When Otis got tired of fighting the north Louisiana traffic, he moved to … Houston. Yes, THAT Houston.
Otis has never claimed to be the ripest fruit on the tree.
But he’s a good man and a great husband and dad who spends his free time watching old Celtics footage on cable or YouTube and listening to Buffett.
A guy could have worse habits.
I thought of my old friend this week when a mom I adore drove her baby boy from north Louisiana to Mississippi and dropped him off for college. It was a long drive there and a longer drive home, and me and Otis know how she feels.
Parenting ain’t for sissies.
There was a time 30 years ago when Mr. and Mrs. Otis had the free time of the one-armed paper hanger we often joke about. They had three boys of various playing weights, from diapers to middle school, but all boys nonetheless. Snips and snails and puppy dog tails. All that.
Otis wrote me from Houston back then, and the timing was a blessed coincidence: it was the day my son started second grade.
“I know it’s been said that life begins on Opening Day,” the eloquent Otis wrote, “and while I feel it’s entirely possible for that to be true, I think that life REALLY begins when school starts. The sleepy towheads and ‘I don’t wanna go to school today, can I be sick?’ Because of my commute and work schedule, I’m long gone before I hear those words now, and I really regret that. Kids grow up too fast. Cherish those early years and I know you do, because someday in the near future, Crayola crayons are not on the school supply list anymore.”
This did not surprise me, this sentimental side of Otis. And I would like to say I pondered, for Otis’s sake, that line about Crayolas, and I felt for him. And I did, for about one second.
Then I resorted to looking out for Number One. I frantically shuffled papers and found it, the supply list for my own son’s class, snatched it up and … (I still have it by the way) … there they were. Between “2 pkgs. 24 yellow No. 2 pencils” and “1 pair Fiskars school scissors (sharp point)” —
— Crayola Broadline Markers.
The old faithfuls.
True, they weren’t crayons. But with the biological clock ticking, you take what you can get.
I thought then of another friend who’d already gone through Crayola withdrawal back then. I asked her that summer if her oldest son was nearly grown now. Must be in the eighth or ninth grade at least, I supposed. She wrote me too: turns out her son was 19, engaged and away in basic training.
Nineteen?
“I don’t know if that makes him grown,” she wrote. “For sure, I wasn’t through raising him. I can’t exactly explain what I wasn’t finished with — I guess most of all I miss having him here.”
That hurt me.
“Much as I was ready for him to grow up,” she said, “I wasn’t quite ready to have him grow out.”
That hurt me worse.
Late that first night of second grade, the night after Otis’s letter arrived, I went to the grocery store. The school supplies aisle was packed with the post-Crayola crowd, boyfriends and girlfriends — they are accountants and lawyers and teachers today, duking it out for their own children’s school supplies — buying matching notebooks. I collected the goods and avoided the “grown kids,” my parenting future, best I could and limped toward the checkout line.
Sometimes, you catch a break. I was writing my check — THAT’S how long ago this was — when a fellow dad zipped by, a man whose son went to school with mine, and his cart was filled with orange juice and lunch meat, glue sticks and those good ol’ No. 2 pencils.
“Meet you in a minute. The only thing I’ve got left to get,” he said, wheeling by and checking his list, “are some Crayola Broadline Markers.”
Aisle 5D. Can’t miss ’em.
And he didn’t.
But now, we do.
Just like Otis said we would.
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu