Photos: Courtesy Adam McIntyre

I’m sitting cross-legged with a sitar in a makeshift percussion pit of kindergartners, and we’re having a musical conversation. Most of the children are banging their tambourines happily, like they’ve been granted permission to go mad and fingerpaint their bedroom walls.

A few of them are experiencing some anxiety. They sit tentatively tapping the clattery instruments with their fingertips, entirely out of time with the rest of the students.

One boy, my son Paul, is looking at me as if something’s wrong. He’s playing a split-second after everyone else, yet he’s locked in with me. He says, “Daddy?” They’re rushing, and he wants to know whether he should play where the beat should be or play with his classmates. I nod to reassure him and we both immediately speed up to the other children.

He seems relieved, and I strum haphazardly at the sitar over the din of the 14 tambourines as we smile at each other. If you’ve ever seen musicians smile at each other on stage, it’s because of moments like this.

Paul is a charismatic, comical and affectionate child, but one who finds himself unable to articulate his thoughts as effectively as his peers. Most of our day together seems to be spent trying to get him to put words into clearer or more correct sentences, or correcting him when he attempts to mix future and past tenses in a way that’s not quite as good as either.

He’ll be fine in the long run, but lately it’s wearing on me that his younger friends don’t have to be corrected every time they speak to adults. His teachers ask me a lot of questions like this: “He said [non-sequitur of the day]. Do you have any idea what that means?” It will invariably be that he has drawn some connection between that moment and a previous moment and will reference the former in a way that baffles his immediate audience. Synapses fire in Paul’s brain like an Olympic sprinter. Conversationally, he runs without tying his shoes.

The sitar is mine, but normally I front a rock band on a different pair of stringed instruments — guitar and bass. My musical conversations on stage are strikingly the same as my “talk” with the children: a worried glance as something begins to go awry and then a smile (or a guffaw) as we emerge on the other side of some massive hiccup which was imperceptible to the audience. We are masters of this, in fact, and it’s a reason why I love my bandmates so much — our damage control is entertaining and affirming. It makes us closer.

Ever since Paul has been old enough to bang one thing against another, we’ve been having the musical conversation. He realized quickly that he could speed up and that I’d follow him, taking a silly song about peanut butter and jelly into breakneck-tempo Ramones territory.

Now he’s 5 and his musical interplay has matured beyond giggle fits over how fast he can make Daddy play. Lately he has preferred to bang on a guitar while I play drums (or vice versa).

Paul might have trouble telling me what he wants, but the way he plays tells me that he knows what’s up. He has problem-solving skills, intimate ways of communicating musically, great dexterity and hand/eye coordination, and an ability to think on his feet while juggling tasks (like keeping a steady tempo while improvising).

When we play music together, I can tell that the key to opening up his verbal skills may very well reside in building his confidence to communicate in as many ways as possible. More satisfying than that glimmer of hope, however, is recognizing my son’s soul and his sense of humor through the language by which we communicate best.