It’s a hectic Monday morning, and somehow you and your wife both forgot to pack lunches last night, and the dog needs to be walked, and your son’s best school shoes are inexplicably drenched, and the kids need to get dressed NOW if they want to have time to eat before school, and how can you be out of cat food already?? And . . . where are two of your kids?

You look around the house, and finally find them sitting on the back steps, your oldest with her arm around your youngest. And the boy seems sad. Oh crap. Was it something you did? Do you need to apologize? You do a quick mental review of your behavior over the past fifteen minutes, because – let’s face it – from time to time, you can be a real dick. But you find nothing out of the ordinary (which isn’t to say you *haven’t* been a dick, but more that if you were a dick, it wasn’t anything unusual). So you ask them what’s up.

And your five-year-old son tells you he has realized that once he is his sister’s age, she will be away at college. In fact, even before that. And he looks at you and his eyes are watery. And suddenly, yours are too. So you join them on the steps. The lunches can wait.