It was a laborious Labor Day Weekend. Kristen, Elliott and I dismantled our 15-foot round trampoline and built a 15-foot round firepit area in its place. We prepared the area. We hauled heavy bags of small rocks up the stairs to our elevated back yard and framed it out with larger rocks. We sweat a lot. I pounded light poles into the parched earth with a mallet. We strung the lights, stepped back and admired our work. My daughter Margo offered an assessment: “Low key—from here it sorta looks like a trampoline.”
The kids have outgrown the bouncing so our hope is they will embrace sitting around a fire in our last year before Elliott heads to college. Neither he nor I are particularly ready for this development but thankfully Kristen is. I married her because she was cute and had good taste in music so following her lead as we guide our sleepy, high school senior through a college search is a bonus. Not only does she know what FAFSA means, she smartly replaced the blackout curtains in Elliott’s bedroom with sheer ones.
I’m not sure how we got here so fast. The first Timmydaddy column I wrote for Atlanta Intown was when Elliott started kindergarten at Oakhurst Elementary. He was a sweet, shy boy and I was flushed with the worry and wonder of sending a kid off to real school. Then Elliott, his classmates and the Six-foot Owl mascot danced around the blacktop to “Call Me Maybe” at the first ‘Community Circle.’ I felt both relief and joy. We were off and running.
Years clipped by. First day of school photos went from celebratory to silly to surly. We stumbled through the glitchy, virtual school period of the pandemic. We dusted ourselves off and started anew. Now Elliott is taller than that owl (and me) and has a wicked sense of humor. He just traveled solo for the first time and when I texted to see that his flight went smoothly he promptly replied, “We crashed.”
A little levity is welcome because this college game is much more intense than I remember. Back in my day we just accepted our SAT score as a reasonable assessment of how smart we were and applied accordingly. We relied on hard data like—well, Marty went there and he liked it so…
Nowadays, the intense test preparation classes and multiple retakes to achieve higher scores is like some societal madness we all agree to partake in. We’ll complete stacks of applications even though the tuition figures sound like a four-year-old’s guess at how many stars are in the sky: “Fifty Million Jillion!!” Then we respond by asking if that includes room and board.
Some of it is fun though. Like me, Elliott is a big college basketball fan so it was cool for him to visit legendary hoops schools like Dayton, Pittsburgh and St. Joseph’s. Next up is a swing through the questionably named Universities. I hear great things about Georgia College and State University but that’s a terribly confusing moniker. Then we’ll tour Appalachian State University (Appalachian is not a state, duh…)
We’ve employed a gentle nagging approach, dying a slow death of the, ‘Hey Buddies’… Like, “Hey, buddy – whaddya say we spend some time on applications tonight?” People say it’ll all work out but I still second guess everything. I’m sure eventually we’ll settle on a great school for our young owl to soar but wait—owls do fly, right? Not their calling card really…but see what I’m talking about!?
When the kids were toddlers those same people told us to enjoy every moment because it goes by so fast. Enjoying every moment is crazy talk but they sure were right about how fast it goes. So, so fast. If possible, I’d like to slow this train down, take a deep breath and just sit by the fire with my boy for a while.
