Today up at the school, my wife will sort out the frozen pizzas for the PTSA fundraiser. On the field out back, my ninth-grade son, Jack, will practice with his team for their second-round sectional game. It will be his second outing on varsity.
In Oklahoma, my daughter Aubrey, fresh off three years as a drill sergeant at Fort Sill, will begin a drive to Georgia where, on Sunday, she will report as a cadet at Officer Candidate School.
Across the Potomac from Washington, in a skyscraper apartment looking out over Alexandria, my daughter-in-law Jessica is a day past due. She has just left the State Department and her husband, my son Lee, is about to leave the congressional staff where he has worked in recent years.
Soon they will set out on a new adventure, but first they will bring a daughter into the world, and begin to fulfill the dream my son has had since boyhood – to be a father, to have a baby and a child and a family of his own.
Perhaps today or tomorrow they will first hear little Pyper’s cry.
While outside New York City my daughter Hannah, about five months along herself, will wait and watch for the text that announces to the family that Lee and Jessica have gone off to the hospital. For all her life, from her earliest little-girl days, Hannah has wanted to be a mommy, a stay-at-home mommy, tending her babies and living her life. Perhaps soon she will live that dream.
Back home, a couple of days ago, Sam lost his first tooth. He was exultant. It was a milestone of maturity that he celebrated and shouted, anticipating the $2 bill that traditionallygets swapped for teeth in our household. He wondered aloud if the Tooth Fairy was in fact his parents, or perhaps Santa Claus. That same day, my sister-in-law, a West Point graduate, the one who took a brigade back to her native Puerto Rico to help after thehurricane, interviewed for a position that could put stars on her shoulders, the culmination of a life of service to the Republic.
Blue-eyed Ellie, a seventh-grader, has play practice tonight, she’s got her first speaking part. Her mom spent most of yesterday afternoon at the sewing machine, making a skirt for her costume. Scott the third-grader will be singing a duet in the children’s presentation Sunday at church. Robbie will be awake late, long after bed time, reading by his nightlight.
While he does, Austin, my son-in-law, will be at the WalMart in the city, working security, his last shift before they head south so he can join the Nashville Police Department.It’s him and my daughter, Sophie, and their little boys – Austin and Mick. Austin is 4 and Mick is a toddler. I had hoped they could stay home, but hiring in law enforcement in New York is a slow and difficult process. He turned down Border Patrol hoping for a New York job, but didn’t feel good about turning down Nashville. He will start “pre-hire” employment in a couple of weeks, and enter the academy in February. My wife found them a house last night on the Internet that they seemed to like.
He graduated high school on a Saturday and went into the Army the following Monday. They got married in a courthouse the afternoon he graduated from basic training, before he had to hurry back and report for jump school. He went to war once with the 82ndAirborne Division, and twice with the 3rdCavalry Regiment.
There were two babies along the way and one dream and now they are pursuing that together, a little American family of their own.
I have come to know their boys in recent weeks as they have stayed with us, and their departure next week will be a heartbreak. A scattering of dandelion seeds in a strong wind.
We will be gone when they pull out of the driveway, flown to New Mexico for my wife’s sister’s wedding next weekend. A happy ending and beginning for a woman who has had struggle every step of the way. A gathering of awkward and sometimes uncomfortable relation, at a waypoint of life, come together on instinct and obligation, hoping for joy.
By then our little house will be ready to list, the one I’ve owned more than half of my life, the place I had expected to retire and die. Children grew there and I hoped grandchildrencould grow there as well. But there aren’t good tenants anymore and it can’t sit empty and I hope if it has to go that it can provide seed money for my dream of a place to till the soil and tend some chickens and cut some wood and live the last bit of my life the way I had hoped I would live all of my life.
Time will tell, and assuredly time will change. Time will change everything. Every day. Small steps and big steps, the blur of daily doings that is the dead sprint from the cradle to the grave, our brief season under the sun. A myriad of milestones in the journey of our lives.