The Boy and I headed out for a walk after dinner. We took the dog, we chatted about school, keyboards (as in computer keyboards — a recent interest of the Boy’s), district band tryouts (tomorrow evening), and random topics (as if that list weren’t random enough). It was another of those “how many more times do we do this?” moments. The Girl didn’t go with us because she had gone to her boyfriend’s house to watch a movie with him.
Everyone’s role slowly shifts.
The dump truck was a highlight of a birthday some years ago — his fifth? sixth? seventh? It was all he was dreaming of, and he loved it so.
Then he outgrew it, and K thought of using it for a planter. She had a potted plant in it, replaced every now and then, for a couple of years.
Now it sits by the side gate of our fence, neglected and forgotten until I walk into the yard, happen to glance back down.
We dedicated today to our elderberries. I clipped the clusters from the bush in the late morning, and K spent a lot of time pulling the small black pearls from their clusters as I worked and after I finished when I joined her.
And when I say we dedicated today to the elderberries, I mean the whole day. As I type (and work on my safety videos for school), K is finishing up, filling jars with fresh elderberry preserves.
We ended up with something like who-knows-how-many kilos of berries (was it four? five? I can’t recall) which will make who-knows-how-many pints of preserves.
The other task for the evening was helping the Boy get his room straightened up, a Sisyphean task if ever there be one. We ended up throwing out quite a bit of stuff, an act that initially stressed and frustrated the Boy a great deal.
Surrendering even the smallest trinket is difficult for someone as sentimental as E. I can understand that, though I hope eventually to grow out of it myself.
The Boy left for camp today. He’ll be gone until next Saturday. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Typical parental concerns: on the one hand, I love seeing him grow up, seeing him not only willing but excited about a week away from us. Not that he’s excited about being away from us, per se, but rather that he’s excited to be going to camp and the prospect of being away from us for a week doesn’t worry him or dampen that excitement.
On the other hand, I know how situations like that can stress him out. Or could stress him out. Perhaps he’s growing out of it, but I’m not: I’m still stressed about him being gone. Not about him being gone, but not being in the near vicinity to keep an eye on things.
“You can’t be there for them all the time. You have to let go.” That’s the common wisdom. The common parental expectation.
But that doesn’t always allay the worries…
The Boy decided he wanted to build a kicker ramp to practice jumping.
“Will you help me?”
“Of course, but that means I’ll help you — you’ll do it, I’ll just coach.”
So the Boy measured the wood,
cut the wood,
created the curve of the ramp, and
screwed most of it together.
When it came time to jump, he got a little nervous. “It’s a bit higher than it looked in the video.”
He’ll get it, though. I have no doubt.
It’s been five years now since Nana passed. E is the same age now that L was then, and now L is only a few short months from being a legal adult.
A common theme in my writing is the suddenness and recurrence of my realization o f just how much time has passed since a certain event, and using that realization to project into the future with the realization that it will come just as quickly as this moment has arrived. Almost thirty years ago, for example, I left for Poland for the first time; project those same nearly-thirty years into the future, and I’m almost eighty, the age Papa died two years after Nana, now three years ago. See? I just did it again: created a loop of time.
In those five years since Nana’s passing, the GIrl has grown almost an entire foot; the Boy has reached a point that we just barely have to look down while talking to him. In those dunce years since Nana’s passing, the Girl has become a volleyball star and broken then re-broken high school track and field records; the Boy has picked up guitar and trombone as well as becoming a confident soccer player.
In another five years, the Girl will be finishing up college, lining up graduate school (with her interests, she will likely end up getting a doctorate straight away), and firmly established in a life of her own, a life without (to some degree) K and me. In another five years, the Boy will be almost done with high school, thinking about college, and probably still playing trombone and Fortnite. I’ll be creeping ever-nearer my sixties; K will be in her fifties.
