We Are Young

I ate red pepper flakes when I was in preschool.  We were doing some craft with spices and our teacher told us not to eat ANY OF THEM.  I suppose that was my cue to lick my finger and stamp it on some of the flakes on the paper towel in front of me.  The pain in my mouth was terrible but I didn’t want to get in trouble so I quietly went over to my cubby and sat in it until the pain went away.

My first bee sting happened in preschool.  I was on top of the jungle gym wondering about the kids outside of the high school across the street, and at the same time fiddling with the zipper on my jacket.  A bee got stuck in the zipper and I guess he didn’t like that too much and wanted to let me know.

I remember someone (my parents? my teachers?) reading a story to me about an older sister going to school for the first time.  The girl had a little brother and the little brother didn’t like that he couldn’t go to school, too.  I remember wondering whether it upset my little brother that I was going to school.  It prompted me to remember to be nice to Geoff after I came home from preschool.  I don’t think that lasted too long, however.

I remember a lot of my preschool classmates.  One is in a band you might know called The Fiery Furnaces.  Another gave me tickets two years in a row for the White House Easter Egg Roll.  I can remember the one that wore cowboy boots almost every day, and the one who pinched (I stayed away from the one who pinched, but tended to follow the cowboy around). Still another made me giggle and I liked to sit next to her for story time and arts and crafts.  I remember thinking I liked her company; that it was easy to be around her.  There is a picture of the two of us together when we are 4 or 5.  She’s leaning towards me whispering something and I am laughing about it.  Years later, we were on the front page of my hometown newspaper doing the exact same thing. Only we are 18 and graduating from high school, the school I used to wonder about when I was standing on the jungle gym at my preschool across the street.

 On Hadley’s last day of preschool, I took her out to lunch and then told her we could go to a park of her choice.  She chose to go to the one in the above pictures.  This is the one where the class had an end of the year performance and party.

Hadley likes to return to stories, parks, TV shows, etc., again and again until she knows them like a limb. Maybe she wanted to return to this park to work on the monkey bars, or to climb the tree by the baseball field. Maybe it was to see what she remembered when she was playing with her buddies.

I think that perhaps she was a little disappointed in the park the day she went back by herself.  I think she wanted to feel the glee of running around with people she’d spent a couple of years learning letters, and sounds, and words with. I hope though, that the happiness she felt will solidfy the experience when she makes new friends.  I hope that when she goes to Kindergarten at a new school she will think, Yes, I’ve done this before. I can do it again.

“I’ll never see those kids again,” Hadley said after her last day of school.  I know this isn’t true.  We moms are busy preparing get togethers for the summer as well as thinking of teams and activities to put them on for the fall.

But if paths go in different directions, as they do, I hope Hadley hangs on to her stories from the beginning of her school years. And if she runs into any of her classmates years later, I hope she finds they are as easy to be around as she did when she was 5.