Six hundred miles, give or take. That’s the there-and-back
distance to my parent’s place. I took my family, my son and daughter and wife,
back to see the rest of my family. Well, most of the rest of my family.
Six hundred miles of asphalt winding over mountains, through
forests, dipping through a canyon, blazing endlessly across a desert before
finding a rhythm in hills and forests again. It’s a trip I’ve made dozens of
times before. And I thought I knew it. Thought it was familiar. But young eyes
make for new journeys.
We found dinosaurs. Concrete cast over a steel frame. Cheap
paint baking in the desert sun. But dinosaurs to my kids. They might as well
have been alive. Such was the manic glee they brought.
The boy and I hiked up a hill. Fought against the slipping
and sliding scree. Caught our hearts in our chests as feet gave way
unexpectedly. Summited. Found upon the summit a herd of metallic horses with
their reckless plunge over the bluff forever frozen in time. Descended again,
the boy wrapped across my chest, feet dancing, looking for solid footing on
that flowing river of rock.
My dad gave my son a Tonka truck. Steel, like the old days.
Promises were made to play together the next day, the old man and the young
boy. A deal written on the paper of his heart. The next day, we came back. The
boy carrying his truck, ready to fulfill the requirements of the bargain.
Grandpa was asleep on the chair.
There was a moment there that made me think of the space
beyond the freeway, the space where people live as other people fly by. The boy
stood with his truck on his shoulder, his burden. And he looked at his grandpa.
And he waited.
I wondered what he saw, that boy of mine, as he looked at
his father’s father. Did he see a tired old man? Did he see gray and wrinkles?
Or did he see promise? The promise of adventure. The hope of promises yet to
come. In that moment, he was not a boy waiting with his toy truck. He was the
callow youth of fable, waiting for fate to force him into adventure. Waiting
for the dragon to awake. The kingdom to be in peril. The world to need him.
There is a space beyond the banks of the freeway where life
happens. And there is life and adventure dancing in the smiles of old men’s
faces, hidden by old, gray beards. I found that, this week. Maybe I found it
again.
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