In the past week my son Timothy has cooked dinner for me twice. Both nights Carol had meetings and it was just going to be the two of us boys and I figured, coming home at 8:30, that we’d send out for Chinese or maybe try the new Thai place that has opened up on the corner.
On the contrary, I came home to find Tim chopping scallions on the cutting board—good knife skills, Tim—heating up oil in the big skillet and consulting an opened cookbook. “We’re going to have fried rice tonight, Dad,” he said to me.
This is one of those unexpected delights of parenting. You take your kids to Little League and soccer, you sign them up for guitar lessons and an SAT review course, you teach them in Sunday School class (learning far more about the Bible than they probably did), you ask them to clean their rooms. You hope somewhere along the way they acquire some life skills that will make them happy, engaged, fulfilled, thoughtful, inquisitive, articulate and able to fill out IRS forms someday. Nowhere did I put in there: “Must learn to cook.”
And yet here was my 20-year-old son cooking…and cooking for me. (Add “caring” to the list.)
So here’s what I’d like to tell my friend Jim who is just starting out in this fatherhood journey: “You’ll pray, you’ll teach, you’ll exhort, you’ll cheer, but no matter how much you plan, your kids will come back at you on their way to adulthood with some wonderful surprises.”
Fried rice one night and a very good vegetarian risotto. Healthy too. Thanks, Tim.
