MY CHILDREN'S FUTURE

By Victor Landa

When I began writing columns many years ago, my children were toddlers. My daughter was three years old, my son was one. My worries for them were, at the time, immediate, and my writing reflected that fact. The overwhelming weight of sudden responsibility leaves little room for hand-wringing. The wonderful chaos that comes with a new family seems to blur far-sight. One's concern is focused on the needs of the moment.

Like all new fathers, I dreamed, and I imagined a better world for my children, and I wrote with zeal about my personal stake in the future. But the midnight runs to the grocery store for diapers and the bottomless well of energy of scampering feet were a welcomed reality check. There were practical things that needed tending right there and then, so I wrote as well about walking my daughter to her first day of school and tossing a football with my son in the warm summer rain.

My grounding has been the extraordinary moments hidden among the mundane passage of time. And I've relied on my children to show me the way.

Two nights ago my children and my wife and I sat together for dinner at a local burger place. The conversation clipped along with its usual exuberant pace, jumping from basketball games to history tests, from movies and riddles, to the ever-present hair-trigger teenage giggle. Somehow we ended up talking about the future.

My daughter is now completing the 10th grade, my son the eighth. They are, by all estimates, light-years ahead of where my wife and I were at their age. They are children of another age, with different challenges and different opportunities. They have a more sophisticated world-view than we did, and they navigate the world of technology and communications with unbelievable ease.

I remember the admonitions, when I was a younger father, to cherish my time with them and to try not to blink. "That's how fast time goes by," experienced parents told me.

Well, I blinked, and I suddenly found myself discussing college with two very bright teenagers. Our family is blessed with high expectations. My children's generation will be the third, going back to my mother, in which college is a given, not an option. ...