Changing Places
Andy Crouch
July 1, 2000
For my parents, figuring out my high school love life required persistent detective work. My sophomore-year girlfriend, the first love of my life, broke up with me in the library stacks. Though I was devastated by the breakup, my parents never knew it—partly because I'd only given them hints about our relationship to begin with. Two years later, when I asked the next love of my life to the prom, my parents had to find out the details from my sister. So why is it that, eight years later, when the real love of my life and I decided to get engaged, we drove six hours to show up at her parents' doorstep and ask their blessing? And why were our parents the first people we called on Easter Monday, 1997, when Timothy Bennett Crouch was born? Somewhere in the years between my high school rehearsals for romance and the actual romance for which God had been preparing me, my parents' place in my life had changed. It's that change, so central to growing up, that is the subject of this issue's cover section. American adolescence is a kind of forced march into the prodigal son's exile—thanks to popular culture, we can't help but view our parents as residents of some distant and distasteful country where the hairstyles are tacky and the photos are always black and white. Those of us born at the dawn of the widespread availability of color film can feel, as Pleasantville suggested, that realism began with us. (Just imagine what a future virtual-reality-immersed generation will think of our crude two-dimensional photos. Dad, you're so flat!) But then we grow up a bit. We survive long enough to look at our own photos with both nostalgia and embarrassment. We begin to have a past—which is to say, like a photograph, we begin to be fixed. We are ...
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