"This song has no title."

On Thursday I decided to borrow the minivan from Shannon ostensibly because I needed to take Josh to baseball and Maggie and Caleb to gymnastics. For some reason those three don't really like to ride together in the back of the Mustang. I was just trying to cater to their wishes and make them as comfortable as possible. Well, that and the CD player in the Mustang is broken and the one in the minivan works just fine. But I was mostly just thinking of the children.

Anyway, with the possibility of enjoying some music for the evening commute available I decided to break out a CD I bought a while ago but don't really get to listen to often, Vernon Reid's Known Unknown. It's a fantastic disc, but as it's a Vernon Reid CD there are a lot of guitar pyrotechnics that don't always go over well at home with their requisite ear-bleeding volume.

The older two (Josh and Maggie) are really getting into music and its meaning. They will ask what songs are about or try to figure them out based on the lyrics. Sometimes the results are surprisingly insightful, and sometimes they're just surprising. Known Unknown is an instrumental album, so their decoding skills were over matched.

As we're driving along and jamming out to a song with a particularly cool groove, Maggie asks what the song is about. I try to explain to her that it's an instrumental song and that sometimes instrumentals have a kind of deeper meaning or emotive message to them, and sometimes they don't really have an obvious one. Also, I explain, you can tell a lot about whether there is an intended message in the instrumental by the title, as that's the only part that has any words. So Maggie, who is really enjoying this song, asks what the title is. I look down at the CD case to see. The track we are listening to is called "Voodoo Pimp Stroll". I think about it for a little while, saying nothing as I try to evaluate the situation to provide the best possible and most age appropriate response. Maggie asks again, insistently.

I'm stuck. Maggie's not the type of child that will just let things go. I've tried this before, with McDonald's and Wal-Mart, when she's asked me why I won't go to either one. I never wanted to have that conversation with her as a five-year-old. She's just not ready to understand the moral arguments. For a while just saying that it's something I don't do worked, but she's so darned inquisitive. So finally I broke down and explained point by point in great detail all of the things that I loathe about those two institutions, blowing her mind a little more than I had wanted to. All because she just won't let things go. I am not about to try to explain what a song called "Voodoo Pimp Stroll" could be about. I don't want to get into a conversation with a five-year-old that uses the word "pimp" in any way, shape, or form. I'm out of options, so I lie.

"This song has no title," is my reply. Conversation over. We pull into the gym's parking lot, park the car, and go inside, where she has much more important things to do.