Value of spending time with young people

By SHARON RANDALL

Scripps Howard News Service

One of the things I like about being a columnist, aside from working at home in my pajamas, is getting to spend time with young people.

If you work in a newsroom, as I did for years, you deal mostly with people of a certain age - the age young people refer to as old. And you write mostly about older people, it seems, especially about old, white men.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Personally, I like old people. Most of them. They're looking younger to me everyday. And some of my best friends are old, white men.

But it helps to spend time around babies and children and teenagers. Especially if they are not your own and you don't have to keep them overnight.

How does it help? Well, it spares you the folly of taking yourself too seriously. What you find so impressive about yourself won't matter a whit to them. Any high school teacher will vouch for that.

It tells you that the world is not so dismal after all - not when it's filled with the kinds of faces you see in preschools and playgrounds and high school gymnasiums.

It reminds you that you're not indispensable; there's someone brighter, smarter, with bigger dreams and ideas, waiting to take your place.

I'll start with the babies. Sunday morning I was sitting in church listening to a sermon on the crucifixion and getting thoroughly depressed about death. Everybody dies sooner or later. I've always known that. But I watched my mother do it a year ago, so I know it a bit differently now.

Anyhow, there I was, glum about my own mortality, when suddenly, right in front of me, a baby broke loose from her mother's grip and started crawling across the pew to freedom. I nabbed her before she got to the aisle, scooped her up, drool and all, and handed her back to her mom.

Something about that baby - the weight of her body, the fuzz on her head, the way her feet pedaled the air - made me feel somehow more alive.

I felt it again later that day, when I officiated at the Monterey County spelling bee and watched 37 nail-biting middle schoolers take their very best shots - until finally, 11-year-old Rachel Dart stood on tiptoe to spell "declivate" and won a trip to the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. this May.

The next morning, I stood before a much larger assembly to give the keynote address at Monterey High School's student body election. What do you say to a gym full of teenagers?

I told them about my grandmother, who won the right to vote in 1920, with passage of the 19th amendment, and would rather die than miss a chance to go to the polls.

I rambled on some, as I am wont to do, then ended with this reminder: Soon it will be their turn to change the world, to make it a better place. The thought seemed to rattle them a bit, but they took it pretty well.

Maybe they know about all the middle schoolers, little children and babies, who are lining up to fill their Nikes.

Maybe they won't mind sharing the weight of the world with us old folks for a while.

Sharon Randall is winner of the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors and Best of the West commentary awards.