Sean Kirst: From kindergarten to college, an oldest kid, a farewell, the aching glory of late summer

Thirteen years ago this week, for our family, represented one of those quiet, things-are-never-exactly-the-same milestones in life. Our youngest child, at 18, had just started his first week of college. Any parent of my vintage knows the feeling during that first little while when your last kid is gone, and you step back into the quiet of the house, and the morning comes without those footsteps on the stairs.

I absolutely loved the rituals of being a dad, from day one. There was a time decades ago when an earnest doctor told my wife and I, point blank, there was a good chance — even a probability — that we’d never have kids. We walked away, staggered, from that appointment.

Against all expectations, we would end up with three children. To this day, that still feels a whole lot like a miracle.

In the same way as everyone else, our young family had our long days and our share of bumps, but — looking back on it — we savored the time when the kids were toddling, and on to grade school, junior high and high school.

The idea that it might never have happened at all was a reminder to treasure even the chaotic moments … like a couple of restless toddlers in car seats on long drives, or throwing together a semblance of breakfast before we all ran out the door on frenzied mornings, or hustling to get home from work in order to sprint toward band concerts or coaching Little League or being there for school plays or whatever events the kids were doing at the moment.

It was all-consuming, and it seemed impossible when you’re in the middle of it to imagine that time will ever reach an end — and then, unbelievably, it does. What it all leads into, as so many of you remember so well, is that little spasm of grief and loss we were experiencing more than a decade ago, just after our youngest left for the dorms.

What you don’t know at the time is that it passes, and the road leads on to equally great things with your grown children.

But man, when it first happens, do you feel it.

In 2012, just as I was experiencing all of that, I saw Jenn Thompson’s start-of-kindergarten photos of her son.

At the time, the two of us were colleagues at The Post-Standard | Syracuse.com, where Jenn was an editor and I wrote columns. She and her husband Jim had a little boy, Sam, who had just turned 5. From proximity at work — and, of course, through Facebook — I knew how much absolute joy the Thompsons took from their little guy. It was a pleasure to follow all of Jenn’s posts, especially since their young family was just beginning a time that was finishing up for good, inside our house.

On Sam’s first day of kindergarten — a morning that carries its own jumble of joy, hope and loss – he held hands with his friend and neighbor, Tyler Quarry, as they walked together toward their bus in Minoa. Sam wore shorts, a plaid button-down shirt (fashionably untucked), camo-green socks, sneakers and carried a tiny backpack. His folks made sure he was tagged with one of those yellow first-day pin-on notes to guarantee everyone in authority knew who he was.

Amid all of it, the child looked up that day and saw the moon hanging clear in the blue sky of a sunny morning, an instant of wonder for a 5-year-old. Even as his mom and dad focused on the understanding of how their little boy’s world was about to be transformed in profound ways, he pointed toward the sky and asked his parents how the moon could appear, in morning light.

Jenn caught the moment when he pointed, in a photograph. Then Sam and Tyler got on the bus, to go to school. As the vehicle pulled away, Jenn took another photo, among several she posted to Facebook, this one showing the bus just before it turned the corner — a turn that in some fashion we had all witnessed, in our own lives.

I saw those images on Facebook at the precise instant we were adjusting to our own first days with no kids in the house. The symmetry of it — all the parallel circles — swept across me. I asked Jenn if we could do a little “column in pictures” about Sam’s walk to the bus and publish it at Syracuse.com. She and Jim said OK, and that’s what we did.

It seemed to me that the moment involved something eternal about what every parent feels at such times, surrounded by the crisp air and golden light of late August and early September — that specific juncture of singing cicadas and the first tell-tale sign of a few changing leaves.

I was grateful to Jenn for allowing me to share with readers how she responded to her son’s short walk, from the front door to the bus, summarizing such a giant passage. Readers responded with passion, for the simplest of reasons.

It was them.

Anyway, the next 13 years swept by like one of those movies where the calendar pages flutter off into the wind. Jenn went on to a new career at ProLiteracy, where she is now a senior editor. She and Jim had a second child, Sigourney — or ‘Siggy’ — now 10, for whom Sam became a devoted older brother. I left Syracuse to work as a columnist in Buffalo, returning here as a journalist last spring to take a column-writing gig at the new Central Current.

