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"Don't touch Daddy's cds."

“Stay away from Daddy's cds.”

"Put down Daddy's cds.”

"Leave Daddy's cds alone.”

“What did I tell you about Daddy's cds?”

What we have here is a classic failure to communicate. Daddy states, in words of two syllables or less, that he does not want Jack to touch his compact discs. Jack looks up at Daddy with his innocent baby blue eyes and repeats “Don't play with Daddy's cds.” Within five minutes, Jack is once again playing with Daddy's cds.

Now, I am fully aware that the mind of a two and a half year old has certain developmental limitations, but Jack's a pretty bright kid. He knows all the letters of the alphabet and his numbers up to fifteen. He knows what his address is, the names of pretty much every train in the Thomas the Tank Engine universe and he knows that Santa Claus brings the Baby Jesus at Christmastime. He cannot, however, understand the sentence “Do not play with Daddy's cds.” If I leave the living room for more than one full minute, when I return I will find the boy with a jewel case open on his lap and his grubby toddler fingers grinding the compact disc around and around like a superstar DJ. Jack is a pretty bright kid, but he cannot understand the words "Do not play with Daddy's cds."

I'm very lucky that Jack, like most kids, likes to self-narrate his daily adventures. “Driving with the blue car.” “Wearing Mommy's slippers. Too big.” “Play with Daddy's cds.” I can't tell you the number of times that I've been doing some kitchen-based task that prevents me from direct visual contact with the boy and I've heard his high-pitched, slightly adenoidal voice clearly chirping:

“Climb on the chair. Stand on the chair. Daddy's cds. Play with Daddy's cds.”

That's my cue to drop whatever it is that I'm doing and rush to the living room, where I will invariably find the boy tippy-toed on our green living room chair, reach-reach-reaching with his pudgy little fingers for a particular cd on our Ikea Billy shelving unit.

My first concern is, of course, for his safety. I securely attached the shelving units to the walls months before Jack was even born, so it's not a matter of the bookcase falling over, but it is very possible that Jack, who did not inherit his father's natural gymnastic prowess, could slip right off the chair and bonk his head on the corner of the coffee table or land on one of his very breakable appendages. My second concern is, of course, for the safety of my cd collection.

Not to be petty and materialistic, but I love my cds. I've had some of them for more than twenty years, and I imagine that a good deal of them are probably long out of print by now. How could I ever replace my Hong Kong import collection of Cantonese Jackie Chan movie themes? Do you think I could ever find another copy of the limited edition digipak version of the second Steve Malkmus solo album, complete with bonus ep? What about that live Nirvana bootleg I picked up in a back alley stall in London, England? Sure, in this digital day and age I could probably download a lot of my music collection from the webbernet if the physical cds were somehow destroyed, but it's just not the same. I'm not ready to declare the cd format dead just yet, even if I can't afford to buy as many as I used to when I was fully employed and single.

I still cringe when I remember a horror story that an old friend of mine once told me about a Christmas morning many years ago. His wife has given him the brand new deluxe Pere Ubu box set and before he could listen to it even once, his two year old son had somehow got his hands on the first disc and then proceeded to scraaaaape it across the floor. That image, of that cute little boy in footed pajamas gleefully destroying that cd, his cherubic face reflected in every silver and gold ornament on the Christmas tree, has haunted me for well over ten years and always comes to mind when I see my little boy standing calmly in front of my cd collection, like Damien in the Omen.

(photo courtesy of Stephen Recker)

So far, the only solution I've come up with has been to remove the source of his temptation. As a result, a big chunk of my cd collection, roughly the Ks to Os, has been boxed up and stored down in the basement. I had started by clearing off the shelf closest to the floor, but as Jack grew taller and he could reach farther, I've had to remove a second and then a third shelf. This gradual attrition has been heartbreaking and incredibly frustrating, especially when I get the urge to listen to a particular album and suddenly remember that it's packed away downstairs. And as more shelves have become emptier, he's filled them up with his toy trucks and buses, further marginalizing my presence in the house and strengthening his already considerable claims on our family's shared space.

Soon, if this continues, all of Daddy's cds will be hidden away, replaced by dinky cars and toy doctor kits. Then the books that my wife and I keep on the other shelving unit will have to go, in order to make room for his train sets and puzzles. Then, it's only a matter of time before the entire living room has been remade into display space for Jack's ever-growing accumulation of molded plastic playthings and shrill, battery-powered noisemakers.

Who knows, perhaps that's been his plan all along.