What do we look back on in life?

A comment Chuck Klosterman made toward the end of an interview I was listening to got me thinking about things that matter in life. He was interviewed on one of my favorite podcasts, Conversations with Tyler, when he made this comment:

My daughter is six, and she still likes me to lay in bed with her and hold her hand before she falls asleep. Sometimes that’s a drag. Last night, for example, I wanted to see what was going on in the football game, and I was, “Well, you know . . .”

But then, another part of me is like, when I am dying, and I’m thinking about the moments in my life that mattered, it’s probably going to be things like lying in bed with my daughter and holding her hand in this extraordinarily intimate situation. We’re so close to each other, both physically and intellectually, that if I could build a time machine on my deathbed, that’s probably where I’d go back to.

This got me thinking about what I might look back at as my time here comes to an end. I think Chuck has it about right. At the moment, I’m reading Peter Pan to Harrison who is now 8. He’s still at that age where he expresses his emotions very intensely, so when there’s a scary moment, he’ll look at me with eyes and mouth wide open. Or when something funny happens, he laughs out loud from deep down in his belly. Like Chuck’s daughter, Harrison likes one of us to lie down with him when it’s time to turn out the light. We don’t always do it, but I seldom regret the time laying together and feeling him drift off to sleep, which usually doesn’t take more than 10 minutes. These are the moments with Harrison I think I’ll look back on.

Penelope, age 12, is now going through a stage where we can have more intellectual conversations. The other day at bedtime she chose to read me some writing she’d been doing for fun. It was actually quite good, but there were a couple of subtle grammar points I decided to bring up. I was able to do so in a humorous way and when she grasped the point I was making, it had her laughing out loud. As she laughed, she repeated back what I said and that got her laughing even harder. It was a nice moment to share with her, because I’m confident that, if she’s anything like me as a teen, she’ll soon think my jokes are lame and that I’m a dork.

I’ll pocket these times with the kids and suspect that later I’ll treasure them more than anything else I might do or achieve in life.