c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. He lives in Durham, N.C.)

UNDATED _ A week ago, while in the role of son, I went for a run along the canal cutting diagonally across the north side of my hometown.

At 52nd Street I turned back toward my parents’ house. I came to the site of the Ron-D-Vu, a drive-in restaurant whose gravel lot was the social beacon for my high school crowd. The day my girlfriend got her driver’s license, the first thing we did in her dad’s white Buick convertible was to “buzz the Vu.”

Nothing lasted long. The Vu was surpassed by Merrill’s Hi-Decker, home of a radio deejay. For serious date food, the TeePee was tops. Then, of course, cruising drive-ins went out of fashion, and we grew up.

The Ron-D-Vu is now an apartment house. I looked for a plaque marking this one-time mecca, but saw nothing.

It would trivialize both yesterday and today to say that life seemed simpler then. It didn’t seem simple at all then. I remember the night a friend and I were to be initiated into a social club. We met at the Vu. The upperclassmen were roaring drunk. We could sense that initiatory rites would get out of hand. We fled the Vu and ran across an open field. That field now houses a college’s day-care center.

This weekend, back in the role of father, I traverse new rites of passage. I deliver an 18-year-old son to college, into the hands of total strangers: names on dormitory doors, names on plaques, names on buildings, traditions two centuries old. It will become a rich tapestry to him but might never be more than names to me.

We give our 8-year-old son a birthday party. Eight boys race around house and yard, forming teams for squirt gun fights, then talking earnestly about Pokemon, today’s blip on the cultural landscape.

My morning e-mail brings the sad news that a high school classmate recently buried her 23-year-old son, victim of an accident while hiking. A mutual friend looks for “some shred of meaning in this sudden and tragic twist of fate.”

Back at the Vu, none of this lay ahead. Our horizon stretched as far as Homecoming, maybe as far as college, but never as far as the Vu’s closing, or Merrill’s closing, or the TeePee’s closing, or our leaving home and never really returning, or moving from friend to friend, house to house, job to job, from rearing infants to releasing young adults.

Death didn’t lie ahead. Our parents would live forever, our husbands wouldn’t die in Vietnam, our marriages wouldn’t crumble, our children would never precede us in death.

Back at the Vu, our horizon stretched about as far as that of Jesus’ disciples. Who do people say I am? Jesus asked them. Some say you’re John the Baptist returned to life; some say Elijah. Who do you say I am? he asked. You are Messiah, Peter answered.

Then Jesus raised their eyes to the horizon. There’s more than that, he said. The Son of Man will suffer. He will be rejected. He will be killed. He will be raised from the dead. Nothing will ever be the same.

They were shocked. This must never happen to you! sputtered Peter.

But it did happen. The way of life is always a way of suffering. More than suffering, more than failing and falling, more than burying too soon, but never easy, never far from tears. And never far from God. For suffering isn’t a contradiction of hope, a mistake God somehow allowed to slip past.

Suffering is the essence. Not because life is a gloomy affair, but because, by the grace of God, it is good to leave the Vu. It is good to step into adulthood. It is good to attempt marriage, even though the odds are grim. It is good to raise children and to let them go. It is good to live and thereby to embrace death.

It is good to press on, not because we will prevail and never suffer, but because God bids us look beyond the moment. And once we raise our eyes to the horizon, there is no turning back to the Vu.

DEA END EHRICH