Sittin' at the Ritz

I had a dream the other night that my father, who would be turning 97 next month, was driving me around in his Cadillac. He was as nimble as ever behind the wheel, his senses as sharp and his reflexes as quick as they always were.

It's always good to see him. Every time, we laugh about how the doctors told him he didn't have long, and here he is twenty years after they said that, full of life, with no end in sight. The joke's on me, a little bit, when I wake up and realize he's not here, but still, I'm grateful for the visit.

This weekend, an old friend's son is getting married. I am remembering the kindergarten playground, tucked away on its own side of the building, away from the bigger kids. The start of my life in suburbia, still alien to a girl who grew up in concrete playgrounds without jungle gyms resting in beds of wood chips. My children would grow up protected, in a place designed to soften their falls.

We hovered over them back then, when they were in kindergarten, before we had any clue about how they would turn out. No clue, just lots of dreams. We hovered less as the years went by, but still we watched, and raked the wood chips, and prayed for soft landings.

They are starting to get married now, those kindergartners in the playground on the safe side of the building. I search their faces, all these years later, often struggling to match them up with their younger selves. I laugh when I think about how important everything seemed back then: timed multiplication tests, birthday party snubs, spelling bees. My friend and I reminisced last night about the word that knocked his son off the stage one year. Background. We wondered, that day, how he would amount to anything when he couldn't even spell background. Somehow, he has managed.

This is new territory for us parents, those of us lucky enough to be launching our children into this next phase. We revel in each others happiness almost as much as we revel in our own. We are as powerless as we were back then, in the schoolyard, but we still watch and hover and hope for the best. And we hope that our children have not yet figured out how powerless we really are. (Stupid, yes; powerless, no.) As grown up and independent as they seem, I like to think they still believe we can help soften blows. I still count on my father, who visits me in my dreams and still manages to make things see all right.