My little bug is buzzing around Washington D.C. with the rest of the 8th graders in her school. A class trip to the nation's capital that she's been preparing for since fourth grade.
In the fundraising sense, anyway. Scrimping and saving in a school-based account with the expected efficiency of market-sponsored fundraisers.
You know what I mean: you sell a candle to your grandad that your mother will pay for and keep, because, let's face it, not a single person his age needs a chunk of wax that supports an open flame.
I prefer dropping off bags full of bottle deposits that miraculously tabulate into a small fortune than to periodic pyramid sales schemes.
Surely two years' worth of spent soda cans would put a bite into the final bill.
"You're welcome," I said with all the confidence of a moral superior. But I had missed the mark.
"Yeah .... you saved the planet a whopping $14.45."
"What a bargain for you."
But it is a bargain, even at twice the price.
Right ... like I'm not going to invest at least twice that amount in replacing her shoe leather.
In four days - as per the itinerary - the kids will infest every spoke of the district. They will walk nearly 40 miles; land on dozens of museums and monuments; eat their way through a handful of restaurants, and do a fly-by of all houses of their representative government.
They pack a lot of tourism into 96 hours.
As she walked out the door, leaving her phone as per school regulation, I missed her.
Wished I could call just to hear her exasperated voice say "Mom! I'm not a kid anymore."
As I fed her critters and changed their water, I missed her.
I didn't even want to complain about the lack of cleanliness of their abode. I just silently swept.
As I sleepwalked into her room at the crack of dawn to silence an alarm she neglected to unset, I missed her.
I almost missed how her voice would sound from our shower at that ungodly hour. How her father would have hollered that she had her own bathroom she never used as if talking to himself.
I especially missed the late morning prank texts I send for her to find when school time electronic bans are lifted
and she rushes to check her messages.
I know she's probably waiting on a
cute boy to say "Hey! ..." and so she can reply "Hey!" and leave it at that.
Instead, she'll find a picture of a ballet dancing bear pirouetting through the air with a furry, distended belly and resting beast face.
She'll send me a catalog page in reply. A screen-shot of a lemon-colored pair of pants M.C. Hammer might have made famous. And she'll tell me they look like olden-days pants she thinks would look marvelous on me now, even though I've grown long in the tooth.
I will agree and tell her they do seem timeless. And I will admit with a false flair that I went ahead and bought two pairs. Now we can match.
She will flash a look of horror that reassures me that the bug in her misses the pest in me, too.
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