Personal/Musical: Nate Meets Johnny Cash
One more thing about Nathan: another thing that tickled me was his discovery of my iPhone, in which he was just like his cousins in soon finding it utterly fascinating, perhaps quickly moreso than he found his uncle. But whereas the girls first clued in to the technology by the wonders of Angry Birds and such, Nate went skimming through the portion of my music collection that I carry with me, which amounted to some 3,000 songs. With astonishing instinct, he went right for Johnny Cash, and even more impressively, right for American IV: The Man Comes Around.
He first skipped over the title track, being less interested by Johnny's spoken Book of Revelations introduction. But he quickly found Cash's poignant cover of "Hurt," and confirmed with us, "Sad song? Sad song." "I Hung My Head," was also judged a sad song after he had listened through it. The cover of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus," however, quickly earned an affirmative "Happy song!"
When he did come back to "The Man Comes Around," Nate seemed dubious through the spoken intro that Joe and I were affirming that this was a very good song. Once it got going, though, he was more interested, but having trouble judging it according to his rubric:
"Sad song? Happy song?"
"Apocalyptic song," I affirmed. Nate looked at Joe, who nodded in confirmation.
"Apocopa?"
Exactly.
So he kept wanting to pull out Johnny Cash for the rest of my stay. And if that's a sign of taste to come, I couldn't be more pleased.
The other discovery on the iPhone was the power of FaceTime. He got to see and say Hi! to Auntie Leslie, who had spoken to him on the telephone earlier, but it was his squeals of delight in finding the smiling face of "Sophie!" on the screen that had me grinning the most. Sophie herself seemed so taken with Nathaniel's delight in seeing her that she kept smiling back and toting her Mom's iPhone around even though she clearly had no idea how to talk to Nate or what to talk about. So I know she'll have a big fan when they all gather at Christmas.