There is a great line during Indiana Jones III in the dialogue between Indy's dad (Sean Connery) and Indy (Harrison Ford). The dad says, "You left home just when you started to get interesting."
That certainly was how I felt living on the East Coast whenever we sent our kids off to college out West.
Our son Steve ran into filmmaker Kieth Merrill, a friend of our family, and they shared stories of recent family gatherings. In the course of the conversation Kieth mentioned how his adult children had now become his best friends and that he would give up anything else he had to do, if at all possible, to spend time with them.
When Steve's wife, Barb, related the experience to me, she mentioned that as a mother of three young children she never thought about the possibility that she was talking to her future best friends. It made her think a lot about it.
She, in turn, got me thinking along that line.
The little child looking back at you is, seemingly in a blink of an eye, going to become an adult. If you are not accommodating and unselfish and you don't want to be with him when he is small, in the idea that what goes around comes around, he isn't going to care too much about you later on.
You can't just ignore a child until he is 18 and then say, "Hey there, remember me?" As the Harry Chapin song goes, "And as I hung up the phone, it occurred to me, He'd grown up just like me. My boy was just like me."
I e-mailed Kieth to say how "right on" his comments were. He replied, "You know, of course, whereof I speak about 'adult kids and best friends.' We surely never thought of it when the kids were tots. When the kids are little we think somehow that is parenthood, only to discover they grow up and turn 20 and become adults and then live another 65 years or so — and with luck we are there for 45 or so of 'the good grown years.' We get to know them a lot longer and much better as adults."
Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" is one of my favorite plays. During Act 3, the Stage Manager looks out over the audience and says, "Whenever you come near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense ... We all know that something is eternal. And it ain't houses and it ain't names ... that something has to do with human beings."
Emily, the protagonist, has died. She is granted a day of her choice to go back to Earth. The other dead try to discourage her, saying it will be too painful, but she persists and chooses her 12th birthday, one of the happiest days of her life. She soon sees how people get involved in meaningless tasks and preoccupations. Her mother fusses about never paying Emily attention, until she finally cries to her mother: "Just for a moment we're happy. Let's look at one another ... "
She is unable to endure the vision and hurries back to her body's resting place to find her husband, George, weeping at her grave.
Awerty.com, a literature site, summed up the play with this thought: "Too late, she now understands: Our time on Earth is an irreplaceable gift, one to be treasured and relished every moment; life is a fragile gift that is delivered to us in pieces, and it only achieves meaning as we cherish and blend the pieces — even the seemingly insignificant pieces — into a full, universal whole."
Raising children is hard work. Their energy wears us down. It takes patience, fortitude and creativity. It takes sacrifice, love and an understanding heart. No parent or grandparent is possessed of those qualities every minute of the day or even every day. But taking the time to get to know our children and grandchildren well enough to share thoughts and ideas in order to create a bridge to our future friends seems like a win/win situation to me.
E-mail: sasyoung2@desnews.com