KINGSVIEW

SEEING THE ENTIRE TRIP

Michael A. King

We were hours from home, my wife Joan and I. The phone rang. A panic-stricken voice said, "Oh Dad, I crashed my car!" She was okay. But stranded with hood buckled two feet up, front end smashed in, radiator’s blood running green on the street. Coasting toward a red light, she had reached for a chocolate. Too late she had watched her car hood slam under a truck.

Her mother and I spent the frantic trip back home pondering the meaning of life and parenting and hope amid destruction. Next day after visiting the crashed car, which Joan reported made her want to throw up, we went for groceries. A young mother had a baby in her shopping cart. The baby was looking worshipfully up at the mother. The mom was cooing down at the baby. They looked so happy. They looked so carefree. They looked so innocent.

Joan and I burst out laughing. The poor mother gazed uneasily at our post-crash faces, haggard and yet strangely giddy.

So we explained: "We’re sorry you caught us laughing," we said. "You must think we’re crazy. We were laughing because we remember having babies. And we remember older parents telling us, ‘Enjoy these days while you have them.’ Then last night our daughter crashed her car and we were just thinking again of when she was just a happy baby like yours."

The young mom smiled tentatively but with a hint of fear still woven in. Now I guessed she wasn’t scared of us. Rather, she seemed to be peeking briefly at a fearsome future of babies who grow up to crash cars.

No doubt she did realize that soon enough this brief world of life with baby would be gone. But if she was like us back then, she didn’t fully believe in what was to come. I doubt any of us entirely believe that what we see ahead in other lives will also befall us. This can be good. Joan and I often wonder if we’d have plunged into the holy insanity of parenting if we could have seen where it would take us.

But I did dare to consider that we had lived much of the path that young mother was just setting foot on; we could see things that were for her largely shrouded in fog. Then I thought forward to my parents and their peers decades ahead of me on the way. Surely they too see clearly so much that for me, as I skirt their land of old age but am not yet its citizen, remains wrapped in mist.

And that made me hope that I am not quite yet so old (at 51) to be heard as only self-serving when I say that it saddens me to see how quickly in our culture we turn from those who have the eyes to see the entire journey. In my publishing work, for instance, I see how often the voices of those past retirement age are silenced or denigrated—and how much they have yet to say if given the platform.

This is not to suggest we should listen less to the youthful voices; I remember gratefully the editors who let my twenty-something voice be heard back when I could say some things with a vigor and clarity these later years of grappling with life’s challenges and complexities have sometimes muddied. And I want my daughters and their generation likewise to be able to share the insights their life stages and experiences—including car crashes!—teach them.

But it is to dream of again treating parents and grandparents and all our elders as in biblical times: as those who tell us what to watch for on the roads they but not yet we have traveled, and who bless and cheer us on the way.

A grandparent sent my daughter a contribution to her car reconstruction fund. My daughter was so moved. Her pain had been honored. Her grandparent had been this way before and was cheering her past the literal and symbolic wreckage of her life from the wise and generous perspective of one who could see the entire trip.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is pastor, Spring Mount (Pa.) Mennonite Church; and owner, Cascadia Publishing House. This column was first published in The Mennonite, May 2, 2006, as a "Real Families" column.