Mullings: An American Cyber-column By Rich Galen

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Back to School

Tuesday, September 2, 2003

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This is a reprise of the Back-to-School Mullings first written on Sept. 7, 2000.

The children of America have gone back to school. And, in about every household, there is at least one person who is standing over the kitchen sink in tears, wondering where the years have gone.

I understand.

Every year at this time, I remember a wonderful essay I heard on NPR the summer before The Lad first went to college. It was by a woman talking about the day she sent her daughter to kindergarten for her first day of school. "My husband told me not to cry," she wrote, "because tomorrow she would still be in kindergarten."

"But, he was wrong," the essay then continued. "'Tomorrow' she went to college."

Yesterday we were whining about getting up for the two o'clock AM feeding. Today we're worrying, at two o'clock AM, why he's not home yet.

When The Lad was born - from the second he was born - he became the most important thing in my life.

I chose to spend Saturday mornings with The Lad at the Air & Space Museum. Later, it was afternoons at the Little League field as assistant coach, while the Mullings Director of Standards & Practices worked in the refreshment stand. Still later, Sunday breakfasts at our favorite Deli in Dallas.

Very early one morning, in August of the summer before the Lad was to go off to the University of Texas, I was driving to work at Electronic Data Systems in Dallas where I oversaw Middle East operations. In order to keep up with employees spread over nine time zones, I often went to work at about four A.M.

Driving up the Dallas Tollway, the overnight sports station was conducting yet another arcane discussion on the state of the left side of the interior offensive line of the Dallas Cowboys, so I shut the radio off and started to hum.

I started singing "Puff the Magic Dragon," to which I can sing the harmony. In college, when I was a pretty good folk guitar player, it was a staple in my repertoire for early in the evening at parties. Later in the evenings "Both Sides Now" and "Four Strong Winds" tended to better capture an appropriate mood.

I was singing - in pieno voce - when I got to the line:

A dragon lives forever; but not so little boys.
Painted wings and giant's rings make way for other toys.

Regular Mullsters know I tear up at Christmas coffee commercials. I weep during selected M*A*S*H episodes. I sniff and wipe my eyes at every happy ending in every movie I've ever seen - including movies seen on airplanes which generally precludes any further conversation between my seatmate and me.

"�but not so little boys," however, caused me to pull over to the side of the road and stop, not just to wipe away a tear, but to actually sob. This, on the Dallas Tollway, even at four in the morning, is no mean feat.

The woman who wrote that NPR essay said that she had divided her friends into two groups: Those who understood, and those who didn't.

I understand.

Around the United States, there are hundreds of thousands of families whose children, are guarding our freedoms in far away places. Yesterday they, too, went to kindergarten not even knowing the existence of the places in which they awoke this morning.

The day after The Lad went to kindergarten, he went to college. The day after that he was racing around the country with the Bush-Cheney campaign. The following afternoon he was working for the President of the United States.

He is still the most important thing in my life. We talk almost every day, The Lad and I. He calls from wherever he is; I call him from wherever I am or, sometimes as we did this past weekend, we have a casual lunch together in Alexandria.

In that way, on most days, we're still together.

In a land called Honalee.

On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: The definition of pieno voce, a modest history of my college singing career, a short discussion of the first snow day of the year, and a pretty funny Catchy Caption of the day.

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