Dear boys,
I watched the three of you walk down Glendale early this morning, like burros under your backpacks. While you headed toward another first day I wished I could read you to sleep and sing you awake forever. I know not every single dream comes true.
This was the summer we put pimento cheese on chicken sandwiches on repeat, the summer we saw Canadian lakes the rarest, most perfect shades of blue, where, as humans, it felt as though we were merely hovering close to earth. This was another summer spent at ballfields and in swimming pools, another season when you could retreat from it all by reading a book. Or playing a musical instrument (piano, guitar, harp, saxophone, trumpet, drums, you name it). At home, some days felt akin to living in a spacious, well-decorated junkyard, with friendly, starving dogs. But this was also the summer that one of the things keeping me most from despair was the sound of your spoons against a cereal bowl, all that clinking, a kitchen full of healthy kids.
As you embrace a new school year, remember that feeling uncertain is endurable, that you are designed to be resilient. That you can play neat tricks in your own mind, that you are well equipped for growth, to tackle the unseen and assume brilliance. You are all three so capable of being good company, inclined to create more than you consume, to convert the dross to gold. May your freshly structured days be filled with frequent small delights.
Go be students! Connect with others and care about ideas and wonder at all the not-boring things in the world! No one at school will be be collecting data on your heart, the secret chambers in which the most important things in your life will likely occur, but pay attention to the way it beats and notice what makes you feel twice as alive. For me, it's being your mom. I can't get enough of you, and I don't need a thing from you.
