Dining with Squirrels

Ben and Lucy’s school held a fundraiser today and I am officially a fan.

Those of you with kids in school know that Back-To-School season [buying backpacks and lunch boxes and checking underwear for holes] is closely followed by Fundraising Season.  Since the start of school 9 weeks ago, my kids’ school has already hosted two major fundraising campaigns,  a gift wrap sale and a magazine sale.  The proceeds from these sales go to things like paying for field trips and teachers’ supplies.

In the past, Oakdale Christian School has also hosted an annual auction.  I helped set up for it last year and made a mental note to never get strong-armed into helping plan it.  It looked like a nightmare.  The appeals for donations went on for months, and the mere orchestration of every detail of the evening looked labyrinthine.  I imagine that the woman in charge of it could have applied for a position in the United States Army and been granted officer status on that credit alone.

Perhaps all the other women helping that night felt as I did and, with the resourcefulness that beleagured mothers can summon, decided to can it.  And so the Foot Frolic Frenzy was born and, as I said, I approve!  Why have parents do all the work when you can make your kids run around the school for half an hour?  Ben and Lucy each collected 5 pledges from easy marks [thank you Grampa and Grama, Farmor, lovely aunts and uncles] and, in one half hour, earned more than one of the largest bids at last year’s auction.  Other benefits include gym teacher having the day off today, increased physical fitness for children, and anticipated early  bedtime for all.

Seriously, these kids didn’t lick it off the grass, as Natasha likes to say.  The strong and savvy mothers [and the occasional father — what can I say?  we live in Grand Rapids, Michigan] who plan and execute these events have bred a bunch of tenacious little boogers who attacked that Foot Frolic with, well, a Frenzy.  I wanted to tell a few of them to slow down, take it easy, maybe walk a lap.  But we need the money.

Got to see Barack Obama downtown today.  A woman said to me “You’re beaming!” and I grinned at her stupidly.  Yes, I am BEAMING.  I’m beaming because Barak Obama is smart and eloquent and speaks to my concerns.  I’m beaming because Calder Plaza was full of all kinds of people who felt the same way and who love our country and want to see it cared for with vision and integrity and sacrifice.  I’m beaming because I LOVE citizenship.  I love that we can rally and question and argue and vote.  All without getting shot.

On the subject of citizenship, Karl just got back from his annual GeekFest in Boston [programmin’ with his homies] and showed me this cool tool one of his posse made using my favorite JavaScript framework, JQuery.  Check it out at http://maps.google.com/vote.  If anyone you know isn’t registered to vote, introduce them to our great American privilege by showing them this website.

Props to my dear friend David LaGrand who hooked me up with a vhl pass to this event.  I imagine my experience today was much like flying first class:  skip the line of thousands, be whisked by usher straight to the front, and settle in to your capacious seating — or in this case, piece of fence upon which to lean.  So much for democracy.

Really.

I remember when our time at Four Friends was winding down how many people asked me what I was doing next.  I was reminded of my answer recently when I saw a former customer who asked me how the teaching was going.    Huh?    Apparently I’d told everyone I was thinking about becoming a teacher.  Well, I had to say something.

But I really have no idea what I’ll be doing as my darling children make their way into their futures.  I never have been a planner, so this transition was, well, no transition at all.  More like falling off a cliff.  Or flying thousands of miles on a jet to Italy in mere hours [more on that later].  One minute we were in summer, the next we weren’t.

Our summer was entirely blissful, sunny and sweet.  We slept until we woke up, and moved directly outside to play with the neighbors every single day.  A trip to the zoo was too organized and demanding for the likes of us.   Lucy learned to ride a two-wheeler, Ben went shirtless almost every day, and both of them grew two inches in 3 months.  Summer weeds.  Sunflowers.

And now, for the first time, Ben and Lucy are both in school every day, Ben in second grade, Lucia in first.  I felt last week as if we were hurtling toward a large pile of snow on the sledding hill and I was bracing myself for impact.  But it turned out to be a ramp-like pile of snow and the kids simply took off flying in the air, as if they knew it was a ramp all along.

Not that they didn’t object to being awoken at 7am on Tuesday.  Ben came out of sleep saying “no no no no no no no no” and Lucy moaned “WHY did you have to wake me up?”  The only person happy about this change was Karl, who has been a lonely man in the mornings this summer.  I apologized to him every day when I called to say good morning to him at work.  Good morning, honey, and I’m sorry I couldn’t get out of bed to say it in person.

But the inspiration of a new backpack got each kid up and out the door and onto their bikes for the new and exhilarating experience of riding your bike to school.  If you’re older than, say, 35, don’t bother telling me how you pushed all your siblings to school in a wagon uphill both ways for 5 miles there and 10 miles back.  Kids ride in cars now.  Even kids who live 6 blocks from school.  We did.  So riding our bikes felt nutty and wild and convicting.  Ben and Lucy’s were the only bikes on the rack.

And then into their respective classrooms for a day that will ever remain a mystery, as will all the days of school, to their mother.  What did they do in there for 7 hours?  When I picked them up, I looked for telltale signs of what happened, but they just looked sweaty.  And that may be the weirdest thing about sending your 5 and 7 year olds off to school.  After years of monitoring their every moment, every morsel in the mouth and every ensuing excretion, every moment, really, both waking and sleeping — after all that, they’re just GONE.  And when I picked them up after school, when Lucy merely said “it was fun” and Ben said “it was better than I thought,” I was satisfied, happy to suck on those words as if they would fill me up.

So, I don’t know what I’m going to “do” yet.  I just hate to distract myself from sight of my children flying off to this new country.  I may come up with something.  But I may not.  And I’d feel quite sheepish if, in 5 years, I came across you in the grocery store and you asked me how the llama farm was going.   For now, I’m just going to focus on the moments at hand, using as my inspiration this faithful quote from Marion Howe:

“We want the spring to come and the winter to pass.  We want whoever to call or not to call, a letter, a kiss — we want more and more and then more of it.  But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:  I am living.”