Vocabulary

Context is everything, especially where weather is concerned. If I had time to go swimming, I'd hate the weather right now. It's cool and overcast and a little breezy with a distant threat of rain. But since I'm sitting outside at a baseball game, the weather is perfect. Context.

It's the end of the school year, second in chaos only to the holidays to suburban parents of sports- and music-playing high school and middle school kids. There's a lot going on. There are overlaps and conflicts. There's a lot of takeout food. But it's all over in a week, and the clouds are warmed by a tiny bit of golden light and the air is fragrant and soft. Dinner will be souvlaki from our favorite Greek takeout place.

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"Worrying about your children is sanity." (Adam Sandler's whatever-his-name-is character in "Spanglish")

Wisdom can come from anywhere, even bad movies. At least I hope that this is wisdom. If it is, then I am certifiably sane.

I have two children. Two teenage sons. And so I worry. Worry, of course, is nature to me. Not second nature, just nature. But teenage sons are worrisome, no matter your disposition. My two are very different and so I worry about them in different ways, for different reasons. And at different times. I alternate my worry schedules.

So that's a good thing. Because I seldom have to worry about both of them at once. I'm not sure if they work together on this or not; but generally, when one of them has a problem, the other one is OK. And luckily for me, they're both usually OK. But I still worry, because that's my nature, and because I'm their mother. Sanity.

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Having children who are teenagers, one about to graduate from high school and one about to enter high school, is an exercise in contemporaneous nostalgia. Look that up, because I might have just invented it. Everything I do, and everything my children do, reminds me of something that they did or that we did together, a year ago or ten years ago. And in June, everything--the breeze off the pool deck and the sunlight on the water and the very air--everything reminds me of their ever-so-quickly-vanishing childhoods. This summer is just barely getting started, and it's happening right now, and I miss it already. Contemporaneous nostalgia.