Born in Time

Walking my son to school for the last time

For the last six years, I walked my son to his elementary school each morning.  (Let’s forget about those Covid months, which included a lot of walking, but not to school.) It was a just a few blocks, little more than a half kilometer, through our leafy, residential neighbourhood in east Toronto. You saw the same parents every morning doing the same walk. Over the years, as the neighbourhood kids grew up and aged out of the elementary school, a fresh crop of new families and younger siblings took their place. When my son was one of the little kids, the walk took 15 minutes; this morning, our last walk to school, took about half that.

Years ago, I walked my son to school because he was too little to go by himself. More recently, and certainly over the last couple of years, he no longer needed me—he walked home by himself—but he liked my company in the mornings; he said it made the walk less lonely. Or maybe he sensed that I needed the walk as much as he did, and gave me the pretext to continue. Regardless, there was an unspoken assumption that our routine would last until the end of grade 6. 

The conversation during our walks was not profound. This was not Tuesdays with Morrie. I had no kernels of wisdom to dispense at 8:30 a.m., and anyway that wasn’t the point; the point was to beat the second bell. The talk consisted of meandering chats about my son’s latest obsessions: Zelda, new Lego sets, the NBA, fish (really), what movies we were looking forward to seeing. We counted down to holidays, or trips we were taking, or to the end of school. In the fall, we counted the jack-o-lanterns in the lead-up to Halloween, wondering if there were more this year. On snowy days, we’d pretend we were trudging across the ice planet of Hoth. He would linger to stamp on patches of flimsy ice, which he found “strangely satisfying.” One spring, after getting his first bike with training wheels, we rode to school, racing like the cars from Cars. (Jackson Storm is in the lead! Lightning McQueen coming up from behind!) Once or twice, after a particularly heavy snowfall, I pulled him on the toboggan.

Mostly, though, we walked to school. He would ask me what I had on the go that day (meetings, email); I would ask the same of him (gym class, music). Sometimes, not often, we were tired or grumpy and spoke very little on the walk, and that was okay. In the olden days, I could cheer him up with a Monty Python funny walk; these days, on the rare occasion he is in a bad mood, such antics only make it worse.

Usually, though, our walks were drama-free. For a long time, longer than I expected, he would hold my hand at the intersections, or just because. Then he was too big for that and would shoot me a slightly condescending glance when I tried to take his hand at an intersection. It said: dad, grow up.

Sometimes, as we rounded the corner and approached the back entrance of the school field, he would say good-bye too early, which left an awkward span of silent walking. So we designated a particular tree the “good-bye tree.” It was only when we reached the good-bye tree that I would squeeze his shoulders, say our parting words, and watch him make his way across the playground. Sometimes, not often, I would linger for a moment and watch him walk into the school. Lately, I would wonder how it would feel to watch him do that for the last time.

Well. Here we are.

There is a moment in A Visit from the Goon Squad where Jennifer Egan captures the uncanny grief of missing something before it is gone. The protagonist’s daughter, perhaps 12 or 13, creates a PowerPoint presentation with the following slide:

This section of Egan’s novel—the entire chapter is a (surprisingly affecting) slide deck—is about some of the mind-numbing routines of family life. It’s also about how the daily routines of this family, and all families, can trick us into feeling like this is going to last forever. Parenthood is repetition: put your phone down, come for dinner, brush your teeth, turn it down, lights off. This seemingly endless repetition, the cyclical nature of it all, conspires to give it a kind of eternal feeling, like it will never end.

And then it ends. We are time-bounded beings. As Bob Dylan sings on one of his lesser-known cuts, we are born in time. Or, as Egan puts it: “time is the stealth goon, the one you ignore because you are so busy worrying about the goons right in front of you.”

There was one thing I didn’t want to discuss on our walk today, and that was last night’s U.S. Presidential debate. I had suggested that my son watch with me because, naively, I thought he might learn something about democracy, or foreign policy, or about debate itself. Instead, he saw a geriatric pissing match. “You’re the sucker, you’re the loser,” hissed the more Presidential of the two, a man so baffled and feeble it was impossible to watch him without a sense of pity. I sent my son to bed long before they started arguing over golf. The only lesson of the evening, if there was one, is that time is a goon, and we ignore this truth at our own peril, and that of others. The American experiment is in jeopardy because one man refuses to accept the passage of years.

I didn’t want to sully our final walk to school with such mean, undignified material. I wanted to talk about something more important, like whether puffy cheezies are superior to the hard, crunchy cheezies. (Turns out he likes crunchy; I like puffy.)

Next year, my son will start middle school. There will be new friends, new challenges, new routines. On the first day of school, he’ll put on a new shirt and a cool pair of shoes and walk to school. He will walk with his friends, or by himself, but not with me. The last thing he will need is his father, trailing after him, doing Monty Python walks if he’s feeling down.

If I had a time machine, and could go back and re-live these years, re-walk the walks, I wouldn’t do it—just as I would pass on the chance to live my life all over again, if magically afforded that opportunity. We are born in time. Burn the Days, as James Salter exhorts in his memoir of that title. (“Life passes into pages if it passes into anything,” he writes.) I will so miss our little walks, avoiding the sidewalk cracks, counting the pumpkins, talking about nothing much. But now we have reached the good-bye tree, and the bell has rung. I give my boy one last squeeze, and he is off.

June, 2024