I May Not Have Mentioned ...

... or I may have mentioned it 73 times since Spring, but 96 graduated from BC High this past weekend. Now that he's officially an alum I'm thinking a lot about how he was born old for his age.

"Never wake a sleeping baybee!" they'd tell me. And I'm proud to say I followed this sage advice even when my eleven-day-old was sleeping through the night.

By first grade he had decided that he was too old to have his mom kiss him goodbye at the school door -- we lived across the street and there was no privacy to be found behind the tinted windows of a private vehicle. Heck, there were no private vehicles anyway, but he knew he was too big to kiss his mom in public. "You can't kiss me anymore, mom. But you can shake my hand when you drop me off at school." Oh, thanks, kid. Way to establish a reputation as a warm and nurturing mother of young children among my circle of friends, comprised almost exclusively of other mothers of young children who likely made a daily habit of kissing their children, and had probably never bid their children Godspeed with a shake of the hand.

Then there was that summer before seventh grade. We lived north of Boston, and BC High was south of Boston, about a 45 minute train ride. The saving grace was that he could do it by train without needing to make any changes or connections. Heck, he wouldn't even have to cross a street. In at Davis (usually after a quick kiss and an "I love you Mom"  to make up for lost time and assuage a guilty conscience, I like to think); out at JFK, across the footbridge, and bam, he's there. So we did, ahem, a few practice rides during that summer of 2008. Eventually 96 put his foot down, announcing, "I know how to do this, mom. I don't need any more practice. Sheesh." So I had to admit that the dry runs were for my benefit, not actually for his. Maybe a month after school started he got home a little later than I had come to expect. He had decided to experiment with other routes home and had discovered the Orange Line and Sullivan Station and a whole series of bus route numbers that even now I don't know to where they go and on which I have never ridden.

Now it's all  cigars and colleges and California and he's still old for his age.