I did closure all day. I love it.
I love the word. I know, I know. It's a theraspeak derivation and something we should shun and scoff at, but still. It's a noun that stayed a noun and didn't wander off into verbland (although I'm sure somebody, somewhere is saying right now "You should closure that, dude").
Actually, I think I kind of like it as a verb, too.
I closured some stuff today. Mostly bills. And little angst over bills. And a conflict with an accounts payable department staffed by people whose English is painful to the ears.
But something else snapped shut today, and that's what's on my mind. Most of what happened in my world in the past 12 months has been awkward, unsettling and often disturbing. There were changes, serious changes, and I realized that my lifestyle had slid me into a Beckett play, where nothing new happens and any conception of change seems dream-like and unreal. Until it happens.
As last spring approached and then appeared, I realized that a milestone was coming that I wasn't prepared for. My daughter was going to graduate from high school, and I wasn't ready.
I know that it happens to many of us, but in my case I had reason to pause. My daughter will grow up, but my son will not.
I don't mean that to sound so negative. Of course he will grow, and mature. But it will be attenuated; he is still Peter Pan and will be for a long time, I think, probably considerably past high school graduation, if that even occurs. So I reached a point where my girl had become a young adult and suddenly I felt lost. I've written about some of this in this blog.
Last spring, I flailed in a public way, in my column, about the impending graduation. I whined and wept and felt sorry for myself, and my readers were gracious and understanding but probably grateful when I was done. It was a little excessive.
Bethy comes home tonight, already in the air and on her way, finished with her first year of college, already a second-semester sophomore. This is amazing to me, my college experience being a little different. To paraphrase Zonker, being a sophomore were three of the best years of my life.
And the door, somehow, swung shut tonight. I survived. She survived. We survived. Our lives got different, and they will be different from here on out, and we're still hanging in there. I'm a year older and no wiser, but I know more things. Last spring I was just scared.
Of all the columns I wrote last year about this subject, this is probably the closest to how I was really feeling. Part nostalgic, part sad, part apprehensive, and part aware that when you tie your life to the lives of others, you'd better understand that you're in for a wild ride, and most of the time you don't get to steer.
Chuck
Let me tell you about my world these days.
Three people I care about have been diagnosed with cancer in the past month or so. There's plenty of hope with all three, but still.
Thanks to my colleague Larry, I went fishing a couple of weeks ago with my son. First time in years. I caught one, too, although my casting skills need a lot of work.
I'm really concerned about this imminent FCC decision to allow media conglomerates to own large chunks of the system that provides information to most Americans (i.e., newspapers and television). And I'm more concerned from the impression I get that most people don't even know about it.
Bill Bennett has crossed my mind a time or two, as has the Flight Suit In Chief. So has the lady golfer thing, although I don't golf so I didn't pay much attention.
I could write about all of this, and maybe I will. But, for better or worse, I'm a father, and after eighteen and a half years I'm now approaching the end of a chapter. For the next couple of weeks, then, I hope you'll bear with me. I have things on my mind.
If memory serves (and my particular server has been down a lot lately), the last teacher strike in our school district was in the fall of 1990. These are never pleasant, for anyone involved, but as this came before school started it was hardest, I suspect, for the five-year-olds. Eleventh-graders probably enjoyed their additional five weeks of vacation, but those entering kindergarten had been waiting a long time for summer to end.
It was in October, then, that my daughter had her first day of school. My wife drove her, and she noticed that down the block a few houses, another little red-haired girl and her mom were apparently waiting for a bus that hadn't come. My wife stopped and offered them a ride, and this is how my daughter met Lucy.
They were in Mrs. Lien's afternoon kindergarten class at Serene Lake Elementary, and they became friends. The bus situation got straightened out, so every day at noon I'd walk Beth outside and she'd look for Lucy. The two of them would wait together.
Years later, Beth would sometimes drive by and give Lucy a ride to high school. Imagine that.
Time, like most things, is relative. As we all know, relativity was invented by Albert Einstein in 1928. "Sit on a hot stove for a minute," he said, "and it seems like an hour. Spend an hour with a pretty girl, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity."
One suspects Albert Einstein had gotten real tired of answering dumb physics questions.
His statement, though, does bring up some interesting questions. Did he actually test this theory? What if it had been a pretty hot stove?
I get it, though. The past 13 years have been fairly slow for me; lots of routine, some drudgery, some extra pounds, a little less hair, mostly and merely day after day of the same old, same old.
But last week I walked her down to the kindergarten bus. Two days later she went to the Homecoming dance, and the next morning I taught her how to drive. Over the weekend she learned how to play the cello, appreciate good coffee, surf the net, do algebra and speak Russian. Now there are only a few school days left, and I realize my time with a pretty girl seems like only a minute.
Again, I ask for your patience as I blather on about something we all experience. My friend, Paul, who enjoys pointing out my various neuroses, commented once about my obsession with the passing of time. "Time seems to weigh heavier on you," he said (yes, ha ha, very nice, thank you).
There's a lot going on in the world, as always. We haven't found Osama, Saddam, or WMD. SARS is still out there, as is the West Nile virus. I haven't heard about the killer bees lately, but I assume they're still around.
The Mariners are red hot. The economy is still anything but. I haven't seen "The Matrix: Reloaded" but I intend to.
But these days, I'm remembering teachers and T-ball games. School carnivals and choir concerts.
And mostly the image of two red-haired girls. They stand on the street and talk and laugh, and when the bus comes they literally skip their way aboard. I watch it drive away, confident that I know where they're headed, only now understanding that it was not to elementary school, but toward today.
This is my world, then. I spend my days paying for prom dresses and tuition, but in the back of my mind I'm still sort of waiting, halfway listening for a bus that hasn't stopped here in a long time.
6:37:29 PM 
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