Westword, Volume XXXIII

A Connection with Mr. Williams
 
Picture this: Martha Jones School, early September, 2012. The Gem and I arrive at the front door, but then stop dead in our tracks, our progress halted by one of those folding sandwich boards with a sign on it that read “Welcome, Class of 2025.”
 
2025?!
 
It seemed like a ridiculous foreign number, even more ridiculous than 1999 was – when Prince sang of it, seventeen years earlier.
 
Ah, but here we are. Present, meet future. It happens all the time, sure, but some of those times just carry a bit more feeling. More bittersweet. More everything.
 
You know, the end of childhood is never delineated with a single milepost. It is not a grade level or license or diploma or job or a first day living somewhere else. No, it’s like the tide – adulthood seeps in with firsts and new challenges and changes. Youth ebbs in a thousand little lasts, not all of them obvious. Birthdays and holidays and playoff games roll by like every breaking wave, each flooding our todays before giving way to the next one right behind it. We don’t notice much difference between two, but when viewed through the longer lens of time, we see the little changes and the impressions left like ripples in the sand; each one ends just a fraction farther away, leaving grains of the past etched in our memories.
 
And you rarely notice when a stage of life has gotten behind you – until you look behind you.
 
When I was a kid, The Muppet Show was appointment TV. The entertainment and lessons and songs all stuck with me. Now, fast forward many moons, somewhere a bit before 2012 – sitting with my toddlers watching some ridiculous kids’ show called “Yo Gabba Gabba.” In this episode, Paul Williams made a guest appearance and performed “The Rainbow Connection” (Williams co-wrote the Oscar-nominated song for The Muppet Movie.)
 
Watching and listening unlocked something – something like being hit by a freight train carrying Father Time and boxcars full of childhood memories. The years (and my face) unraveled a little, but hey…when my kids were that young I could just fake a sneeze, and they would have no idea about my condition, thankfully.
 
So now fast forward another half a generation or so, because as my oldest ticks off one big milestone after the next, that mythical 2025 is no myth. Adulthood, college, leaving the nest, and partying like it’s 1999, all in her very near future. Birds in the last days of spring. You may read this in January, but this whole year is gonna feel like late May, folks (to speak nothing of that birthday on my horizon.)
 
I am ready for it. Except that I’m not ready. I should be more prepared. I had years of practice, didn’t I? All those older cousins for whom I’ve been the “funcle” to their kids; my sister with two graduates and only baby Erin still in college; heck, even little Roo is turning 21 this year! I love all of them, of course, and celebrated all those kids’ milestones with joy, and I did not grieve at the loss of childhood or the stages they left behind.
 
But this is different. I’ve heard it too many times to ignore it, and at last I see it – there are some things you just can not, do not feel until they happen with your own kids.
 
And so it goes. Each step forward brings a look back for me and The Gem, and maybe for you, too. Bet on a boatload of fake sneezes when spring comes and my daughter walks up to get her Westwood High School diploma. A few months after that, she will head to points as-yet-unknown, just about the time Martha Jones welcomes the parents of the Class of 2038. Seriously, 2038.
 
My friends…if you think I have ever been too emotional or obsessed with the passage of time here on the back page, then might I kindly suggest you get yourself a bottle of red, a bucket of popcorn and a box of Kleenex or four. Then buckle up, and we’ll navigate 2025 together.
 
I once thought things would get easier when I grew up, and I was wrong.
 
I once thought things would get easier when they grew up, and I am again wrong.
 
Westwood Living? No…thank YOU for living in Westwood. See you next month, and I look forward to hearing from you – the lovers, the dreamers, and me! – any time at jayresha@comcast.net.