As the school year careens toward its end, and your blissful work-from-home life faces disruption of epic proportion, you enumerate your regrets. You should have:
(1) had more lunches with friends. Which is to say, you should have maybe tried to make some friends in this town, and then invited those friends to lunch;
(2) had more coffee dates. See item #1 above;
(3) maybe joined a gym, but in any event you should have run more. Or lifted. Or done *something* more than you did, you slothful amalgam of nachos and wine. Look at you – you’re already trying to pretend that your kids being out of school somehow prevents you from exercising. Erin does it every day, rain or shine, winter or summer. AND she saves the babies. You’re the worst;
(4) written more;
(5) better prepared for the second annual session of Daddy School (also know as “Rockridge Academy”, “The Hamilton School For Gifted Youngsters”, and/or “Stuff Dad Makes Us Do Before We Can Have Screens”);
(6) volunteered at that retirement home you keep talking about, where you could play cards or chess with the old timers, and they could tell you their stories, and you could maybe reduce some of them to writing (with the names changed). But mostly you could just absorb and enjoy what they have to offer, and maybe learn a thing or two;
(7) visited libraries, or museums, or botanical gardens, or really anyplace of even moderate interest where you didn’t have to take a kid to the bathroom, or break up a fight about a toy you told them they shouldn’t have brought in the first place;
(8) walked at a leisurely pace through fancy grocery stores, sampling the soppressata and losing yourself in the olive bar or the wall of cheese, all the while having savored the experience with full awareness that you were unencumbered by fervent and high-pitched demands for cake, or sugary cereal, or fruit juice which, in the memory of some of your children, was once approved but is now forbidden;
(9) visited a fortune teller, or a spiritual medium, or some other kind of charlatan, just for the story;
(10) developed a thoughtful bucket list which does not include entries such as “finally watch Gymkata” or “transcend space and time”. Unless watching Gymkata itself enables one to transcend space and time. “The skill of gymnastics, the kill of karate.” Rad!
Duly chastened at your collection of lost opportunities, you steel yourself for summer, and resolve to appreciate what it offers in the now. Indeed, for all the unvisited museums, there are equal and opposite swimming pool shenanigans. For every blissful botanical garden, there is a Six Flags hellscape, uh, wonderland. And gone will be the drop offs, and the pickups, and the monitoring of homework, and the packing of lunches, and the dreaded unpacking of what’s left in the lunch boxes at the end of the day. And there are adventures to be had, both planned and unplanned, with kith and kin.
So you bid farewell to the school year and your comfortable life, and you embrace the coming of summer, with all its absurdities, and indignities, and joy. So much joy. And you pack away your regrets and your aspirations until sometime in late August – at least some of them. You’re unlikely to ever watch Gymkata, and you may never manage to cultivate Fort Worth friendships that lead to Fort Worth lunch dates. But one day, in the not too distant future, you shall once again push a grocery cart that has no kids sitting inside it. And on that day, as God is your witness, you *shall* savor the soppressata! Of that, there can be no doubt.