Parent to parent: Buckle up for the ride

By John Corrigan

There is late, and then there is late. Four and half hours is late.

But when my daughter Kelly finally picked me up at the Kansas City, Mo., airport a couple weeks ago, her sheepish grin made me forget the hours she left me marooned in the terminal.

Ahead, we’d be sharing a small Mazda crammed with her stuff and 1,600 miles of highway. Hastily arranged, the trip from her grad school in Missouri to our home in L.A. was one of those parental opportunities you have to jump on, whatever other obligations might be in the way.

The last-minute nature of the trip was also, I suspect, an inkling of the surprises in store for us in the year to come as we see our kids through three crucial phases in their educations: Kelly’s last semester in grad school, our son Kevin’s senior year at Davis, and our daughter Katie’s senior year in high school.

To be sure, our parental obligations have eased a bit over the years. Those 3 a.m. feedings of wailing babies, those grand Saturday morning tours of soccer fields, those car trips where the kids seemed ready to levitate on the power of sugar and caffeine, were they not tethered by seat belts — all that’s in the rearview mirror.

We miss it, of course. And while we’ve come to appreciate the simple pleasure of a quiet Sunday morning with coffee and the newspaper, there’s nothing quite so thrilling as the chance to be a parent again.

The trip with Kelly was a case in point. She had been working this summer to line up an internship in New York or Washington, D.C., for the fall, but her plans hadn’t come together.

Then, at what I would call the last minute (and the calendar would call "two weeks"), Kelly announced that she had landed an internship in D.C., but she would be living in a dorm with no parking. She would need someone to drive back with her from Missouri to Los Angeles, where she would leave her car.

The opportunity, as that ad goes, was priceless.

To me, the road trip itself would be fun enough; it was my wife’s brilliant idea to try to make it a bit of a mini-vacation as well, since Kelly had been working all summer without a break. By scheduling in overnight stays at Glenwood Springs, Colo., and Las Vegas, the adventure went from good to great.

As Davis gets back into session, meanwhile, we’ll also need to make an effort to stay connected with our son, Kevin. He recently took on a job at the campus radio station that kept him busy all summer, and this fall his load will get heavier as he focuses on burnishing his grade point average and weighing his post-graduate options.

Fortunately, I also had a chance to spend time with him this summer. He put together a four-man backpack trip — two dads, two sons — in the Eastern Sierra. Before the trip, I was briefly torn between the backpack and previous plans for that same time. In the end, I made the right call — and threw those other plans out the window.

And Katie? She’s still at home, but her time here is short. She will be applying to colleges this fall and trying to boost her grades and SAT scores for the final push.

She’s been to several of the schools where she hopes to apply, and when I ask, she says she doesn’t need to see any more campuses. Fine, I say. But secretly, I’m hoping she will wake up one morning and insist on visiting another college.

Preferably, it will be one that’s at least a full day’s ride away.