Oh, Father Time...

     Tra-la-la...It is 3:00.  I'm home from the office early because my semester is over and I can now relax and maybe I'll sip some lemonade and just check Facebook and oh, look! How cute, my oldest child has posted something on his page: "I. Am. Now. In. High School."


     Crash-Bang!  That is me falling on the floor. No amount of pre-registration forms, no parenting manual prepares you for this day.  Where did the time go?  Oh let's just speed the plow, shall we?  Why don't we just sign up for his AARP card now?  If Father Time is going to be so cruel as to hurl our babies into the future at warp speed, then why not start those Senior Citizen discounts now?


     I know for him, time has moved way too slowly.  He can't wait to drive, to have more independence, and I remember that feeling acutely.  I remember when the word "year" was always preceded by the words "a whole." A year felt like...(insert eye roll here) forever.  Now I tend to think in 5-year and 10-year increments.  Probably not a good sign.


     But I promise you it was just yesterday, or it felt like just yesterday when he was getting ready to go to Kindergarten.  After I picked myself up off the floor, I promptly found two things:   
     1) His school photo album with year by year school pictures including this one from Kindergarten.  He wrote in the album that he enjoyed "reading and costumes."  Ha!  You don't say, future thespian.
     2)  A poem I wrote 9 years ago after attending the preview day for Kindergarten.  It was such a foreign planet.  I was bewildered by all of those children, moms and popsicles.  My baby was getting shuffled into some system, some machine that I knew would take good care of him, but something I knew nothing about.  Heck, I was still reeling from childbirth and now I had to adjust to school?  So I wrote this poem--really, it was yesterday-- but somehow the little boy in this poem seems to be going to high school now.  For the life of me, I'm still bewildered.

Kindergarten Enrollment Party

Slanting sunlight on playground and popsicles.

Kindergarten holds the mysteries

of exotic postcards or strange zoo animals.

Mothers hover.  Fathers flick

coats over their shoulders

like catalog models.  Everywhere

a cacophony of kids.

A pile of gravel calls them to conquer.

Girls who haven’t learned to yield

take the hill in skirts.  Boys hurl

pebbles at Miss Carr.

Finn finds his way from the fire truck
and scales the mountain

when no one else is there

and catches my eye in his triumph.

I see him, in a glimpse, grown,
doing the things men learn to do
like surveying a scene,
like setting his jaw,
like owning a piece of this earth for awhile.
Who can resist the fading 

afternoon light 

and those little fists?

I imagine him with boys

of his own. He looks like his father

used to when he was forty and starting to gray.
I feel my body start to slacken in age, heavier and tired
as he stands in his bright and certain future,
but then he bends to palm some pebbles
and places them on his head.
I don't realize he's making a crown.
All is see is his jagged crew cut
rough with dust, a firm chin
smeared in cherry stain. 

All I see is a boy with rocks on his head.
No mortar board, no snap brim fedora.
Just some silly rocks, a Garanimals shirt,
and the sly smile of Miss Carr
watching merely one of dozens of boys
do what they do with
no thought of tomorrow
at all.