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Yesterday was my birthday. I’m now 43, which depresses my daughter because I’m not 42. That was the age of the answer to life, the universe, everything. She was mournful as she noted it. When I told her I had re-slipped into obscurity and mediocrity, she told me to stop talking about it, I was making her sad. We can only be the third primary pseudoperfect number once. I’ve accepted this, as we all should.
43 is one of those ages that might as well be 41 or 44. I decided to spend my big day in the manner of one who is obscurely mediocre: I switched winter and summer clothing for six of the boys. It’s been warm for weeks and they were tiring of wearing the same few pairs of shorts and t-shirts we left out for warm days along with the winter clothes. They were excited to see old shirts and were amused by how much they grew since last fall, when everything was packed away. Shirts were passed down from big brother to little brother to littler brother. I stood barefoot in the basement directing folding, barking orders to bring all long sleeve shirts, save two, and pants, save two, to me. Say goodbye to the snowboarding abominable snowman shirt! Farewell, waffleweaves! Smell ya later.
I did laundry. I went to the grocery store. I made my bed. My parents called and sang to me and I missed them, terribly.
When my husband got home from work, he whisked me off to one of the best German bakeries in the Denver area so I could choose my cake. While we stood waiting for the baker to write on a ribbon that would perch on top of the seven-layered torte I claimed, we were offered samples. A clerk shared messy cubes of coffee kuchen littered with slivered almonds and creamy white icing. I took a bite. I stopped and tasted. The icing was exactly, exactly, like my late hungrily-missed Grandma Alice used to make.
A cool June morning. I was sitting at the vinyl-covered picnic table on her back porch eating breakfast. A dozen baskets of lush flowers hung around the edges of the awning jutting off a wall of red bricks. The day’s newspaper was scattered in sections, stained with coffee rings and pencil smudges from the partially-filled out crossword. A small black radio played classical music broadcast by an AM station.
Happy birthday, Gretchy.
I heard her voice. Thick Minnesota accent, warm, low, I heard it.
 Grandma Alice, late 1930s Archie and Beatrix, who came along on our sugary errand, pulled at me to go look at a case of outlandishly beautiful cookies. They snapped me out of the daydream.
I held back tears. Was that a memory or a promise?
Birthdays arrive loaded with expectations. Even the idea you won’t have any expectations is an expectation. You can’t tell yourself it’s just another day, business as usual, let’s sort sweaters without hoping you are maybe a little wrong. Maybe something magical will happen? Maybe you can feel like a child again because your mom and dad call and sing to you—over you—like bird parents to bird babies, teaching the most important songs.
Later, at a date night dinner at a southern comfort food restaurant, I bit into a pickle. It tasted just like Grandma Alice’s. Tongue-spanking sour, dill pummeled, hellbent garlic, cold.
That time, I talked back to her.
1. Realize your child needs to be at a certain place multiple times for many days in a row. Driving the child is either not possible or not on your list of awesome ways to spend 80 minutes each day.
2. What about those large, shoebox-shaped vehicles with ads for musicals lumbering along in far right lanes of major streets? The bus! They stop at benches set up along sidewalks every few blocks, including where your child needs to go.
3. Obsess over the idea. Look up routes and times, fares. Picture your child standing alone at the corner of Cigarette Butt Boulevard and Shattered Liquor Bottle Lane.
4. Your child has a smartphone and can kick like an enraged zebra.
5. Your child is also leaving home eventually and being comfortable with public transportation is one of those Grand Life Skills like pre-treating stains and filling out W-2s.
6. Tell the child your plan. Watch eyes widen to 10 centimeters in an instant, instead of in 22 long, arduous hours. Yep, kid.
