Pardon us while we climb out of this generation gap we fell into recently. It may take us a while – there’s nothing that can make you feel so old as realizing your youngest child has come to a point of mature judgment in life. Here’s how it happened to us.

Our youngest son, who’s 15, has been surprising us all year. First, back in January, he signed up for a music class in guitar at school. We confess we were tempted at first to add extra insulation to his bedroom and pretend it was his new recording studio, but we managed to restrain ourselves. Then our son surprised by showing a heretofore unsuspected aptitude for playing the guitar. We can only surmise that his newfound talent spurred him to keep up with daily music exercises, running up and down scales on the guitar strings as if they were the old playset in the backyard.

He kept practicing throughout the summer on an old guitar he borrowed from his teacher. One day after he finished his rehearsal, he mentioned casually that he might progress to an electric guitar in the fall. His father took the hint and started checking out online music stores and even auction sites for ads offering an electric guitar for sale. Unhappily for our limited family budget, even the sale prices on guitars came close to what we could afford.

In order to avoid disappointing our teen-ager, we stayed mum about the Great Guitar Quest. What we didn’t count on was that although he never heard his parents when they called him to do a chore, his super-hearing kicked just as we were discussing how to acquire a guitar for him. This knowledge set off a teen-age version of the ecstatic dance done by a certain cartoon beagle when his round-headed master brings out a full supper dish.

Our son was ecstatic. Not only would he not have to borrow one of his teacher’s guitars for practice; he’d have his very own instrument that he could use (and abuse, most likely) any way he pleased.

Then Dad asked what kind of rock guitar our son wanted, with the understanding that it might be a while before we could get up the cost. That’s the point at which we got the shock.

Our son’s face became very solemn at the word ‘rock.’ Then he rather sheepishly told his parents that he’d been studying classical guitar, not rock ‘n roll. He didn’t want the kind of flat-backed electric ‘axes’ we knew from our younger days. He wanted something for classical music, such as a takamine acoustic electric guitar.

Or maybe, he said after a moment’s thought, we ought to get an ibanez acoustic electric guitar.

You could have blown us over with a feather! Here we middle-aged Generation X-ers were contemplating our sprout turning into a god of rock, and instead he’s preparing to become the Andres Segovia of his generation!

Yes, friends, there’s still a generation gap, and we fell right into it. See you when we climb back out.