Back to School
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“I’m fancy,” Jones announces.
Standing there in our apartment, looking like a million bucks. Mommy taking photographs of him from every angle.
First day of school and there are premonitions of frost in the morning air. But overhead, an endless, vividly blue sky, sunlight touching everything.
Jones is goofing up the street with his friend Vivian. Cracking her up by doing funny walks. Vivian, beautiful in her new dress, giggling and smiling. Her hair like Kurt Cobain, her eyes mischief. They’re having so much fun. Jones stops dead on the street, throws his body into wild spasms, “I’m a man getting electrocuted with blood on his hand!” he shouts. And then he stops. “Hi friend!” he calls out to a stranger drifting past on a skateboard.
And all of us parents are nested around them, shuffling up the street, snapping photographs like paparazzi.
And when we turn the corner, Rachelle says to him, “Look Jones, there’s your new school!” Right before him is a playing field glowing green and gold. It’s like a dream, a prize, and when I look at it, into Jones’s future, I can hear music playing in my head. Sweet Thing by Van Morrison. And it is here on this field where Jones will inhabit some of his most perfect memories.
He shouts, “Yay!” at the sight of it.
Jones. His oversized yellow backpack. His determined, happy walk into the world. This boy. So fresh. So genuinely excited. The way he lives inside and outside of us at the same time. And as we’re saying goodbye to him, he just charges into the school. He doesn’t look back. He jumps in.
And we are left standing on the sidewalk with all the other parents. Young mothers hiding tears behind sunglasses. Flowers swaying as the wind moves through a bush. Everyone smiling, everybody a little melancholy. A ladybug glistens in the sun on a bright, yellow fire hydrant. Such a small, astonishingly beautiful thing. Each one of us passing such miracles as we walk slowly home, each one feeling a little different now, humbled, and so very, very, absurdly lucky to get to be a part of it all.
