Analogy for Isaac

In 1986, when I was 16 years old and a junior in high school, I traveled to my first foreign country: Canada. I went with the high school band to perform at Expo 86, a sort of World's Fair which was being held in Vancouver. I was in theory supervised by a bunch of parent chaperones, but I remember being allowed to leave the hotel and wander around the city by myself. I even rode the bus, something I wasn't allowed to do back home!

I was very excited to spend a week away from home, semi-independent, in a foreign country, and perhaps this combination of factors was what made me acutely aware of every cultural difference. Exotic Canada! I saw differences rather than similarities, and I relished each one. You may think that Canada is not that different from the United States, and furthermore that British Columbia, being on the West Coast, is not that different from California. And you would be right! It's not like I went to Japan or India. However, Vancouver was also my first big city of any nation, and quite unlike the small agricultural town from which I came, so being in a city was in itself an awakening.

So for whatever reason, I found every aspect of my Canadian trip to be exciting and new: the public transportation, the money, the spelling, the dual-language label on my new toothpaste. Even the typography of the street signs, different from that in the U.S., was a thrill.

One afternoon during our Vancouver trip, a friend and I went to lunch at a Dairy Queen.* I ordered the same hamburger I usually ate at the Dairy Queen back home, and as I did back home, I asked them to hold the pickle. The cashier looked at me in scorn and said, "It doesn't come with pickle."

And I thought: "Wow! Such a difference from the United States, where every Dairy Queen hamburger comes with limp, overheated pickle!"

Sounds like a joke, doesn't it? But I must have found this experience significant, because it has stayed with me for the last 24 years. And this is what parenting my first-born child has been like: every aspect of raising Isaac, no matter how mundane or irritating, has been significant, because I am experiencing it for the very first time.

And what does that mean for my second-born child? You'll have to tune in next time for an Analogy for Laurel.

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*What was I doing eating boring old Dairy Queen while on my exotic international trip? Hey, I was 16 years old and my parents had given me a meager $10 a day for meals.