September 15, 2025
When Michelle and I were new parents, the year that our baby would turn 18 always seemed so far off. "Someday," she would grow up and move into the next adventures in her life, but who could imagine 2025? — "that's SO far in the future!" We barely gave any thought about one day being a couple again and occasionally a family, instead of the other way around as naturally happens when there are kids in the house.
Yet, here we are, speeding relentlessly through "The Year of the Way of Things". For this is how the river of time is supposed to flow, IF you get lucky and everything goes reasonably well. It's certainly a year of milestones and momentous change for all three of us. Looking back on it, it has largely been most everything it was supposed to be, and each of us is deeply grateful for that, even as we continue struggling to adjust.
I've long outgrown my childhood imagination, so I don't really know WHAT I expected this year of transition to be. It has been emotional of course, but my longtime readers (thank you!) know that I tend to be attuned to the passing of time and a sense of history too. I've also been fortunate that my crazy career as a performing artist allows me to stay in touch with far more people than most, and probably at least three times more than I realistically can handle. I view maintaining those connections as a blessing rather than a curse. And I've been extremely lucky to have been able to keep connections with most everyone whom I have wanted, making the absences due to the natural eddies and currents in that river a bit more conspicuous too.
As her high school graduation drew near this spring, I found myself remembering and reminiscing a bit about my own journey at that age. It seemed like every turn brought up vivid new details - the campus visits, Orientation, the financial aid process, and in particular, my one year living in a dormitory, and the few connections from that year that I've been fortunate to maintain.
There were the milestone events that brought "the now" into sharp focus too, like Honor Society induction, the annual ritual visit to their elementary schools that the graduating seniors make in their regalia, and naturally, graduation day itself. All rich reminders that time flows in one direction and one direction only, and we get no say about the speed with which it passes.
For me personally though, there was much more. Experiencing her senior spring and imminent departure for college kindled a long-standing desire to reconnect with one of my dearest friends from my freshman year . How easy it was to lose touch in the days before email and mobile phones!
Finding Scott turned out surprisingly easy in the end — a few messages on LinkedIn led to a few emails and a plan, and just like that we were sharing dinner and a couple of fine beers on my summer New England trip. Somehow even after 40 years, it felt like no time had passed at all. The easy-going, outdoors-loving partner-in-crime of my freshman year remained intact, much as I expected. But it was poignant too; learning that he had survived a killer heart attack eight years earlier made me deeply grateful we even had the chance to reconnect.
And along with several members of my own high school class, despite not being a "reunion year", we spent this spring planning an informal get together, which fell ironically on the very next evening. My class has never been much on reunions, but perhaps with a lot of us looking at our odometers and saying "if not now, then when?", some 35 of us enjoyed a wonderful get-together. Once again, I felt blessed to reconnect and close the gap in particular with a couple of too-long-missed and much-cherished friends.
On the drive back to Virginia, it occurred to me that while I shared intense chunks of time with many of these people, our conversations and connections were in the now, even as we reminisced about moments and absent classmates too. We weren't "stuck in the past" as one might anticipate from long-overdue reunions, but each of us bringing a long lifetime of experiences that helped us see and appreciate each other's struggles and successes in school and the decades since. It sure seemed like both evenings flew past.
Collectively, the experiences were deeply moving, deeply reconnecting with that period in my life in parallel with my daughter's journey. The very next weekend, it was my dad's turn. Nearly as many people were at his "final" reunion with his high school class — their 71st! And he and his surviving classmates felt much as my classmates and I had after our get-together; "maybe let's do this again sooner rather than later."
Decades beyond my daydreaming childhood, as our daughter makes her own way into adulthood, I see ever more clearly that time flows in but one direction, and every pool, riffle and rapid is both a gift and a reminder that these moments are fleeting and precious.
