One Child's Honesty

For Christmas, I received (among other things) the new, self-titled Taylor Hicks album. For those of you who may be rolling your eyes, I encourage you to at least give the album (as well as its predecessor, Under the Radar, which was released independently before he ever set foot on American Idol) a listen. There's 12 tracks--generally, on any given album, I can identify 3 or 4 "keepers" with 8 or 9 additional filler songs to round things out. Here, there's a couple of songs I could do without, but in general it's a GREAT album. Especially when one takes into account the fact that The Powers That Be at American Idol most likely foisted some songs on Taylor that they felt would be "radio-friendly" (in other words, crap for the faceless hordes). All in all, a really SOLID debut. Listen for the What'd I Say keyboard sample in Heaven Knows and a song originally written for Ray Charles that he didn't get to record before he passed away (The Right Place). There's also 2 songs on there that Taylor wrote and had originally sung on his independent Under the Radar album (Soul Thing and The Deal)...very interesting to hear different takes on them.

But I digress.

Rewind a few weeks with me, if you will.

It's now the middle of December. The Taylor Hicks album had been on my Amazon wishlist pretty much ever since Amazon pre-orders for it were available. I was home with Kiddo, and had promised him that he could play a computer game on pbskids.org. So he was sitting on my lap at the computer. I wanted to do two things before going to the pbskids site--check my email and doublecheck my Amazon wishlist to make sure there weren't any out-of-date items on there. I scanned my email quickly, then surfed over to Amazon, and began scrolling down my wishlist.

As the picture of the Taylor Hicks album scrolled up, Kiddo stopped me. "Daddy," he said, "that's what you want for Christmas!"

Since I had never informed him of this, I was immediately interested in what he had to say. "Oh, really?" I replied.

"Yes. That's just like what I saw in the store with Mommy, and she said you wanted it for Christmas," he told me, pointing to the picture of the album cover.

I started laughing. "What's funny?" he asked me.

I don't remember exactly what my answer was, but I think I made something up about remembering something funny Kiddo had done earlier in the day.

And like that, the cat was out of the bag. The secret was out. Well, not completely, I suppose, he never did actually say that they had bought it, but I knew.

Ya gotta love a child's honesty.