he asked Do I have to? I told him it was up to him—at which point he promptly hung up and went back to watching TV. Proving, I suppose, that for all his integrity, he’s still a pretty normal kid.

Makes you kind of proud, to be honest.

PW