Lessons from the young

Steve Barnes

It was our best spring break ever. No classes, but we learned so much. The oldest grand, a ripe old 25 and newly (and thus far happily) married and master’s-degreed magna cum laude, enjoyed her last spring break a couple years ago. Except not; she now spends those precious days helping people younger than she, most of them female, assess what they plan to do after the respite ends; that is, what they plan to do with the rest of their lives. Counseling, after a fashion, while using a golf course as a chalkboard and a putter as a pointer. Adulthood: It’s closer than they think, she tells them; she, who is in the first third of her wonderful life. And, Heaven Bless, she made time for her grandparents, stopping off to share with them the advice she was passing along to her charges, which amounted to a refresher course for her elders. She was telling them that education was paramount, that they could learn about some things in life, as she had, on the fairway, but that other lessons could only be learned in the classroom. So they absolutely had to put their textbook education first.

And then her younger sister, short weeks and one semester from her undergraduate degree, her four-point grade average (a bit of grandparental pride, that) practically inviting, almost demanding, the graduate school path her sibling chose. But some hesitation. Sitting at the grandparents’ kitchen table, musing over the near-term timeline, which can seem, at age 21, a lifetime: Did she want a breather after that bachelor’s degree? Could she, should she, leave campus for at least a semester, perhaps two, and taste the working world for longer than a summer? Working with young people — she loved it, but would she love it full-time? Could she give the kids what they deserved?

Some college gal-pals had bade her join them on a four-day, margarita- filled Mexican cruise, but somehow it didn’t feel right. So she opted to spend the time with her clan and some friends nearer home, and to help her grandfather with some office stuff — filing and answering the phone, like that.

To be asked such questions, to be so consulted, to be used as a sounding board: a gift in any season, and far more precious than the azaleas that framed her through the kitchen window, lavender against her soft brunette.

And that third grand, the fourth-grader, the not-so-little guy: He spent the first four days of the nine-day academic interregnum with his other grands, the ones on the better side of the Miller-Bowie border, crossing State Line Avenue into the darkness only long enough to sample some always over-hyped Texas barbecue, a venture all the more ill-advised for the abundance of much better ’cue on the saner side of the divide. (At least, it once was saner.)

The kid’s parents profess to be fond of him, and were driven to distraction by his absence for even those few days that he spent in the state’s southwest corner. So how he convinced them to permit him to spend the rest of the holiday with us is unknowable. It may have something to do with the comparatively short distance between mom and dad’s house and ours: about 20 minutes in heavy traffic, which would enable them to easily enough stop by (re-route, actually) before or after work to make sure he wasn’t being undernourished. Fat chance.

His first career choice remains creating feature films, and how he learned at age 9 — longer than a year ago — what a motion picture director is and does is beyond us. A few weeks ago he added a second possibility: attorney at law. The give and take of civil argument, he said, was appealing. Go figure. But now there’s a third option, rising like the steam from the volcano he and his parents observed on last year’s Pacific holiday.

“It was inactive,” he assured his M’Amie and me, relating how close he had some to the volcano’s rim. He explained that magma is down in the cone, and becomes lava during an eruption. Hot stuff.

And the bookstore, his favorite retail haunt: some nice evenings there, the allure of the Harry Potter paraphernalia now, mercifully, wearing thin (sorry, Ms Rowling); and his literary selections consisting of more words and fewer pictures.

The General Assembly, or most of its members, were on spring break as well, which meant the Capitol would be largely empty. I nonetheless prayed he would not ask to tour the building yet again. He didn’t. Another blessing.

It was a wonderful spring break.

Yours?