Music x Fountain Pens: An Intergenerational Exchange

It wasn't always easy for me and my father to bond, especially when I became a sullen teenager and then a principled yet woefully naive 20-something, but as a philosopher once said, “Music makes the people come together.” Yeah.

- NICKY PESSAROFF

Musically, my father was a web of contradictions: a member of the Rutgers University glee club who waited impatiently for the next Beatles album. A man who attended Woodstock with a cooler of beer instead of a dime bag of pot. A cantor who chanted the Torah and listened to the stereophonic After Bathing at Baxter's by Jefferson Airplane. A man who was just as excited to see Itzhak Perlman play classical violin concertos as he was to have seen Joe Cocker as a no-name opening act.

Music bonded us. A cantor’s son who imagined myself a counterculturalist, I reveled in the same psychedelic sound he did. When I played Barenaked Ladies for him and he actually enjoyed the song “If I had $1000000,” it was one of the proudest moments of my life.

And then, when it turned out my kiddo was influenced by my musical tastes—Mazzy Star and Modest Mouse, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Liz Phair and Andrew Bird—I was just as proud.