7. Still, you suspect your little bus jockey is secretly excited because you find yourself not making a case for it.
8. You seem to be more freaked out by it than they are. Visit the public transportation’s websites multiple times to make sure times and routes haven’t suddenly changed. What if you tell your child to get on the 84, but overnight they change the 84 to the bus that goes to the airport and the next thing you know—through a chain of impossible coincidences and inexcusable human errors that will become internet comment section fodder for an entire news cycle—are forced aboard a flight to Milwaukee. On Spirit Airlines.
9. In the days leading up to the inaugural bus trip, be hyper-aware of all busses, bus stops, and bus passengers.
10. The big day arrives! Crazily rattle off everything you remember from riding busses in your youth. There’s a buzzer button thingie you push if your stop is coming up and it’s not a scheduled stop and you want the driver to stop and and and PUSH IT like a block BEFORE your stop but not too late and not too early because then you’ll be dropped off short or overshoot. SIT NEAR THE DRIVER. Have fun!
 😛 INDEED 11. Let us know when you leave. Let us know when you arrive. Try the beer-cheese soup in Wisconsin. Best in the world!
12. When it all goes smoothly, tell yourself you knew it would all along. It’s just a bus, a bread box on wheels that really, really wants you to go see “Wicked.” Note your kid embraced it in spite having a hand-wringer for a mom. What a good kid.
The 2013-14 school year is officially over without a single tear shed by anyone. I used to cry on the last day of school, but didn’t this year. The closest I came was the night before Sam’s last day of 8th grade, when I was suddenly seized by a vision of him on his second birthday wearing a paper hat from Krispy Kreme. I don’t know why my subconscious fished out that memory, but it was enough to make me grab and hug him, sniffling, “Oh, Sammy. Sammyball! My Puppy-Dude!” I called him every nickname he ever had while he patiently stood there, accepting my outburst for what it was: Weird but not unexpected. He’s been around for nearly 14 years and knows I can hardly stand all of them getting so big and tall and surly.
Without a lot of fanfare, the last kids finished yesterday morning and suddenly, it’s summer break. The calendar is slowly filling and I scoff at the claim made by Phineas and Ferb about 104 days. It’s more like 75ish, which isn’t enough time to build a portal to Mars. But, we look forward to them like people who are going to be 12th, 10th, 9th, 7th, 5th, and 3rd grades plus a Kindergartner in August. It sounds exciting on paper, but if those days take awhile to get here, that’s cool.
Yesterday, during lunch, I asked each of them to share the best thing that happened to them at school the past year. Ryley went to Arkansas with the Robotics Team. Aidan went camping in Moab with her Honors Field Geology class. Joel went to Mountain Lab School, Sam enjoyed Young International Town. Tommy loved spending a whole day at the aquarium, where he dissected a squid. Beatrix liked everything. Aside from her, their most memorable moments were to places outside the classroom, beyond taupe walls, taupe carpet, smartboards, paneled ceilings, sitting.
I pointed out how they all learned so much. A year ago, they didn’t know what they know now. They shrugged and nodded and passed each other bottles of ranch dressing and orange soda, feasting. Mom says obvious things, right? Then, I was struck by the idea what they didn’t learn this past year was equally as important as what they did learn.
Something horrifically awful happened at my older kids’ high school. But my younger kids were safe. Nothing sidled up to them. Nothing shattered. They were rarely baffled or confused or simply inconvenienced. They completed. They were stretched but never broken. Beatrix didn’t learn how to write geometry theorems. Joel didn’t have to give a speech about Belgium while speaking French.
But what happened this past school year will usher in those abilities someday. What happens—and doesn’t happen—in the summer is just as important, I will always contend. It gives time for the glue to dry before adding another layer of learning until suddenly, he’s speaking French and she just proved that shape right there on the paper is, indeed, a triangle.
We have hopes to be out and about with cold popsicles and hot sparklers, going to bed with dirty feet because it’s too late and we are too tired. It’s incredibly freeing to embrace a summer ahead that isn’t scheduled to the last inch before school starts. I plan to keep the kids busy with the task of not being busy.
Let’s see what we won’t learn this summer.
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