Monday, January 15, 2018

Young Indy raising my kids

With my kids I recently started watching the third boxed set of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, the 1990s show that had its hero going about the world in the early 20th century, meeting important historical figures and having lots of adventures.  Watching this series with my boys has made we weepy, but in a good way.

I remember years ago, in my early 20s, I dreamed of seeing the Young Indy shows, which I'd largely missed out on as a kid.  At that moment in the early 2000s, the series was old enough to no longer be available, but not yet old enough to merit a nostalgic release or re-release.  A few years later, maybe when I was living in Spain, I learned that they had either come out or were going to come out as a DVD boxed set.  Still years later, I finally ordered a box to reach me in Colombia via my mother.  At that moment I was fixing up a house in our town, and my wife and kid were living far away in Bogota.  At night, after a long day of office work, followed by a few hours working on the house in the evening, I would settle down in my room amidst the rubble and dust of the rehab, and watch an episode of Young Indy.  The boxed set was excellently put together, in that each episode of the show was accompanied by two to four documentaries on subjects from Norman Rockwell to ballet to Jan Smuts and apartheid. 

As I watched these shows, I dreamed that they could someday be a major self-contained source of entertainment and education for my largely TV-free infant son, when he was older.  Starting about two years ago I finally exposed my two boys to the show, and we've been watching an episode every few weeks ever since.  It just makes me sublimely happy to have this thread running from my lonely days in a drafty abandoned house, to occasional reunions with my family in the elegant Parkway neighborhood of Bogota, to a precarious few years in our DC-area apartment, to our present, comfortable reality in Central America.

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