Ice, Ice Baby

Brian Wilson

May seems very far away.

This is especially true as the first truly cold mornings of fall frost the windows of my car overnight and I trudge through piles of damp leaves when I am out walking.

Heck, the Medford Curling Club hasn’t even started putting in the ice for the coming season — that is scheduled to happen next week.

Yet, I am reminded how soon May will be here. Whether I want it to be or not.

“CLASS OF 2024 It’s time to order your Caps/Gowns and Graduation supplies!

TIME SENSITIVE CLASS ORDER...DON’T MISS OUT “ The message screamed out at me with bold fonts and capital letters, virtually screaming in the typing etiquette of email messages.

God willing, my son, Alex, is set to graduate next May. We have already gotten dozens of reminders about the need to order his yearbook before the prices jump up after the end of the month. On Monday night, with just a few hours to go before the deadline he submitted his personal senior quote to go in the yearbook. We fortunately talked him out of the initial quote he wanted, which would have aged about as well as the glass of milk he left in his room over the summer.

My wife and I worked to guide and nudge Alex into choosing more traditional styles of quotes with classic message of transition and personal growth. His sister Beth, in the loving way only older siblings can be, was far more blunt about what she thought of his suggestions.

I’d have to go back and check, but I sincerely hope I didn’t quote Vanilla Ice or anything like that in my own yearbook. Hey, 1991 was a pretty wild time, cut me some slack. We were still coming out of clouds of Aquanet in the school hallways and I was fully embracing the longhaired scruffy look. Why, back in my day, we actually had to remember the quotes and not just do an internet search for them like the ne’er do well youths of today. Heck if we wanted to cheat and go look up famous quotes, we had to go to the reference desk at the library and search through pages and pages in a book the size of a small Buick.

Suddenly “All right stop, Collaborate and listen” doesn’t seem too bad now does it?

My wife is already asking how many and on what nights we need to get tickets to see the Medford Area Senior High School production of Cinderella. What? It will be November next week? Where did October go? For that matter everything since the 4th of July has been something of a blur. I sometimes feel like the kid who fell asleep on the way home from the Zoo and woke up finding it was midnight and I had somehow ended up in my bedroom.

Still, May seems like it should be a thousand years away. But no matter how much I may wish to pretend that we have all the time in the world, we are buffeted by reminders that time is fleeting.

I am sure there will be moments between now and May that will drag on interminably and have me checking the time every 12 seconds. But even then, I know that they too will be gone all too fast.

I recognize that there is nothing unique or special about my growing anxiety regarding the swift passage of time and the imposing milestone in my son’s - and by extension - my family’s life. I am sure that every parent goes through this sort of thing, made seemingly more pressing because families are smaller than they have been in the past.

By the time I graduated high school, my parents had been through it all four times before, so it was old hat to them. I am not even sure if they ever looked at my yearbook, let alone cared what lame quote I wound up with to put in there. (I really do need to dig out my yearbook and check.)

There is nothing I can do about the passage of time. Seconds tick away whether I wish them to or not, becoming minutes, hours and days. The best any of us can do is to try and make those moments count.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.