Adams is still musically footloose: he roves through bucolic New England in his symphonic autobiography My Father Knew Charles Ives; charts the stark and irregular California coastline in his violin concerto The Dharma at Big Sur; and evokes the searing heat and thundery air of New Mexico in his opera Doctor Atomic.
His father's chart, the son recalled, contained no time for meals, conversation or any social life.
George W. Bush, like his father before him, charted new highs on presidential approval after 9/11, and after the invasion of Afghanistan.
"They're off the charts," his father, Leland Welker, said of his son's statistics in a telephone interview.
In "Decoding Deepak," Mr. Chopra charts his father's rise from Indian immigrant to successful Boston doctor, on to apostle for the Transcendental Meditation movement and now best-selling pop spiritualist, thanks to his introduction to the mainstream by Oprah Winfrey in 1993.
"Off the charts!" their father said, because they all stopped playing at exactly the same time for once, and everyone had been in key and no one had forgotten any verses; even Melissa's flailing dance had been more graceful than usual.
This box tracks his movements from disco's waning years, as the singer in the bands Luther and Charme, through his own albums, his duets with Mariah Carey and Beyoncé, and finally his last record, "Dance With My Father," which climbed the charts as he lay incapacitated by a stroke.
One father admits the monthly charts have changed his perspective on child malnutrition.
"The Climb", by Cyrus' daughter, Miley Cyrus, debuted at number forty-eight the same week, the first time a father and daughter had separate charting songs on the chart since Johnny Cash and Rosanne Cash charted in 1990 with "Silver Stallion" and "One Step over the Line", respectively.
Going back through the calendar now, more than 18 months after my father died, the entries chart a relentless physical decline — profound fatigue, sore hips and knees, aching wrists, swollen legs, inflamed teeth, increasing forgetfulness, the savage indignities of old age.
In his office, my father kept a flip chart tracking how much money his department saved the U.S. taxpayers.
