Little Clara Wembley wondered about Jenny Newland dropping Jake's walker on his head. Didn't she know that holding it over his head that way, that it might fall? She didn't think about it for long, though, because back at Nana Kate's house, Kate's husband, Professor Ben "Seymour" Bottoms, known to Clara as "Big Daddy," to distinguish him from her regular daddy, was playing a new CD he had ordered from iGeezer, "A Merry Geezer Christmas." Clara went home humming Bing Crosby's version of "White Christmas." Her parents were astounded. They had never heard anything like that. They think music started with The Beatles.

Fifteen-year-old Bronwyn Heltzel was humming a different tune. When she found out that her grandparents were going to a concert at Treasure Lake, she asked to go along. To her, a "concert" means rock and roll. At Treasure Lake, it means folk and blue grass. "You told me it was a concert! That so-called music is so lame. Gilly McGill and The Brokearm Mountain Boys? What kind of name is that, anyway? Silent Night on something called a cittern? It's just a pregnant mandolin. Why don't you ever listen to my music? Haven't you ever heard of The Smoking Emus? A concert means some band like The Rabuud Squirrls. Why did you make me go to something like..." That was her litany all the way home.

On the way home from school last week, seven-year-old Remington Watts, strapped into the back seat, began to sing the blues. "I ain't got no woman, I ain't got no bank account, I ain't got no Nintendo DS, but I got me a good mommy, oh, yeah, she take care of me when I ain't got nothin, oh, yeah..." His mother, Rachel, was dumbfounded. When had he ever heard the blues? He sounded like an old black man who had been smoking for 50 years.

Where, indeed, does music come from? James Wilkins, Bronwyn's grandfather, pondered that question. Why do certain songs, or certain genres, suddenly make us feel like we've come home? He wondered about it as he searched the internet for The Smoking Emus. That was at the same time that his granddaughter Bronwyn was stealthily downloading hammered dulcimer tunes to her iPod. And little Clara Wembley's parents began to hum geezer tunes with their two-year-old daughter.

Meanwhile, back at the library, where his mother had dropped him for after-school story time, first-grader Remington Watts had slipped out of the children's section and into the computer room. He wasn't sure where music came from, why the blues had bubbled up out of his soul, but he knows that music has a power unmatched by anything else. He knew where his new Nintendo DS was coming from, for he was sure that even then, his mother was searching through the aisles of Shop-Ko for a Nintendo DS. He began to update his secret blog on the KidsPost site, "Scamming Your Parents for Fun and Profit."