My middle child Ally was home from college recently. The way it usually goes is like this: Ally arrives sometime near dusk, drops her stuff at her mom’s and goes out Friday night with her friends. She comes in late and sleeps till eleven. Then it’s to the mall with friends. On Saturday evening at six I get a call saying “Can we move our dinner together up from seven-thirty to six-fifteen?” This is not to accommodate my early morning hours, but rather allow her to go to a party she was just invited to.
I understand. If I were she, I’d rather be with my friends than a long dinner with daddy. Her friends will provide laughs, gossip, and I am afraid, beer. I will provide the very latest statistics on the dangers of smoking, drinking, speeding, tanning, urban crime, rural crime, plus questions concerning her grades, cell phone usage and why there was a 22 dollar charge by her bank for an overdraft. I will be informed that one of her friends used her bank card “by mistake”, and that she is going to straighten it all out on Tuesday and the bank will actually owe her money. I end up understanding less about the overdraft problem than I do Portuguese politics.
Well, I decided I’d had enough. I plotted a little day trip with her. I was going to take her to the house she was born in and had not seen since she was four years old. The house is about 45 minutes away, so, with lunch it will take most of the afternoon. I must not let her know what my plan is.
I picked Ally up and said, “I’m going to take you to see a place you will love just before lunch.” She smiled and said “O.K.” not really concentrating on what I just said.
After about 20 minutes on a highway south she started to wonder where we were going. “What is this place I’m going to love?”
“It’s the house you were born in.” I blurted out, figuring she was too far away from home to jump out of the car to avoid a trip down the most horrible street known to womankind…. DAD’S MEMORY LANE!
We arrived at the neighborhood and I was really excited. Ally was kind of into it too. I was curious if the people living there now had changed it much. Gigi and I built it when we were married just two years. It was designed by us to feel like a big beach house you would find at Hilton Head. It had wide-open rooms, eleven-foot ceilings, and each child had their own bedroom. There was a guest room and a working fireplace in the master bedroom. The decks were on two levels with a ten-mile view of sunset over a distant golf course fairway. I had a great TV job and we were on our way.
We pulled up to the house and I said “Well, that’s it.”
“It’s so pretty!” she said.
I told her those three maple trees in the front yard were planted by me the summer she was born. They were now over twenty feet tall. I loved that. I showed her, which room was hers, and how a lighting strike blew a window out, and that glass shattered into her crib while she slept.
I showed her where we used to walk our Alaskan husky Stoli, and how I walked her for hours and hours up and down the streets around the neighborhood to calm her down from the colic she had during her first year.
“Why did we leave here?” she asked.
“I think we just needed to be closer to town.” I answered.
We had lunch and I drove her back to her mom’s place. She gave me a big hug and said she had a great time and that I should write about it. Or something else, as long as I talked about her. With that she laughed and went inside.
I looked at her mom’s townhouse and thought; it’s nice, but a lot smaller. And back at my condo I thought this is cool, but I could put three of these in that house we used to have. When most people spilt, one of the first shocks is the downscaling of where you live.
If I am to be honest with myself, I have to admit there was a little part of me that wanted Ally to see that house because of it’s size. To remember that I was able to pull off a place like that for the family. With most kids, bigger is always better.
A few weeks later I visited Ally at the apartment she shares with four other girls at school. Her space is tiny, not much bigger than a large closet.
“I love my room!” she beamed. “Thank you so much, daddy.”
I have come to realize that yes, kids would like to have parents with a big house, but in the long run, given a choice, they would prefer parents with big hearts, that are always there, wherever we live.
