If dreams were horses..
Why my brain only holds a few of my childhood memories so vividly is beyond me, but one of them just came back this morning, as I walked, held my Kindergartener’s hands and went along with him, floating as if in a bubble, as snapshots of past, dreams of the future, all danced in front my eyes, crammed in those three minutes it took us to walk from home to his new school!
I was kicking and screaming in my daddy’s arms, while my mother and sister looked helplessly from the door steps next to the gate that enclosed our home in my home town.. I must have been 5 or 6, but I was refusing to go to school.. Getting packed in the rickshaw, with a bag and a lunch box in hand, I was going to be away from the comfort of my mother’s voice and the rattle of my toy friends for only a little while, for what felt like forever on that day..
As I walked on into the school building doors, I was flipping out inside that I should have some memento, some way of keeping this memory of my son’s first day in school alive… The thought did seem retro, but I still had to take a picture of him, his backpack on his shoulders, his lunch in his hands, you know, the works.. If I would have made an attempt to defy convention, I was risking at getting embarrassed for not treasuring a picture proof for those later-in-life moments.. , while all along carrying in my pocket, a six month old piece of 21st century marvel, the Iphone.
Surprisingly, I did not jerk a tear or let out a melodramatic wail while leaving him in a brand new setting, a new teacher, no daddy to listen to his chit-chat, or mommy to feed him… In fact, I was excited and squeezed his dad’s wrist a little while stepping out of the class room.. !!
The early morning pledge in the assembly line, the chalk and board, my navy blue uniform, the bell signalling the end of a class – the school that I attended more than a couple of decades ago might not be a match to this school, its programs, the library, the computers, and let’s throw in a hyperbolic football jersey in there.. – But it felt great, to just walk to school, just like in the old days..
Acting as a gentle critic to my writings is my mother, a writer, who tells me that in order to have a broader audience base, the content that I choose to pen down should resonate with people from all backgrounds, irrespective of their culture, their upbringing and their lifestyles. And in the classroom today, I saw precisely what every mother and father saw.. A foundation for our child’s creative licenses, whether he chooses to be a painter, an astronaut, a football player, a writer or even a dreamer like me..
With all the love in the world!!
Your Old School Momma
“Consistency is the last resort of the unimaginative.” – Oscar Wilde