After I settled in, I was wandering around Facebook a couple of months ago, where I saw some new photos from Jenn and realized — with disbelief — that Sam was about to graduate from East Syracuse-Minoa High. So I messaged Jenn, and we reminisced about the kindergarten images, and she said: Yes, Tyler still lives nearby, and she and Jim had gone out and caught another image of the two boys on the same spot on their final day of high school, essentially mirroring their journey from 13 years ago.

I could have written this column then, to go along with graduation. But it seemed that right now is the better moment, as August passes into September — especially considering that Jenn and Jim dropped Sam off a few days ago for his first semester at SUNY New Paltz, on the same day Tyler left for SUNY Cortland. Sam’s goal is becoming an educator, maybe a math teacher, though Jenn says he’s also “a great reader and great writer, and he’s always asking questions.”

She said Sam and his dad had this game that began a long time ago with a National Geographic trading card with the image of a gharial, a kind of crocodile. Sam’s childhood curiosity about the card, and every detail involving gharials, led to a ritual that continued for many years, where father and son would take turns hiding the card around the house … often in pretty tough places … until the other guy found it, and the game would start anew.

“He’s a kid,” Jenn said of Sam, “who’s always wanted to know everything about everything.”

She is missing that curiosity around the house. Big-time. She misses all the questions at the kitchen table, and she misses the daily warmth and humor of interactions between their son and daughter, and she misses the deep bond between Sam and their dog Ringo — a pit bull rescue who came to them six years ago, when Sam was 12, which means dog and boy had the kind of lifetime-love-and memory connection you know precisely if you’ve had dogs and kids.

When it thundered, and Ringo was frightened, he would immediately jump into bed with Sam.

The Thompsons left Sig with her grandma on the day they drove Sam to New Paltz, and the big brother hugged his little sister at the house. On the long ride to college they listened to podcasts with the kind of grownup themes they don’t turn on when they’re in the car with Sig, which was a little statement of its own about what the journey represented for Sam.

At New Paltz, for a teenager such an exciting and revelatory place — an easy day trip by train for students, to New York City — mom and dad helped Sam move into the dorms and then stayed in a nearby hotel while he got his first taste of independent college life, that night. The next day Jenn and Jim drove back to campus, and the three of them ran out to share a quick meal, at a cafe.

Finally, they all returned to the dorm, and maybe — just maybe — Jim found a way to hide the gharial card in Sam’s room, before his mom and dad did what they knew they had to do.

A hug, a farewell to their boy, and the two of them were back inside the car. Every parent who’s done it remembers the crackling quiet of the first moments of that drive. They thought about listening to the podcasts again on the way home, but that was all too much of a reminder about the kid who wasn’t there …

Instead, needing some strength, they turned on Tom Petty.

To me, what was most striking about the then and now — Sam leaving for kindergarten, Sam leaving for college – were two of the photographs Jenn and Jim captured, at each distinct moment. As Sam walked toward the bus for the first time, at 5, he glanced toward his mom with a look of… it’s almost hard to explain. A little fear, maybe, with a dash of wistfulness.

Yet more than anything … a staggering amount of determined, don’t-worry-mom-this-is-how-it-has-to-be love.

In Sam’s dorm room, as they photographed their son in his moving-in-day-what-a-long-strange-trip-it’s-been Grateful Dead-themed T-shirt, from the Strong Hearts cafe:

There it was. That same expression.

For the Thompsons, they are going through the identical kind of aching first days since your kid leaves, exactly, that led me to call Jenn about the kindergarten images, 13 years ago. Every parent whose child first goes away to school, or the military, or to some faraway job knows precisely what I mean, that instant when you are glad for your daughter or son’s dreams and you admire their raw courage but you have to work through the sadness of knowing the house will never feel exactly the same again, and you go nose-to-nose with that absence — even though you understand somewhere and somehow that what I promised Jenn the other day will also come to be:

This separation will lead, down the road, to the ultimate consolation: There will be a kind of doubling back, to a new connection with your grown kid that can be somehow deeper and more intimate and in many ways even stronger than the bond you recall, say, when you were scrambling in the morning to match up a couple of small socks, out of the jumbled laundry basket, for the little kid in bare feet standing at the door.

Jenn knows that’s true, even if — at least for a few days, as late August becomes September – such an outcome might feel as difficult to explain as the moon joining the sun, in the same morning sky.