By David Crow
Conversations
David Crow
I just graduated my second child from high school. As I watched from the bleachers of the football field, she collected her diploma and waved in triumph to her family. It was easily one of the proudest moments of my life. Yet as we rode home from the ceremony a thought struck me.
I noticed that I am a relic of another time living in my children’s world. My wife and I spent the last 20 years of our lives making sure nothing changed so our children would grow up in comfort and security. That’s the definition of a “home”; a place where comfortable and predictable routine makes a person feel snug and safe from the outside world.
While we were busy making sure everything stayed nice and routine, the world around us changed into the world that my kids now know.
I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. Sometime between then and now everything changed. Music, fashion, politics, institutions, automobiles, sensibilities – everything. Somehow while I was raising kids my world of MTV videos on cable television and answering the phone to see who is calling got replaced by a world that downloads songs from iTunes and smart phones. The things I grew up thinking were “cool” and “cutting edge” are now things that make my kids chuckle patronizingly.
I participate in this new world. I’ve got a smart phone and I surf the web and I have cars with backup sensors. However, I don’t quite fit in this new world. I don’t watch Netflix on my smart phone. I still can’t back a car up without looking over my shoulder with my right arm thrown over the passenger seat. I still expect to see Martha Quinn and J.J. Jackson introducing world premier music videos. (If you’re younger than 30 you might have to Google that last one).
I get along in my kids’ world, but I’m not steeped in it like them. They don’t know anything else. And they would be out of place in my world. They wouldn’t recognize a full-service gas station and God help me if I ever fall off a ladder and they have to call for help on a rotary phone. That’s just the cycle of things.
Perhaps there is hope for me. My parents, freed of child rearing, caught up to this world in a rush. They FaceTime and text their grandchildren on a daily basis and are connoisseurs of Netflix and Hulu. My dad openly smirks as I peck out a text with my index finger instead of my thumbs.
But that hope isn’t what saw me through that moment after the graduation ceremony.
I simply followed the timeless advice of my grandfather, who told me back before I graduated from high school that it is the moments of joy where the sun seems to shine a little brighter that add up to our lives.
As I do before all of those moments, the morning of my daughter’s graduation I got up early to smile at the sunrise, savored a deep breath of new dawn air and added another little moment of joy to the pile that is my life.
Until next time, y’all come out.
David Crow is a lawyer who lives in Orange.