The best parenting advice I’ve ever heard came from my youngest, Mark, after he grew up and had children of his own. He and his wife have five.
“You have to pay attention,” he told me.
If you’re paying attention, and a child gets a foot or two off the path you’ve chosen for him or her, you can say, “Move to your right a little.” And they do and that’s that. No big deal.
But if you’re not paying attention, Mark said, before you know it they are way off the path, down there in the creek somewhere or tangled up in a bunch of briers. You have to go get them. There’s a lot shouting. You’re upset, they’re upset.
All that could be avoided if you would just pay attention.
I was walking through the woods, following McAlpine Creek south of Charlotte, when two men challenged me. One was older, one a good bit younger, in his 20’s.
What was I doing there, they wanted to know.
I wanted to tell them that what I was doing was none of their business but that didn’t seem like a very good idea at the time. They were serious.
So I introduced myself, told them I was a newspaperman working on a story — I was looking for polluters.
The men, who turned out to be father and son, said they thought I might be a burglar sneaking up on their house. We have a lot of trains, they volunteered. I hadn’t noticed before but, through the trees, I could see part of a house.
I’m no train guy but I am curious about stuff so I asked to see their collection. They said OK and we walked through the woods to their house, which could have kindly been called “modest.” It was not big, not new, just a little two-bedroom frame house beside a gravel road.
But inside, Oh my word!
It wasn’t this fancy but it was fancy enough.
There were trains running around on tables, on the floors, on shelves along the walls. There was a train pretty much everywhere they could put a train. There were railroad bridges, switching yards, and tiny towns with streets and businesses and train stations and figures of little people waiting to board. There were six-inch long “logs” stacked beside the tracks, and piles of coal, and rows of little cars all ready to be hauled somewhere.
Who would have guessed? Inside a dinky little house in a woods in the middle of nowhere was a fantasy world for children of all ages.
