Day 1309 | History
One of the most exciting days in my teenage years was when I got my drivers licence. I already had a car that my mum had helped me buy and I was ready to ‘cut laps’ all over Devonport in that bad boy. It was a loud, light blue VC commodore and I thought I was the coolest dude going round.
As my love for cars grew, so did my budget and before I knew it I had a Twin Turbo Nissan GT-R. Now for the non-car folks, this thing was basically a race car. It didn’t belong on the street but that’s where I drove it. It was noisy and it was fast…. Too fast. And while I treated it like my baby, at the time I did some stuff in that car that could’ve landed me in hot water.
I haven’t done a lot of reminiscing about those days until recently when we had a ‘father/son day’ that involved me taking Hudson to the car museum in Launceston.
We went in and he saw this blue car (the exact model I owned) and asked for a photo with it like it was Christmas! He said it was because it had ‘Sonic’ written on the bonnet and it was the right colour for his favourite video game character. It was at this point I got to tell him that I owned one of these and things went up a level. The rest of the day and the whole way home we talked about cars, my childhood and I shared a heap of things with him that he hadn’t heard before. It was some of the best bonding we’ve ever had.
Time flies by so fast that we forget that these little people just want our time to chat and learn things about us from before we were their parents. They love the chance to talk about the ‘old days’ and I never knew how important that was to build a better connection.
If you get the opportunity to get out your old photos and show your kids, it might just start a conversation that allows them to know you better. Maybe when they are teenagers and going through something similar to what you did at that age, they might be more likely to talk it through with you because they know you’ve been there once and you’ll understand. Seems like time well spent to me.