Back-to-school night brings flood of memories for young pupils’ parent

They held a get-acquainted night at the school, and the father walked through the brightly colored double doors with his senses on alert. This was the place that had begun to absorb his children, just as a school much like it had absorbed him many years ago.

The place seemed Lilliputian in scale, now that the father had been away from its halls for so long. He felt a little too large walking through corridors built with children in mind, dwarfing the miniature chairs and tables of plastic and chrome.

He recalled a line by James Joyce: “How small it’s all.”

The father looked at the other parents, their big bodies looming over this fragile landscape, and knew that this was one place that didn’t belong to them. This was children’s territory, where parents followed.

The fascinating part, he thought, was how quickly children adapt to such important places outside of the home. The older he got, the more the father cherished the idea of home, where the faces he knew almost better than his own would turn to him smiling each night when he walked through the door. No one else offered that as freely.

The home had become a place of immeasurable worth. Even as it buzzed with chaos it still was the sanest place in the world. The more time that passed, the more sense it made. And yet, the very children who made it that way were moving slowly, inexorably out of the perfect picture and into their own.

This school was their first step. Over time it would be their stage, their unexplored universe, their field of honor, victory and defeat. It was an unleashing of sorts, a moving away. And that was the way it should be.

The rules to live by hung about the rooms like cardboard commandments:

Cover your coughs and sneezes.

Brush your teeth.

Get plenty of rest.

Don’t run.

Don’t shove.

Human conduct would never again be this unmuddied and straightforward.

The father was reminded of an old black-and-white photo his own mother had sent him a year ago. It showed a group of schoolchildren in rows, tall at the back and short in front. The boys wore white shirts and neckties, for this was long ago, and the girls all wore skirts. The father, with three teeth missing from his lopsided smile, stood somewhere near the middle. The rules he once lived by hung on the wall in the background of the picture. They were the same rules that now guided his children 30 years later and 500 miles away.

Stop, look, and listen before you cross the street.

Here we are responsible, here we know the rules, and what to do, what to do.

Be kind to one another.

The complicated, ambiguous rules would come much later, and life would never be as clear again:

Don’t fight, unless…

Be kind to one another, unless…

Here we are responsible, unless…

“Oh, we really enjoy having her in class,” the teachers told the parents one by one, whether they meant it or not. Teachers have always been good diplomats. But they were different, too. They didn’t have snow-white hair anymore, for one thing. Most were young, as young as the father was now and some of them younger. Where was the white-haired teacher from the old photo? Where was the stranger who had thrust a bony hand through the classroom doorway on that first day of school long ago, and gently drawn the nervous boy from his mother?

“Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of him,” the white-haired woman had said before she closed the door on everything the boy had ever known.

The father moved in and out of memory, trading places with the children he had now and the child he was before. All it took was the sound of a teacher’s voice, which never changes, or the sight of a familiar word on a blackboard. The body may not fit the tiny chairs anymore, the father thought, but the mind can slip back at any time.

As he wondered about the hazy process of growth and change, he noticed the Monarch butterfly display in the corner of the classroom. A chrysalis hung from a twig in a wide glass jar that was draped with netting. A sign read: Egg … caterpillar … chrysalis … butterfly.

The children had positioned themselves in front of the jar, chatting quietly and staring expectantly at the dangling pod. And the father stared at his children for a moment, knowing that cocoons don’t protect forever and wondering just what would emerge one day.