On Time

it's Regents week. And it feels like I'm being tested. 

The boy, you see, is not like the girl.

He has not made spreadsheets with multi-colored sticky notes nor has he committed the schedule to memory.

He will fly by the seat of his pants, knowing full and well someone else is responsible for the laundry. 

I tried to decipher the schedule but felt like a needed a translator. 

“I thought you said you had biology today? I don't see biology on the list.” 

“It's there, but for some reason, they called the test “Living Space.”

Not that he could laugh, since he needed a timekeeper, as we'd already been to school and back twice, since he thought the exam was in the morning rather than midday. 

It had been that kind of day for me, too. The kind where everything that could go wrong had gone wrong.

Nothing major. Just little things …

Although waking up to find we were out of caffeinated coffee should have tipped me off to the way the chips might fall.

I would get through it, but it would be a slog.

Like you had to make six trips between the house and car to gather all the piecemeal things you forgot the first-through-fifth times you tried to get on the road.

And then you can't find your glasses, because they're on top of your head.

And then you get every light. The only thing left to navigate around is a slow-moving tractor. 

Oddly, the farm vehicle never materialized. 

“Are you here yet?”

Had he been in the car with me, and also a kindergartener, we may have laughed for a minute, knowing what the adult parent driving might have said for the four-hundredth time.

I mustered none of my dwindling self-control as I dictated a response for Siri to relay: “I am somewhere,” wink-wink, nod-nod emoticon. “I could be here yet, but also I could be there yet, too.”

The urge overwhelmed my sensibilities, however, and I sent the response off with a tell-tale Whoosh!

I deserved the 🙄 that he sent in response. 

Although I suspect that my absence from the curb where he waits in the pick-up line after school had more to do with it than my droll wit.

When he gets in the car he'll remind me of all the other times I'd forgotten something. Like the time I packed up the car with the little man’s baseball gear, and headed for practice … only to be told by his older sister that I had forgotten to pack him, the shortstop. 

Major-league mistake.

But when I arrive he's all smiles. Two of his friends jump out of the bushes and the three of them commandeer the backseat. 

“It's ok?” He asks. I nod. 

“Where are we headed,” I ask, flipping an imaginary meter and pulling out into the stream of test-day traffic. 

“Well … it's hard to explain. I just tell you when you need to turn.”

Now, let's see if I can find a slow-moving farm truck.