If your kid wants to take up an instrument, make it a guitar.

First, guitars are portable. When your young rocker forms a band, rehearsal will be in the drummer's home. Guitars have cases. Drums and cymbals don't.

Second, guitars are quiet, as long as your kid never gets hands on an amplifier. Just try to muffle a piano or sax.

Third, guitars rock. And rock is good. Here's why.

It was clear early in my son's life that we were not cut from the same cloth. I love sports, watching them, reading about them and, especially, playing them. While never great, I was good enough to have fun.

The greatest bonding we did over sports was when we discovered he wanted to stop playing kindergarten soccer as much as I wanted to stop coaching it. We happily quit together at the end of the season.

Now, over music, we can talk. We both think "American Idiot" is a superior Green Day album to "21st Century Breakdown." We think the Foo Fighters, while less influential than Nirvana, are far more fun. We look at Justin Bieber and wonder, "Why"?

We do disagree, too. I won't waste a megabyte of space on Linkin Park, Breaking Benjamin or Disturbed, while they fill my son's iPod. Despite my best parenting, he still needs to listen more to the classics — the Beatles, REM and my college favorites, the Hoodoo Gurus.

Disagreeing over the best bassist or lead singer is way more fun than arguing over why the trash isn't out or why two weeks' worth of dirty socks are under his bed.

Some moments are magical.

One evening, I heard the heavy strumming of my son's guitar from his room. I dropped in for a visit. I scrolled through his iPod to a song with one of my favorite guitar solos — "Joining a Fan Club" by an obscure 1990s band called Jellyfish — and asked if he could replicate it. One more listen and my son launched into his own goose-bump-inducing version.

Suddenly I saw my child not as the surly avoider of anything resembling a chore, but as a young man with knowledge I don't possess and talent I could never have.

It reminded me of when my dad and I played racquetball when it was the rage back in the 1980s. Bigger and stronger, Dad always won. Improving year by year, by my late teens, I came close to beating him. Remembering it far better than I later, he told me about the day I finally won. He tried harder than ever to win, yet rooted inside for me to finally beat him.

Although not on a tiny court wearing embarrassingly short shorts, I felt the same awe that the little person I diapered, fed and dressed when he couldn't do anything for himself now can do many things I can't do. My son's days of winning are just beginning, I hope, as he needs me less and less.

Listening to my son scratch his fingers up and down guitar strings to learn a new chord, I could brood with Jim Croce — "if I could save time in a bottle" — over the simple joys of fatherhood slipping away.

Or I could think less, enjoy the moment more and heed the words of the Rolling Stones: "I know it's only rock and roll, but I like it, like it, yes I do."

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Dave Bundy is publisher and executive editor of the Suburban Journals of Greater St. Louis. He can be reached at dbundy@yourjournal.com or (314) 744-5772.