He did it, he started! His fourth place to be all day, every day - his first true 'school,' with bigger kids. I teared up, he was unfazed.
Public school. The first to do that, oddly enough. Pre-K. Sweet, young, scrubbed, happy, demanding 4-year-olds. 20 of them.
We will walk there. Half a mile. Every morning, through three seasons. Just two of us. We will have stuff to talk about. Every afternoon, we will walk home. We will have Things to Do.
He of white-blond hair and constant chatter. Recent discoverer of computer games. Drawer of pictures, observer of details through his little bifocal lenses.
I like this part - standing here, knowing that in a year this will be the past. I like that we are here Before, and most everything else is after.
I don't like this other part, where soon all this will be gone. Where that little bit of baby, as I say to him, still remaining behind his left ear, might disappear without my realizing it. That I will barely remember this in two years. In four, he will be 8, with all his 8-year-old demands. I will struggle to remember him at 4, the way I do now the two-year-old him.
4, to me, sounds like the end of Little.
He had his hair cut today. When will it be his last little-boy mushroom cut?
I call him over to me, and he instinctively gives me a kiss. He sometimes asks, "am I in trouble?" Disbelieving. His temper can spark and flare. He can scream. I can, too - and I am embarrassed when he sees it. It flames out, and he often returns with his eyes down, a ready apology.
He is optimistic. He is mostly unfazed. He observes and he tracks and he saves it for later. He quotes advertisements like he thought of them, and he shares thoughts of his own that sound written. At the tail end, he is ever in danger of being left out, or over-ruled. He thrives on attention, for moments of being considered equal to anyone, to anything. He holds forth.
He is right there on the edge of the rest of his life. And on Monday, I will walk him a few more steps closer.
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I watch Ppod, too, from a much greater distance, and I think... he is the last of the Small. I will miss having the littles, the ones small enough that you can't resist buying the tiny clothes at Costco. The ones who are all potential, and the outlines aren't yet clear. But it is a magical thing, to see them all growing into themselves, and Ppod will always be, as you once described him, sunny and defiant. Which is as near a description as I can think of, of you when you were that size. So he might not stay small, but he'll always remind us all of you, the last of the Small in our growing up clan... and he's a great one on which to end this generation of small.
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