It’s always interesting when a message comes at you, totally unbidden, from multiple sources at the same time. I freely confess I’m not very adept at picking up on life’s little breadcrumb trails, but when the breadcrumbs look more like jumbo-sized loaves, I figure it’s time to pay attention.
Our family spent most of the last week at Disneyland, and we had a wonderful time—such a good time, in fact, that I found myself truly regretting that we’d allowed nearly six years to elapse since our last visit. The boys, 13 and nine now, had been just seven and four at the time. All week long I couldn’t stop thinking of that previous trip. And the one before that, when Nick was an infant, and even the one before that, when Jake was just three and Nick was still on the way. The boys chuckled when I told the story of how I’d nearly ruined Disneyland for little Jake on that first trip by making Space Mountain our first ride together. The dark and the fast movements terrified him so much that every other time we got in line for a ride, Jake kept asking, “Is there a . . . a TUNNEL?” And if there was a tunnel involved, he would patently refuse to go.
So I spent the first part of this week’s trip looking backward, getting sentimental over days gone by, thinking of how the boys have grown and changed, and regretting . . . what, exactly? That we hadn’t made more trips to Disneyland? That somehow I may have missed something somewhere? Some opportunity to extract the absolute most from my boys’ childhood? I couldn’t pin down the exact source of my melancholy, but it was there nevertheless.
But then the trip started to take on its own identity—to have its own catchphrases, its own humorous memories, its own place in the trophy showcase. Jake—my now-giant, strapping seventh grader—even helped bring me back to the present when we were in line for Space Mountain. Ten years removed from that initial encounter, Jake got a mischievous grin on his face and asked, “Dad, is there a tunnel?” I had to laugh. Jake had made a new memory out of an old one.
That seemed like a moral in and of itself: That it’s okay to cherish a memory, so long as you don’t neglect to make new ones. The way is forward, after all, isn’t it? Always forward. No matter how much time has passed, no matter how long ago those sweet memories occurred, you have the chance right now to create the things whose memories you’ll be cherishing tomorrow. It’s an ever-renewing phenomenon.
Interesting that I ruminated on this while at Disneyland. It was Walt Disney, after all, who said, “We keep moving forward, opening new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious, and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” The park itself is a testament to that philosophy: Favorite old rides (Matterhorn, teacups) remain, but there’s always something new under construction to make you want to come back again.
While all of that was going on, I’ve been keeping track of a major re-do of the track at Phoenix International Raceway, the one-mile oval just west of Phoenix that we natives like to call “The Jewel in the Desert.” My friend in the communications department at PIR, Nicole Scheider, has been posting photos of the project, and I have to tell you—they’re hard for me to look at. They’re not just repaving the place, they’re actually reconfiguring it. The infield road course will be gone, the front straight will be wider, the turns will be banked more, and the famous “dogleg” on the back straight is being reshaped. All of that is great, of course, but sentimental slob that I am, I can’t help remembering that the old track is where I saw Mario Andretti win the first IndyCar race I ever attended, back in 1988. It’s where I got the autographs of Al Unser, Al Unser Jr., Arie Luyendyk, Roger Penske, Emerson Fittipaldi and Eddie Cheever. I've waved the green flag there, and once I even got to say, "Gentlemen, start your engines!" Best of all, I drove on that old track surface myself when I twice attended the Richard Petty Driving School. It's all gone now, chewed up by giant, pavement-munching machines.
Yet again, though, it was someone else’s enthusiasm for the here-and-now—and the future—that snapped me out of it. When I expressed my remorse to Nicole, she shot back a message riddled with enthusiasm: “It’s a big dirt track! Monday starts the digging of the pedestrian tunnels!” Just as Jake’s good humor had infected me, so did Nicole’s. Cool! I thought. Pedestrian tunnels!
Then, as if to cap off a week of contemplating this topic, I sat in church this morning and listened to a sermon on God keeping his promises. At one point, the pastor told us to write something down: “Forward movement is the natural direction of a Christian.”
That line didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything. But then the pastor elaborated: “The fulfillment of God’s promises is always out there, forward, ahead of you. It’s easy to look at everything that’s right here, all around you, and get consumed with that. But he’s made his promises, see, and he’s out there ahead of you, already fulfilling them.”
Disneyland. PIR. Church. A curious combination of locations to conspire to teach me something, but conspire they did. All of them seemed to be muttering a quote I once read: “The past is valuable as a guidepost, but dangerous if used as a hitching post.” I’m not sure where this trail of breadcrumbs leads, but I’m eager to find out. Whatever the answer is, I know it’s out there, ahead of me.
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