In 1981 I needed a car and my Dad offered to help me shop, kind of teach me the ropes. It was a generous offer, but I ended up with a 1976 powder puff blue four door Ford Grenada. It was the last time I let my Dad, or any other "adult", go car shopping with me. The car itself was barely mechanically adequate and totally uncool but I helped it along by installing a pretty decent cassette player and good speakers.
During that period of my life I spent as much time as possible with my big sister and her family. She had two young kids, my niece and nephew, who were around ages 6 & 8. In my heart they were easily the two most important people in my life. I was, of course, their really cool uncle, and they were my little buds. I would run to my sisters house to fetch the kids and bring them to visit their grandparents and then later cart their car sick asses back home. Along the way in that POS car we would blast that cassette player turned up to 11 singing our lungs out.It never occurred to me that it would have any influence on them let alone the positive influence they later told me about. One experience in particular they said was fun and exciting was listening to the song Surrender by Cheap Trick as we rolled down old route one. The song apparently made them see their parents in a different light. That led me back to the song to take a closer look at it and figure out what could possibly have turned on these two little kids to the point where they remembered it strongly into their own adulthood.
They specifically sited the lyric "Mommy's alright, Daddy's alright, they just seem a little weird." My sister and brother-in-law were less than impressed but really it was a compliment. My parents, or at least my Dad, was possibly the uncoolest person I knew. On the other hand my niece and nephews parents were former hippies from the Woodstock generation and, as far as I knew, had invented cool.
Cheap Trick's song surrender tells the story of parents who were open, honest, and frank with their kids. The Bands advice was to surrender yourself to your parents love and care but also become your own person. Both my niece and nephew did exactly that. The lyric about parents being weird didn't mean freaky or geeky it meant that compared to the older generation of adults they were hip and cool which is always weird to kids. I think what my sister objected to was the lyric about the kids catching Mom & Dad having sex on the couch while playing Kiss loudly on the stereo. It was at once extremely yucky and extremely cool. Kiss was big at that moment in history but I doubt my sister listened to them. On the other hand they had every Beatles record along with CSN, ELP, and Jimi Hendrix. Kids know cool when they see or hear it and compared to the adults I grew up with my sister and her husband were waaay cool. 
I had pretty much forgotten about those adventurous times in that cheesy car until I attended my bother-in-laws I'm starting to get old birthday party (his not mine!!!). Those two kids, now adults themselves, with independent and happy lives of their own played the song Surrender for me. They told me how memorable and important the experience was for them & were saying thank you to me for having given it to them. To say I was stunned is an understatement of biblical proportions. I never even expected that I had been an influence let alone a positive one. Sometimes good things gets paid forward in unexpected ways.
It really is a great song which, very near the end, leads the masses in the anthemic lyric "We're all all right" repeated over and over again. In my case I don't know if that's true but for my niece and nephew it is obviously and powerfully true. Rarely does a person get to feel the results of their unwitting positive influences on the world and especially on their loved ones. This is one of those cases where I unintentionally paid if forward and it boomeranged back to me in one of the most loving and affectionate gestures I've ever experienced. I cannot thank my nephew enough for making this request because it has given me the opportunity to thank him and his sister for teaching me that I too am just a little bit weird in a good way...Surrender by Cheap Trick
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