The First Day of School

My heart filled with tenderness for all the parents standing with their kids at bus stops, all the new backpacks carefully placed on tiny, bony shoulders, all the new shoes saved until this morning...all the world starting over, fresh and filled with all the possibilities imaginable, at least this one day a year.

At 7:30 this morning, on a glorious, sunny, cool-after-rain-after-drought yellow dawn, a few light gray clouds just emphasizing the skyness of the heavens, I drove Elena to school—her senior year, the last first-day-of-school photo taken (she’d dyed the bottom of her hair pink at 2 a.m.—not quite the same as kindergarten)—and my heart filled with tenderness for all the parents standing with their kids at bus stops, all the new backpacks carefully placed on tiny, bony shoulders, all the new shoes saved until this morning, all the hair brushed and breakfasts prepared and bus schedules triple-checked, all the parental squabbles patched over in common hopes for their little ones, all the work schedules worked out so the single mother could stand outside until the bus driver came and took her precious-but-so-hard-to-manage son off to the replacement mother who is his new teacher, all the prayers for a better year than last, all the paperwork agonizingly filled out for free lunches or special programs or transfers, all the older siblings kindly or grudgingly or haughtily helping out their younger sisters and brothers, all the teenagers trying to seem aloof from the excitement but nonetheless still recalling that pit-in-stomach wonder about how THIS year would pan out, all the drivers carefully stopping when the yellow bus’s STOP lights flashed, all the dropouts placing bets on school to make their kids’ lives just a little better than their own, all the uniforms neatly tucked, all the lunch boxes tightly gripped, all the world starting over, fresh and filled with all the possibilities imaginable, at least this one day a year.

August 25, 2010