Finding a Purpose Through “Twisters”

Kids find passion in the strangest places.

My kids go to a lot more movies than most other kids. In the same way that, because of my parents, I grew up knowing a lot more about hospitals and electrical grids than most other children, my kids know more about movies, college basketball and interior design than anybody they go to school with. Our generation grew up going to the movies, sitting in the dark with strangers having a shared experience, but this is a rare experience for kids now. It’s not rare for my children though. I host a weekly movie podcast. They get dragged to the theater all the time.

This July, a couple of weeks before school started back up here in Georgia, I took my son Wynn to see Twisters. As I worked upstairs, he watched the first Twister movie downstairs, the one with Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt (and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Tar director Todd Field), and when I came back down to drive us to the theater, I noticed he had already started watching stormchaser videos on YouTube. My kids, because they are not monsters, know not to talk during movies, but I noticed during the film that he was unusually rapt as he stared at the screen, a feeling I know well, a feeling anyone that who loves movies is always chasing. After it was over, he didn’t say a word until we got to the car. He then turned to me. “That was…