Patrick's a Little Man of Few Words

As somebody who is absolutely LOUSY at metaphors and similes, I wish I could come up with one or the other for Patrick.
An original one, I mean. Not something like being the calm in a storm (or even BEFORE the storm), or the yin to the yang or, perhaps, a square peg for a round hole.
I suspect that the meaning of that paragraph is as muddy as my most mixed metaphors, so I'll start over.
If the boys' last name were Marx, Patrick Michael would be Harpo, known as the silent one.
And THAT's what keeps giving me a double take when I'm around Patrick.
At a tad over a year, the lad can speak but a few mumbled muffles that may not be words at all but rather, family members' imaginations. Oh, he laughs and giggles and makes guttural sounds, and he probably is saying mum-mum-mum and dada, after a fashion.
But usually, he just watches things and activities — for some reason, he watches me with the studied .007 golden eye of a secret agent assessing a suspect — although he's starting to join the boys' dogpiles on Dad.
The reason I need a metaphor for him, why he seems like he’s following a different drummer, is that he's growing up in a cacophony of chaos, a din of drummers. He’s the sounds of silence among the various renditions of songs entitled “SHOUT.”
I suppose the Isley Brothers kicked it off the shouts in 1959, when grandad was a wee lad:


I’ve been favoring Tears for Fears rendition of late (call me “groovy,” but I think some songs of the ’80s easily rivaled music’s breakout period of the ’60s):



And, lest we forget, The Beatles added a TWIST to the shout:



And that’s what Patrick’s brothers — Vincent at 8, Jack at damnear 6, and Luke at 3 — do much of the time twist and shout, and, to invoke Tears for fears, “let it all out.”
I swear, those lads are so noisy when they get to playin’ that I can’t hear myself think — and they can’t hear ME pleading with them to turn down their volume. Indeed, trying to talk to Melissa on the phone when they’re playing in the background is as impossible as scoring a hole-in-one on a 600-yard par 5 on a windy, rainy day.
At this point, Patrick is mostly a relatively quiet observer as the world goes by. Some days, it throws me off that he’s so quiet because the others can be so dadgum loud. I keep expecting noise to issue forth, but it’s mostly toned-down utterances wafting forth on the winds of baby’s breath.
Happily for all concerned (perhaps), Patrick won't be as tongue-tied as Harpo Marx. (And, truth be told, Harpo could speak; he just usually didn't for a couple of reasons, including the fact that it was a great schtick to get attention, according to the family biography at http://www.marx-brothers.org/biography/marxes.htm.)
OR, for all I know, he’s just a proverbial genius, as per Proverbs 10:19: He who holds his tongue is wise. (I wonder whether a politically correct Bible might say, “He or SHE who hold his or HER tongue is wise.” Probably just “People who hold their tongues are wise.)
On the other hand, things could get so noisy once Patrick quits holding his tongue that we'd wish we could put the toothpaste back in that tube, that the train hadn't left the station, that we could turn back time, etc.
Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it.
Soooooooo, my keyboard will fall silent now, as I show a few pix of the lad and his fans:
With his godparents, my son, Brendan, and his wife, Erica, on his christening day:



In a more casual setting, with Brendan and Erica, at his brudders' soccer fields:


With mom, Melissa, on christening day:

Sometimes, everybody's got to get their mugs in a pic, such as the four boys' dad, Skip, Brendan, Erica (you can't even tell she's preggers, can you?), and Melissa, holding Patrick, whose eyes are wide shut, with the strangely silent crew in front, Vincent, Luke and Jack:
The boys just HAVE to clown around when their parents aren't in the pic:
Don't you just hate it when grandparents overdo the photos? Oh, well, one more:

Oh, WAIT, that’s not Patrick. That’s just me, hangin’ with Ernest Borgnine at the Emmys, when my daughter Annie was nominated for editing "Top Chef." How’d THAT get in this column? Can't figure out how to delete it.

In closing, as long as I’ve brought up the varied resurrections of songs with “Shout,” I present one of my favorites and no, I don’t mean its performance on “American Idol” in April 2008. To my mind, nobody does it better than Darlene Zschech: