Senior Bike Day
KIDS FIRST GLIMPSED 6:55AM
The noise grew slowly at five of seven this morning. First it was just a tiny squawk outside our bedroom window as if maybe a baby blackbird had fallen out of a tree. Then another squawk followed and some small shrieks too. I went to the window and saw Charlie Chaplin shoot by on a dirt bike followed by two girls in pigtails and baby clothes also on these short little bikes. The Charlie Chaplin guy was in a suit with black bushy hair and a drooping mustache and the girls looked ALMOST like they normal girls and at first all I could think was that they were some insane family like my sister born-again neighbors who she once looked out the window at 1 am to see silently running down the street down the street in utter silence and holding hands.
Then the noise grew louder and here came a guy in a clown suit and a girl in roller blades; here a helmet, here a Rambo-style headband. A safari hat here, and over there on one boy a pointy headpiece drooping at the tip that looked like a lot like a condom and before you knew it here were 60 people 30 feet from my house and even more clambering out of pickup trucks and SUVS whose backs were loaded with more bikes.
At lat I realized what this was: I knew what this was: It was: the special day when tradition has the town's 12th graders either ditching or rather lightly attending school and beginning it by roaring through the streets of our little downtown on bikes, then heading straight for the high school just when the underclassmen are arriving, to take a kind of taunting victory lap. It’s funny to them but it’s poignant to those of us who have already left high school and maybe we roared past the old place and maybe we didn’t but in neither case did we know how quickly and completely the gates of that Eden would close against us. This morning’s kids don’t sense that yet and why should they with the prom and graduation and one lovely long summer all still ahead for them. Let them enjoy it all and believe as we all once believed that the old friendships would never end and Love Always was a promise you could hang your hat on and not just a quickly scrawled inscription in a yearbook.
Outside my front door they fell into formation on their bikes and roller blades and a shriek went up like the sound of ten thousand magpies and off they moved, up the street and around the corner and out of sight.
AND SO GOODBYE