With all this in my head, we go to Polish mass in the afternoon, and while everyone is getting the pot luck afterward read, the Boy heads out to the playground and it’s clear how much he’s changed…
Though it’s hard to comprehend how we’ve reached this moment so quickly, the Girl is just shy of six feet tall and wrapping up her junior year of high school, and the Boy has crossed the five-foot barrier and will soon be twelve. The changes coming are enormous: L will be making final decisions about college over the summer, and the Boy will soon have a full-blown, empty-leg, teenage boy appetite.
We got a hint of that this evening.
After eating a full meal, he came back downstairs hunting for food no more than five minutes later.
“I’m still hungry,” he declared. So he got a piece of yesterday’s leftover pizza out and warmed it up.
Clover smelled it, sensed a treat, and followed him into Papa’s room (it will always be “Papa’s room”), and sat down like the best behaved pup in the world.
It’s been a while since we had any sports in the front yard. Lately, though, the Boy has been asking to head out to play soccer in the front yard a little. With the time change, this is likely to increase — at least I hope so.
It, too, will be gone before we know it.
The Girl was heading out to Target.
“I want to go, too!” the Boy exclaimed.
What was going to be the reaction? She’s often reticent to take him anywhere, but surprisingly she simply said, “Well, you can come with me.”
So our children went clothes shopping alone.
When the Girl decided she wanted to play volleyball, when she tried out for the team as a sixth grader and didn’t make it, when she became really determined, she’d come ask me, “Padre” (She’d started calling me that by then) “can we go out to the front yard and practice volleyball?” I’d toss her balls, simulate spikes, help her practice running for balls — all the basic skills someone of my eager volleyball means could help with given our lack of a net.
At some point, she asked me for the last time to go help her practice. I didn’t realize it was the last time she would ask me, and to be honest, I don’t know if I even agreed to it. She might have asked, and I might have made some kind of excuse. Or maybe we went and practiced one last time.
She hasn’t asked me to do that in years now. She probably never will again. The last time, passed without knowing, fully past with complete knowledge.
So when the Boy asked if, instead of swimming tonight, we could practice basketball, I agreed. I didn’t really want to: I wanted to get some serious exercise in the pool. But he’s that age: how many more times will he ask? When will be the last time?
Where did this come from? The last time I remember doing this with him — I can’t even recall. Two years ago? More? Less?
L insists that the boys are too old now to have play dates.
“They just hangout!” she explains with exasperation.
“What about you? Do you have play dates?”
[L rolls her eyes…]
Today, our Boy finished elementary school. “I mean, I have to go three more days after that,” he explained to me the other day, “but once I get that piece of paper, I’m basically done.”
Our daughter has two more years of high school; our son starts middle school next year…
The Boy is no longer a Cub Scout. That’s over — a whole phase of his life behind him. Tonight was his first meeting as a Boy Scout.
There was the requisite paperwork — which he filled out. “This is all you, little man,” I told him with a smile.
They started the meeting with introductions to the troop: “We’d like to invite our newest scouts to introduce themselves and tell us a little bit about them.” E stepped forward, shyly as always, and said, “I’m E. I like soccer and guitar.” After introductions, the new scouts went out with some of the older boys to learn the ropes, so to speak.
So different than Cub Scouts. Boy-run, boy-planned, boy-approved. “We’re just there to make sure they do everything safely,” the scoutmaster told us when we first visited back in December.
We parents didn’t see the kids until they were done, wrapping everything up with their circle. In fact, tonight is likely the only night we’ll stay through the whole thing. “Most parents just drop them off and then pick them up later,” the assistant scoutmaster told us new parents.
“This is going to do the Boy so much good,” I told K.
We spent the evening downtown, the five of us — the two kids and the dog. It’s so rare that everyone’s schedules work out to let us do something like this. We’ll take every opportunity we have.
Our stroll eventually led us down to the river and the new Grand Bohemian hotel which is the latest highlight of the ever-developing downtown Greenville.
Eventually we made it down the the rocky area of the river just at the edge of the main downtown park, the place both of our kids loved to run about on the rocks as little kids.
“Those days are long gone” K and I constantly remind ourselves. And yet, every now and then, the stars align,
the kids are both fascinated with the same thing, and for a brief moment, we pop back a few years in the past.
