I do not have children of my own, but close friends have had kids and appointed me their godfather. It’s been an honorary role – no one ever expected that I’d be the guy to adopt and raise any of these children should anything have ever happened to their parents. As one friend explained to me, shortly after my goddaughter was born, naming me the godfather meant simply that she and her husband wanted me to be a close and significant influence in their daughter’s life.

I shared Thanksgiving with that family last week. My “godkids” are adults now – 31 and 28, respectively. (I actually have four godchildren in all – all grown up now – two from this family and two from another. I even now have two “god grandchildren,” whom I suggested should grow up calling me “Great Grand God” but so far that has not stuck.)

I earnestly admire my young adult godchildren. They are far more emotionally mature, kind, wise, self-aware, physically and spiritually healthy, and strongly grounded in values than I was at their ages. I suppose I should credit their parents for that, and to a large extent I do, but I also must say, it’s their own unique spirits that I deem most responsible for how they have “evolved” into adulthood. 

Our Thanksgiving celebration was pretty sizable for a pandemic year. There were 14 adults (including in-laws, partners, and friends), as well as two children and a six-week-old baby. (All the adults had tested negative for COVID within the previous 48 hours.)

We briefly played the Higher Thought game and drew the question “Is human nature still evolving?” My own answer was yes, and I cited my godkids as living evidence.

At some point, a guitar was produced and a few songs were sung, including “Teach Your Children” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, which is a song I’ve detested for over 50 years, ever since I was made to sing it in a group with all the other kids at my summer camp. I never liked the tune, and the lackluster attitude that we 11- and 12-year-olds brought to our rendition of it has clung to the song (for me) over the decades. As a preteen, I found it cloyingly sentimental, and I still do.

But I learned something new about the lyrics on Thanksgiving. I had misheard them all these years. I had simply assumed that the following lines contained a grammatical oddity – a willful, quirky violation of proper subject-verb agreement (consistent with the rule-flouting hippie zeitgeist of the song’s times):

…and feed them on your dreams

the one they picks,

the one you know by …”

I had not realized that – obviously, when you think about it – there is an apostrophe in “pick’s”:

…and feed them on your dreams

the one they pick’s

the one you know by …”

I guess somebody pulled up the lyrics on their cell phone on Thanksgiving and that’s why I saw this – for the first time. 

So what the line is really saying is:

…and feed them on your dreams. The one they pick is the one you know by.”

No grammatical error there.

I suppose, in my own way, just like their real parents, I’ve tried to impart some of my own dreams to my godkids – dreams of what life means, dreams of what is important, dreams of what life can be.

And by how they’ve chosen to live, and what they’ve chosen to live for, they now reflect back the dreams that make the most sense to them.

And those are the dreams I now “know by” – the ones with enduring value.