July 2006: Discoveries

Some years ago I made a commitment to my grandchildren that the summer each one is nine I will take him or her on some kind of an expedition. I’ve recently returned from a week’s intergenerational Elderhostel in the Black Hills with Brannon, Peter and Katy’s middle boy. We drove 3,000 miles, not including bumping hundreds of miles around mountains and plains in a school bus during the program. We saw all the expected attractions—the Badlands, the Needles Highway, Mount Rushmore, Devil’s Tower, Jewel Cave—and many unexpected ones. We hunted fossils and rocks and wildflowers, watched mammoth bones being dug up, saw dinosaur foot prints in the middle of a cattle ranch. Scouring the dusty ranch, Brannon even found his own personal dinosaur bone. And he and I, who ordinarily see one another only two or three times a year, deepened our knowledge of one another.

He discovered that I can be impatient and even sharply angry. I found that he can be stubbornly unwilling to obey any directive he doesn’t see a good reason for. (And “because I want you to” is definitely not a good reason.)