It happens every year right around this time. Too much to do and not enough time to do it all in. Competing priorities or just the rush and crush of life here on the ant farm. You know, I can’t really tell, and I’ve reached an age where I’m not sure knowing would provide anything aside from small solace.
Anyway, I should be used to
it but I keep losing track of the days of the week. I used to say I’m 'getting
old' but that doesn't really capture since, like you, I've been living through each of them, and yet I don’t seem to get any of them on me.
My wife and I have two children who are, in
every sense of the word, adults themselves, though I have a vision problem that
precludes my successfully seeing them with my heart as anything other than as
they once were. We were fortunate to have our daughter and her beau travel up
from Virginia to visit both sets of parents for the Thanksgiving holiday, join us for a meal of turkey with all the fixings on the day afterward, which, I think,
helped make Thanksgiving last even longer. Our son and his wife celebrated with her parents
in Florida where they all now reside as witnesses in the Snowplow Protection
Program.
During those Thanksgiving preparations,
I tried hard to not look too much farther forward than to the end of this
sentence as opposed to where we are on the calendar right now, less than two
weeks to Christmas, because this Christmas will be the first that only my wife
and I will celebrate since arriving on these shores in November of 1991.
You live so much of your
life through your children, and it sometimes comes as a surprise, at least to
me (if not more like a shock) that while you think you’re teaching them about
life as they grow up, they’re really teaching you as you grow old. And I’m chastened
to admit that while I’ve always seen myself as someone willing to learn I’m not
always happy with being taught or the lessons that come with the teaching.
I’m thinking back to years
of after-school soccer matches in parts of the state I’d never heard of (before
or ever again), school PTO fund-raisers (so many holiday pies!), marching band competitions
in places, not even the soccer games were held, and the first part-time jobs (at
Linda’s on Lafayette Street, making grinders, for Michelle, and the Candy Corner
of Suburban Stationery in the old Norwichtown Mall, for Patrick), all while
watching them become their own persons, and struggling to accept that no matter
how hard or how many worked to make Norwich a place to come home to, for so
many of our children, the only choice after graduation from Norwich Free
Academy was, and too often still is, how far from here they’ll be living.
Politics I’m told is the art
of the possible, so, despite the quarrels Tuesday night in Council chambers, I’ll
remain optimistic about Norwich because the days of miracles and wonder I'll
remember all my life all involve those I love and revolve around our days here
in The Rose of New England.
-bill kenny
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