"Teach Your Parents Well"

There's a great moment in Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons" (also known as "Fathers and Children"), where the protagonist, a young man in late-19th-century Russia, on break from university, gently takes a book of dated German romantic poetry out of his father's hands, as the father is trying to read, and replaces it with a current German text called "Stoffe und Kraft," showing Dad in a very direct way that people shouldn't be wasting their time on outdated sentimental doggerel when they could be acquiring practical skills to build a better world. Most academics, both in Russian history and Russian literature, find this a classic, and moving, example of the younger generation's impulse to nurture their parents, such that the line between care-taker and cared-for gets blurred and even reversed.

But I think our transitional moment is much more beautiful that Turgenev's. Every night, I say evening prayers with the boys, read them a story (or stories), and put them to bed, making the Sign of the Cross over them, along with the standard kiss on the head. But now, Ian sometimes makes the Sign of the Cross over me in return, slowly and with great attention and tenderness.

I'm quite sure that we need their prayers much more than they need ours, and I've never been happier to see the proverbial "shoe" on the "other foot."

(September, 2010)