We took our kids to an amusement park and it was like one of those credit card commercials:

  • Tickets = $79 per person
    • Parking = $26
      • Rented stroller = $16
        • Lunch for three kids = $70
          • Caffeinated soft drink for one tired dad = priceless

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            No, that beverage was actually $6 — SIX dollars?!

            It’s true that there were wonderful moments, including our children’s screaming with delight faces on the rollercoaster. This is the truth of that commercial. You splurge in order to have an experience with your loved ones that money cannot buy.

            In addition to the amusement park, we had traveled to the area to connect with our family’s history. We stayed in a nineteenth-century family farmhouse, which had been renovated by my father’s cousin at a price I can’t even imagine. Yet, the sacred worth is measured in more than financial terms. Our family roots reach deeper than the weathered apple trees in the yard.

            I loved hearing all the stories about my hard-working, somber relatives: men who farmed the land, women who raised enough kids to field their own football team.

            We also come from people who were, shall we say, characters. Take my father’s Aunt Dot. Unlike my predominantly German Protestant family, she was Irish Catholic. On the porch of the farmhouse, I learned that Dot wore red lipstick and stiletto heels; she smoked cigarettes and swore, “Oh my God!” Most family stories about Dot end with a chuckle, “She sure was something else!”

            I want my children to have a sense of their family as each of them pursue the holy question asked by poet Mary Oliver, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

            At the amusement park, my wild and precious five-year-old told a bold-face lie to the park employee about her age so that she could go with her big brothers on the ride for six-year-olds and up. As she drove the model car around the track, she actually beat the older kids. Priceless! Oh my God, that girl is something else!

            Maybe somehow in the mystery of time, Dot laughed too.

            Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of Little Big Moments, a collection of mini-essays about parenting, and Tigers, Mice & Strawberries: Poems. Both titles are available most anywhere books are sold online. Taylor-Troutman lives in Chapel Hill where he serves as pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church and occasionally stumbles upon the wondrous while in search of his next cup of coffee.