A Single Day

Can One Day Outshine Them All?

And so, the expectation, of course, is that we write about Little Bean’s first day of fourth grade, which was yesterday. This year, she’s the senior class as fifth graders get their own buildings near the various elementary schools. So this year is it for her and the school she’s attending for the past four years, the one right down the road from us, the school which is the primary reason we moved to where we live.

Listen, if you’ve ever read anything by me you know that the passage of time is a pretty frequent theme on these pages. And I’m ok with that, in fact I often feel empowered by impermanence.

If I were immortal, I doubt I’d get anything done because literally everything could wait until tomorrow. Having a set time table - to help direct Little Bean, to give the projects screaming at me in my head some daylight, to work on being a better hubby and dad - when you know you’re eventually going to run out of time, well, that can be motivating.

Still… I wish she’d slow down maybe a little bit.

Here I am winging a speech atop Mt. Lafayette during our wedding ceremony

I’d add that her first day back to school is also our 14th wedding anniversary, the day we were married atop Mt. Lafayette with a dozen close friends and family and about 50 perfect strangers in attendance. Hurricane Earl cleared off the summit just about a half hour before we arrived to say I do.

I had big plans for that ceremony which included one of my favorite quotes from Anne Morrow Lindbergh:

When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

Well, I forgot the paper with the quote on it and had to wing the whole thing, but my friends who were up there with us said I did fine. Of course, they would say that. Still, I’ve been winging it ever since and Meena still puts up with me so I must be doing something right.

And yesterday was one final important event date. The completed first draft of my New York fire tower field guide, my first with Falcon Guides, was unceremoniously emailed to my editor bringing just over a year’s worth of work to a close. This will be my first book with a major publishing house and tenth book overall. What a nutty journey that’s been to get here.

Three big, single day - Sept. 3 - events. I wonder, if we had some kind of daily time machine to look back on all the events that happened to us over the course of our lives if any single day would tell the story of our entire lives? Can you think of a day, which over time, has had significance in your life year after year?

Anyway, we’ll celebrate this evening with dinner and flowers, I’ll talk to the kid-o about her first day and I’ll look over those screaming projects in my head to see which might make it out for book 11. Days go by. Over and over. Even if you don’t get married or go back to school, I’ll bet some interesting things happen.

Maybe you just have to be aware of them. Try to be aware of them today, would you? Bet you’ll be surprised by what you discover.