The Girl has slowly disappeared from this site though not for lack of interest on my part. She’s reticent to have photos taken; she is often not at home in the evenings, either at practice, the gym, the library, or just going to visit friends; the things we talk about don’t result in cute exchanges anymore but just honest sharing with each other — when she’s willing to share. She is, in short, a typical sixteen-year-old, and her withdrawal from this site mirrors a bit of a withdrawal from family life into her own, growing life.
So when she accepted an invitation this evening to come downstairs and play a board game with E and me, the temptation to take a picture was great, but I knew it would ruin the moment. K probably did, too, and didn’t even try a stealth shot. Instead, the three of us sat and played Sequence, chatting about nothing of any significance, just spending some time together. I played without a care, randomly placing my pieces with only the occasional intent — usually to block L’s pending sequence. She won anyway (she always wins board games), and though I would have played another, neither child was interested.
“Are they both just humoring me?” I thought as they walked away.
I keep repeating myself: X is always a highlight of our time in Polska. When you come here only every few years, I guess everything becomes a highlight. Still, going to Pyzowka to visit K’s dearest friend D and her family has to count as a highlight no matter how you define it.
D is the type of friend you have that, no matter how much time has passed since your last visit, the years disappear in an instant and except for the topics of conversation, your relationship feels little different than it did when you were in high school together. These days, you might talk about the cost of your child applying to college versus the cost of your child going to college if you lived in the states. You might talk about friends that only one of you has seen in the last twenty years and how they’ve changed or not changed. You might talk about the cost of heating your house this year as opposed to last year. These are discussions your parents would have had years ago, but now you have them.
Before you know it, your children will be having them as well. But for now, your children are happy jumping on the trampoline and playing with a puppy. The cost of heating is as distant to them as it was to you when you were their age. They hear your discussions, but they don’t pay much attention to them.
Then again, neither did you.
There was so much more — so much more — today that, at 11:59, I don’t care to cover. But this was the most insignificant event of the day.
The Girl got her restricted license today. This means that, once we have her covered on our insurance, she can drive alone during daylight hours.
It’s not that big of a change, I guess. She’s been driving for six months now. Ah, but it is a big change: she’ll soon be doing it alone.
The Boy learned about the joys of putting together furniture.
When I got my current job teaching eighth graders, Nana said to me, “I don’t know how I survived your eighth-grade year. I wanted to strangle you every other day.” I can’t say that I’ve been as upset and frustrated with teaching eighth graders as Nana might have suggested. Indeed, I’ve come to love it, and I don’t really have any desire to teach any other grade.
My own child, though, was a different story. I began to understand Nana’s hyperbole. I haven’t written much about the Girl here because it’s been a typical period of growth, which means frustration for parents. What are we doing wrong? Why is she pushing us away? What can we do differently? We knew the answers to those questions (Nothing; Because she’s thirteen/fourteen; Nothing — just be there unconditionally), but that didn’t make it any easier.
In the last few weeks (or even months), though, since she’s started driving, since she went back to work, since she’s made it through her first year of high school, it’s like she’s taken a deep breath and made peace with us and herself.
I knew it was coming: the transformation eighth graders go through is amazing, and I know it continues through ninth grade (until they’re sophomores and temporarily revert because they’re sophomores and know everything — or is that just a cliche?), but to experience it has been refreshing. To begin seeing what kind of an adult she will be: a valiant defender of anyone facing injustice, a friend who sometimes lets her love for her friend overshadow reason (not always a good thing, not always a bad thing), self-reflective and self-aware — to see this change really start to kick in just makes me smile.
Tonight, we finished watching Schindler’s List. The reason (other than it’s a moving film that everyone should see) is that L and I are planning on visiting Auschwitz while we’re in Poland, and I wanted her to have an idea of what the scale of the Holocaust in real, human terms. Tomorrow, we will watch Conspiracy, a film about the Wannsee conference so she can get an idea of the “logic” that drove the Nazis.
That I am comfortable letting her watch such a film is a testament to her maturity.
