Posted: 2/18/05
DOWN HOME:
Knothole worthy: 'Senior Dates' list
Those folks down at the schoolhouse really know how to hurt a guy.
They didn't mean to do it, of course. They were just trying to be helpful when they sent a sheet of paper home with our youngest daughter, Molly, the other day.
When Molly's big sister, Lindsay, started kindergarten in 1989, I wondered about the sheets of paper they'd carry home through the years. I wondered what percentage of those important papers actually would arrive in our home.
Don't tell my mother and daddy, but when I was a kid, some of the sheets of paper I was supposed to take home “accidentally” fell through the knothole in the wooden backyard fence of the house on the east corner of Third Street and Dartmouth. When the teacher handed out a paper I didn't like, I'd volunteer to walk home, instead of ride with Mother, a schoolteacher. I hoped the people who lived in that little house with the knothole fence had a paper-eating dog.
Well, during the past 13 years, Molly's carried countless pages home from school. Many of them have contained “important parental information” for Joanna and me. But this was a sheet of paper unlike all the others.
Someone at the school typed “Senior Dates to Remember 2005” across the top of the page. Big, bold letters, all underlined.
Those “Senior Dates'' chronicle the countdown to my darling daughter's final day of high school:
March 29–Senior Revue
April 27–Scholarship info turned in
May 7–Prom
May 12–Senior honors night
May 17–Rosecutting ceremony
May 24–Graduation practice
May 30–Graduation
Just when everything was going so well, somebody from the schoolhouse messes it up by sending a list of “Senior Dates.”
If you've kept up with our little family the last several years, you know I'm the sappy, sentimental one. The one who cries at weddings and baby dedications. And, yes, the one who cries at high school graduations.
But I've held up remarkably well during our last child's senior year of high school.
No, don't worry. I haven't taken to strong drink. Denial has been my anesthesia. If I refuse to think about it, then Molly's impending graduation won't hurt. At least not in advance, it won't.
That is, until the folks from the high school decide to send parents a friendly reminder that graduation will take place at 5 p.m. on Memorial Day. Be early or sit in the nosebleed section.
Graduation isn't so bad. It's a good excuse for a family reunion and a grand occasion to make a fuss over a kid who's brought abundant joy to her mama, sister and me for 18 years. Graduation will be a great day.
What I want to ignore is what happens next. Our Molly Bird will fly off to college, leaving an empty nest. A much quieter nest.
I'm tired of thinking about it. Too bad Molly doesn't walk past a knothole fence on her way home from school.
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