There's a special kind of pain in recognizing that there's something that everyone else understands-except me. One of the first memories I have of this is from seventh grade. I was at a junior high dance. As an aside, the word "dance" was a bit of an overstatement. As I recall, the girls stood around on one half of the gym and the boys on the other. But what I couldn't understand were the lyrics to one of the songs at the dance-Crocodile Rock, Elton John's hit song from that year. My hearing was excellent. I just couldn't make out what he was saying.

For example, there's one line that I now know is "long nights crying by the record machine, dreaming of my Chevy and my old blue jeans."  It's so obvious now! Here all these years I've been trying to understand why he was so obsessed with beverages, "dreaming of my sherry and my Ovaltine."

Mr. John has had an amazing career that must be about 40 years long by now. He's never gone out of style. I admire not only his single hits, but his score of The Lion King, his playful choice of eyewear and, most of all, his many generous humanitarian projects. Year after year, he would release songs that were always wonderful tunes...  but in almost half of the songs-half of the time-I had no idea what he was saying. I completely and freely admit this is my problem. Everyone else must be able to hear the words, or his songs wouldn't hit the charts as they do. Especially in seventh grade, I would've been too embarrassed to ask someone to interpret his lyrics. Now that I think about it, it's too embarrassing now.

Thank goodness for the internet. Now I can-via the secrecy of my own laptop-type "lyrics" and "Crocodile Rock" and it's all laid out for me. Oh-of course!  THAT'S what he's saying!  Even so, I discovered that reading the lyrics doesn't completely answer all my questions. I just looked up the lyrics to another Elton John hit that I've never understood-Bennie and the Jets. Now I've read the lyrics, in plain English, and still I have only a vague idea what they mean. There must be something wrong with me.

What my little parable reveals are a couple of things related to family studies.  Even when families "hear" a message under the best of circumstances-in their native language, with no hearing impairment-sometimes they have no idea what's being said. What our job is, if we are to be the multidisciplinary source of information about the understanding of families, is to be the connection between what is said and what is heard. Practitioners, such as family life educators, can create that safe place to ask questions and get answers. Increasingly, this may be via websites developed for families. In the next issue of NCFR's member magazine, there is an article that brings up the topic of the internet and our mission. With regard to disseminating information about families, we are just beginning to exploit the possibilities we have with new technology. It's embarrassing for me to ask about the lyrics to Crocodile Rock; how joyous it was to have the internet and quickly dispel over 30 years of ignorance.

Researchers?  It all starts with you. You are the composers that write hit songs. Most of the time, however, a journal article wouldn't be understandable to a family in its original form. NCFR practitioners and CFLEs like me-then it's up to us. By reading the research, we know what the words are. But when we serve families directly, we have to have enough of a command of research to know how to translate it into a format that can be understood by our clients. There will be times that even we don't understand the words. We have to be courageous enough to ask our researchers "what does this mean?" 

Researchers?  Scholars can learn from practitioners, too. If we tell you that an unusually large number of Elton John fans cannot understand his lyrics, you can find out why.

This is the beauty of NCFR. This is where this process happens. Theory, research, translation, practice, new questions from practice, more theory and back to research. Hmmm. Reminds me of an Elton John song that I do understand-The Circle of Life.

Epilogue:  I just asked my husband to read this article, which he did. I've been married almost 25 years, and I thought I knew everything about him. Turns out he's had the same problem with Elton John's songs too. He said he never understood the line, "Hold me closer, Tiny Dancer. Count the head lice on the highway..."