A woman I know can’t take a simple stroll through the autumn woods with her children without shouting, “Shale!” every time she glimpses sedimentary rock beneath the leaves. It has become a family joke. She can’t help it. Her father was a geologist. When she was a girl and they went walking together, he pointed out rock formations. Now, decades later, she does too. I myself can’t drive through a New England village with my children without crying, “Fanlight!” and “Cupola!” whenever we pass one. A fanlight is the small, semicircular-shaped window that you often see above the front door of Classical Revival farmhouses; a cupola is the little house-shaped ventilation device often seen atop a barn roof — and if you’d grown up with my father, you too would be unable to keep from announcing such architectural features to your own children.
It is humbling and charming, both, to consider the funny bits and pieces that we inherit from our parents. Far beyond the sober determination of our DNA, we carry into adulthood all manner of harmless quirks.
Some households have a horror of milk cartons on the table, for instance — definitely an inherited custom. Some families come down in the morning fully dressed, and look with disgust on sluggards who breakfast in their bathrobes. A man I know can’t endure the sight of mud on his children’s shoes because, when he was growing up, his father insisted on immaculate footwear.
Often unknowingly, we absorb our parents’ preferences and eccentricities, and these may lie dormant for decades. But when we have children — bam! — out they come. Then our lucky children get to inherit not only their grandparents’ oddities but whatever fresh foibles we ourselves have developed in the meantime.
The other day, in fact, I was driving with a friend, a mother of sons, when she suddenly pointed at a backhoe parked beside the road and shouted: “Digger!”
I turned to her in wonderment. It was just the two of us in the car.
“Sorry,” she said, with a rueful laugh. “I’m just so used to pointing out construction equipment for the boys.”
Weirdness just sneaks up on a person, I guess. It has certainly snuck up on me. Not so long ago, it was a misty morning and I was driving my children to school, chatting away, blah blah blah, when one of the children politely interrupted.
“Mummy, why do you always tell us about hydroplaning?”
“Well, because someday you’ll be driving, and it’s good for you to know about varying road conditions — ” I began. And then I realized that pedagogy had nothing to do with the fact that, every damp day, I tell the children about the skidding danger posed by a thin layer of moisture on the road. Reader, it was because my mother — who used to teach driving — had a habit of warning me about hydroplaning when I was a little girl.
What goes around, comes around, and in the case of hydroplaning, “Shale!” “Fanlight!” and “Digger!” it seems to come around amusingly often.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
