quote:

Dear Jonathan,

I thought about this poem three years ago when your brother was ten. Now it comes to mind again this summer for you. It's called "Centaur" and it's written by May Swenson, but that's not all that important. It is an emotion brought about by the poem, particularly by the way that the first few lines strike me.

The Summer that I was ten--
Can it be there was only one
summer that I was ten? It must

have been a long one then--

I think of things like this when I see you riding along over the waves on that inner tube behind the boat, bouncing and laughing, wiping the spray from your eyes. Josiah watching and shouting to you. Micah staring, and possibly privately debating if he wants to take a turn...

I wonder if time really seems as slow for you as it seems it was for me when I try looking back to my tenth year. What little I remember of specifics... it seems there was a whole block of time, swimming in Uncle Bob's pool, swinging from ropes to hay stacks in the barn with my cousins, hiking trails with dad, picking lilacs from a neighbor's bush for mom.

The odd thing was how each day seemed to stretch for hours far longer than they do now. The space from breakfast to dinner seemed an eternity. I know how you wait for events like birthdays and Christmas. It takes forever, doesn't it? As if it may never come, and the anticipation lengthens the wait.

Is it simply that you don't have to-do lists? No schedule set in stone or deadlines to meet. Does time start speeding up in high school when papers come due? Or has it started too soon for you with this last science project that had to be completed before the science fair?

Or is that too easy an explanation? Maybe there is much more to it than that, maybe there is magic in being ten. Maybe there is a spell that starts when the years reach two digits or maybe that is when the spell first begins to fade.

I don't know the answer, Jonathan. But I find myself at moments like this, with you in the river, then later tonight on fold out chairs in front of the car at the drive in, watching Spiderman again, this time with my own children mezmorized by the lights on the big screen. I find myself capturing the magic of the moment again.

Not whole days. I'm not that good at it yet, but moments like these that seem to stretch for longer than the clock allows. You may never keep them, but I wish for both of us the skill and wisdom to hold on, like Spidey to the webs and make the summer moments with our sons last as long as they will stretch. And I wish for the grace of memory to bring them back when we both are old.

May this be the best summer ever, Jonathan. Until next year.

Love always, every moment,
Dad