By David Crow
Conversations
David Crow
Lately I’ve had a little more time on my hands than I usually do. I suspect it’s been the same for a lot of people out there. One of the silver linings lately has been that I’ve gotten an extra chance to spend time with my kids. The older two were off at college and the youngest was always out and about, but they are home for a while now. At first I worried about how that would work out, but the old routines kicked back in and after we got the shower schedule worked out things started running pretty smoothly around the old house.
As a result of all this time together a strange thing has started to happen. My wife and I always parented by the adage that “we’re your parents, not your friends.” Focusing on being their parents prevented us from letting too much of ourselves show through in our dealings with our kids. They knew “Mom and Dad,” but they didn’t know as much about “Rosa and Dave.”
My kids are all older now and that wall has started to come down. Maybe it’s the fact that in the process of going through the house (spring cleaning with the Clorox until everything smells like a swimming pool) we’ve been running across buried mementos of Rosa and Dave.
For example, concentrated basement archaeology turned up an ancient stereo system (circa 1994), a receiver, a turntable, a dual cassette deck, a CD player and a graphic equalizer. When Rosa and Dave first moved in together, one of the first things they absolutely had to have was a stereo system that was more expensive than the rest of the furnishings in their four-room apartment. It was one of those stereo systems that would shake the foundation of the apartment building if we turned the volume up over halfway.
We didn’t find any speakers, but there was a cassette tape (“Get Nervous” by Pat Benatar) in the cassette deck. With that came a story about how the neighbors would complain when the young couple in H4 turned up “Shadows of the Night” a bit too loud.
Then some pictures of Rosa and Dave before the kids were born were discovered: at the 1995 Daytona 500, at Epcot Center, at Wildwood, New Jersey, kissing on the roller coaster at Six Flags, and at their Sept. 28, 1996 wedding. With those came more stories about how Rosa and Dave weren’t always so sensible and practical and cautious and maybe took a foolish lark or two. Maybe the clothes and the hair are funny in retrospect, but I maintain that those mirrored sunglasses still look cool.
The good part of all this is my kids are getting an unexpected present from their parents: a small sense that Rosa and Dave aren’t just “Mom and Dad.” Maybe it’s dawning on them that the story of Rosa and Dave began before they showed up. To be sure they are a big part of that story, but they aren’t the whole of it. Rosa and Dave had to get a few things straightened out and a few rough edges rounded off before settling into their Mom and Dad roles.
Once upon a time those two silly young kids named Rosa and Dave took a big pile of no-clues-and-no-cares that every young couple starts with, navigated through life’s uncertainties and together wrote a little story that blossomed into the bedrock of their lives. These strange days are just one more chapter in that story.
Until next time, y’all come out!
David Crow is a lawyer who lives in Orange.