An afternoon stroll becomes a trip down memory lane

 

There’s no question that the older you get, the faster  time flies by. This column, which I was inspired to write during an afternoon walk on my cul-de-sac, captures that feeling.

This column was published in the October 2021 edition of Jewish Rhode Island of Providence, R.I.

What began as a routine afternoon walk on my cul-de-sac was soon transformed into a trip down memory lane when I saw two families picking up their youngsters from the school bus.
When I passed one family’s house, I told them, “The torch has been passed,” referring to the years that I used to do the same thing when my daughters were moving through the local school system.
The stroll took place just a few days before the 20^th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and that realization made me feel very old as I realized that my older daughter Arianna had just started kindergarten when 9/11 happened. Now she’s a fifth-grade teacher, glad to be back in person after juggling remote and hybrid schedules for most of the last school year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
I felt even older as I recalled that our younger daughter, now a junior in college, was only 5 months old when 9/11 occurred. (We adopted her the following April in China, two days before her first birthday.)
Twenty years, considered a generation, is a long time, but on this sunny, crisp late-summer day, eerily similar to the weather on Sept. 11, 2001, it felt like a really short time had passed since I started walking my kids to and from the bus stop.
Except, of course, that it had indeed been that long.
The truth is that it had been years since my walks to the bus stop had ended. By the time they were in middle school, they no longer wanted to get picked up, preferring to walk home with friends or alone. As the years passed, I’d drop my older daughter off to her after-school job on my way to work for my late afternoon-night shift, and once they got their driver’s licenses, they were on their own.
All of this happened gradually, of course, but when I saw my neighbors getting their children off the bus, I traveled back in my mind’s time machine all the way to 1961, which was 20 years after Pearl Harbor, to which 9/11 had been compared in the days and weeks after the terror attacks.
I was only 9 in 1961, but I don’t recall that anniversary carrying anywhere near the weight that the 20^th anniversary of 9/11 did. Part of that could have been because Pearl Harbor was the start of the nation’s involvement in a global conflict that ended in clear victories over the Axis Powers of Germany and Japan. I read that there was a ceremony at Pearl Harbor commemorating the 20^th anniversary of the “Day of Infamy,” but that there weren’t many other observances on a scale of what took place on Sept. 11, 2021.
The significance of my trip back in time was that it showed me that for all the change the country has endured over the last 60 years, parents are still doing some of the same things.
My neighbors in 2021 are making their school day morning and afternoon strolls to the bus stop with their kids, just as I had done with my two daughters from 2001 until my younger daughter was in her final two years of middle school in 2014 and 2015.
And, going back farther, the school bus pickups of today aren’t all that different than what my Dad used to do for me, when he’d walk me home from Hebrew School classes, which in the late fall and winter weren’t over until well past sunset.
It was a much different era back then, and growing up in Dorchester and Mattapan, I routinely walked to school with my friends from the elementary grades through junior high, which ran through ninth grade when I attended.
After that point, I took what was then MTA buses, trolleys and trains to and from high school from 10^th through 12^th grades. Older readers will recognize the MTA from the 1959 folk song made popular by the Kingston Trio, “Charlie on the MTA.” (Written by Jacqueline Steiner and Bess Lomax in 1949, it was originally a campaign song for Boston mayoral candidate Walter O’Brien until the Kingston Trio made it a hit.) The Metropolitan Transit Authority or MTA eventually became the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority or MBTA, which I rode to and from college in Boston.
After graduating in 1974, I moved away to start my newspaper career, then 11 years later, moved back to the Bay State, got married a few years later, and then, 28 years ago, bought our house.
It’s hard to believe that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, happened 20 years ago, just as it sometimes doesn’t seem that our children have grown up.
That’s why, when I saw my neighbors getting their kids off the bus, I not only felt as if the torch had been passed, but I also saw my life flash before me.
That’s one of the inevitable consequences of growing old.
LARRY KESSLER (larrythek65@gmail.com) is a freelance writer based in North Attleboro. He blogs at larrytheklineup.blogspot.com