The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

It’s that time, not only of the year, but of my life. The time is, high school graduation. For the past almost 30 years I haven’t given two shakes about high school graduations. I knew they happened. They talked about them on the news. A few weeks before we knew to stay in as prom season rolled into full-swing, and the restaurants were full of pimply faced teenagers trying their darndest to act all grown up, dressed to the nines and wining and dining their dates.

But this year is different. No. 1 Son is graduating from Topeka High School – my alma mater. Two days ago he played his last band concert during the annual “Dogs on the Lawn” band fund-raiser. At the end, they had the Seniors step to the front, and us parents join them, and we sang the school song, and the school fight song. It has been nearly 30 years since I sang either of those, but they came back to me just like it was yesterday. Amazing really.

I’m not sure I’m ready for the boy to graduate high school. Hell, I’m not sure he’s ready to graduate. He’s the emotional type. He looks at high school graduation not as the end of the beginning, but rather, as the beginning of the end. He is kind of lost (as I was at his age) in that he doesn’t really know what he wants to do with his life. It’s a hard time for kids that age, looking back, all I knew was that I was glad to be rid of school, and I went to a college nearly 400 miles away just to get away from the ‘rents. But he’s not like that. He has no interest in putting any distance between us and him. We joke that he’ll be 40 and living with us. Sometimes…just sometimes…I wonder how far off we are on that mark.