Many nights, often in the last silence before sleep, I check in with my kids. Not by text or email or phone. I just imagine them, wherever they happen to be in the world. It’s sort of an extension of the tucking-in process when they were little.
Two of them, a daughter and son-in-law, are in Kenya. When I’m about to drop off to sleep, they are just ready to start their new day. I imagine the early morning streets of Nairobi, the buzz of motorcycles, the chaos of traffic.
I have not been there. I have seen a few photos and, through Skype video calls, a view from their apartment window. That’s what I see when I make my late-evening check-ins.
When I have said good-night to Nairobi, I move on to our son, tucked along a parkway in a third-floor apartment in Minneapolis. A modest old home, shaded by old trees, a running path just out the front door.
When I’ve made my rounds, I can drift off to sleep. I suspect I am not the only parent who performs this kind of ritual on a near-daily basis. Once you become a parent, if that’s your choice in life, you are in it for the long haul. The kids may be grown and gone, doing well on their own, but they are still with you.
They do not need us so much now - hardly at all, in fact. The way it should be. But from the day you leave the hospital with those tiny creatures cradled in your arms, barely visible beneath all the blankets, they’re going to be part of you forever.
These nightly tuck-ins by imagination, at least for me, are not done out of some longing to have the kids home again. They are choosing their paths in life. Let them go where they may, seeking their way. In past years, I have imagined their lives in France and Guatemala and Switzerland and Washington, D.C., with shorter stops in Spain and Hungary and Great Britain and Boston and Chicago and Italy.
In the best of times, we have gone across the world to find them where they live, and sleep on their floors or in the homes of friends. We have seen something of their world. We’ve had coffee with them on Lake Geneva or walked with them along the Seine, experiences I never could have imagined when I was making hay on a Kansas farm 50 years ago.
Now the kids from Kenya are back on U.S. soil for a visit, not quite to Duluth yet, but somewhere in Minnesota. Next week, they will be with us, sitting at the picnic table, walking the Lakewalk, perhaps swimming in Lake Superior. The Minneapolis boy will be up, too. The house will buzz with their conversation and laughter. We’ll throw some burgers on the grill. We’ll talk until the stars or the mosquitoes come out.
And I’ll be able to skip my nightly check-in by pillow.
Sam Cook is a Duluth News Tribune columnist and outdoors writer. Reach him at (218) 723-5332 or scook@duluthnews.com . Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/samcookoutdoors or on Facebook at “Sam Cook Outdoors.”
