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When you’re a teenager, it’s part of your stubborn, youthful agenda to convince yourself that your parents are uncool. Personally, I never held my parents in that much disregard, but there were definitely times in high school when I believed them to be totally unwitting of anything in vogue. That was, of course, a wrongful assumption, and now I know better. If anything, my parents are thwarted only by technology (e.g., how to install software or search for something on the Internet or burn a CD), and that’s just sort of a generational thing. In all other respects, they never fail to demonstrate that kind of unaffected worldliness that validates them as both parents and adults.
My parents frequently take wine with dinner, and as soon as I turned 21, they afforded me my own glass without so much as even a word about my being of legal drinking age. Apparently, not a huge deal for them. Truth be told, my parents are hardly connoisseurs in the field, but every time we sit down to a meal that begs the company of a fine wine (mom gets fancy on occasion), they make some mention about its body or dryness or some other term that I myself am just shamefully unqualified to speak about. If I happen to voice my curiosity, I’m treated to a light-hearted dialogue about tasting techniques, their favorite wines, and fun, little bits of trivia, like what it means for a wine to be “fortified”. Once the entrée is over and done with, my dad selects two or three cheeses from his collection of way-too-many and talks about how this Gouda is more sour than that Gouda.
Maybe it’s just my family, but I am greatly amused by my parents’ knowledge of totally arbitrary things. I like to hear my mom discuss in minute detail the craft behind the clothes she buys for me, and recently, we shared in an engaging comparison of the two, prevailing productions of Pride & Prejudice (we both favor the less compacted, A&E rendition). Also, for some reason, she knows a ridiculous amount about pop culture. She blames good newspapers. Especially the reading of them.
But such venerable insight is not readily apparent. Dinner conversation at home frequently falls on the subject of my life at school, and that involves my recounting of a few, only moderately interesting facts, to which my parents invariably reply with interjections wanting in substance, like “Oh, wow!” or “Oh, that’s nice!” or “Oh, how fun!”. That’s why it’s awesome to invert the exchange and hear them speak at length about something; it’s a lucid viewport into the hundred-twenty-some-odd years of experience they’ve collectively amassed as citizens of this planet.
Cool!