Summer’s End
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
Someone said it in the hall today just as I was looking out on the greenery in full view outside a nearby window.
“Summer is almost over.”
I was in two worlds at the time: the one that allows me to walk hazily between the cubicle rows and glaring computer monitors back to my own square space, and this other place that is not deliberate enough to be called imagination or day dreaming or even an inner-dialogue. Caught on a plain between both mentalities, those words shocked me awake.
Summer is almost over almost as quickly as it began and soon the flourishing Cottonwood that I’d just begun to notice was soon going to whither to a skeletal remains of this beautiful tree. Am I that old already … that the time passes imperceptibly and before I know it, entire seasons have passed before I notice them come up around me?
My daughter, who only yesterday was a baby swaddled to near death on her first trip out with us is now almost six years old. Six years old next month and well into kindergarten. She can read and write and apologize for her mistakes, which means she can recognize ours, and we’re no longer perfect for her. But how we rank in her small world of personalities and acquaintances is still near the top, though that might change soon.
Another six years from now, our near-teen daughter will have no trouble finding issue with us. I had no idea my parents were when I was her age or how clueless they probably felt. I am still getting used to my friends being adults, and that has been a bigger reality struggle for me than my own adulthood. I had a professor in college once tell me that I possessed a wisdom older than my age at the time and I sometimes wonder if that is not the case now. If maybe age and wisdom have balanced or if now, in fact, I am in debt to intelligence. I haven’t stopped reading or trying to educate myself.
I read now more than ever before, but scholarly thought is more forced, less natural. It’s an effort to wonder about god. Now I have my own children to observe – to see the world through – without casting a vision onto others’. My circle of good friends has diminished, so I have to rely on myself now to shape my own perception, the way it should be. A simple statement made off-handedly in my presence set these thoughts flooding. If anything, that is a comfort. Overthinking is one habit that apparently doesn’t dissolve with age.
