Considering that we have lived apart for most of her existence, and much of it in completely different states, even, there’s an awful lot I feel like I’ve missed out on over the years with Emma. Visitation time is awesome, but it only covers so much, and there’s been one obvious glaring gap almost completely missing from the repertoire: her school experience.
I believe I’ve done the best I could, but then again, surely just about everyone says the same thing. You tell yourself that, yet don’t really know for sure. Actually, for me, it depends upon the angle that I’m viewing the situation from. If I think about baby mama and her own mom’s antics and that whole messed up dynamic over the years, then I’m definitely telling myself, hey man, you handled all that about as well as anyone possibly could. Except if I isolate everything down and just think about Emma, then the whole mindset shifts instead into, eh, I still probably should have found a way to be more involved somehow. And the same applies to Maddie, too, even though legally I didn’t have any rights with her and was therefore even more constrained.
It’s also really easy to get fired up about other people’s behavior - without examining your own in quite such intense detail. I remember one day a while back asking Dad M. if he had any idea what the name of the school was in Georgia where I briefly attended first grade. He admitted that he recalled where it was but had no clue as to the name. And this did somewhat offend me, just a little, as I basically thought to myself, wow, that’s just great, my dad doesn’t even know where I attended first grade.
Maybe you know where this is going, though. Because just a few minutes later it occurred to me: yeah but wait a second, you have no idea where your kid(s) attended first grade. Once I realized this, it bugged me enough to make an immediate effort to attempt learning these things, and remembering them. But it still bothers me that I didn’t have a handle on these matters in real time.
Life just comes sailing at you at an insane clip, and you’re making all these decisions on the fly. Sometimes you don’t get it right. And I suppose virtually everyone feels this sinking dread when they think about their kids and wish that they had done more and spent more time with them when they were little. There’s also this incredibly frustrating dynamic in play (often encountered in the work place, to cite another example) whereby if you attempt to take the high road, and refrain from badmouthing other people…it just ends up making you look much worse instead. That’s your lovely tradeoff, congrats. Like how to this day, I’ve never said a single negative word about Jill to Emma or Maddie. Which is great and all, except then they are left wondering why you did such and such, and you probably come off as a distant jackass a lot of the time as a result. Even so, while all these points are true, I don’t know, sometimes it just feels like making excuses.
North Iredell High School
But since Emma moved here a year ago, things have been awesome. And now that she’s about to begin her sophomore campaign, I get to experience something new, that of a parent attending open house. So it is that she and I ride together up there, on a Tuesday in mid August.
Since moving down here prior to her freshman year, she’s been attending North Iredell High School, in the countryside north of Statesville. It’s an attractive looking building, set atop a high hill, and in fact the entire setup here reminds me more than a little of the high school I attended, in Lexington, Ohio: also perched atop a high hill, on a short side road sloping down to a busy one. Hers is located more in the country, but the similarities are striking.
The primary reason we all chose North Iredell is because Erin teaches at the middle school, located just a little bit farther out on Jennings Road, and it’s considered a better district than Statesville High, even though that one’s basically within walking distance of where Emma lives now. Starting with her freshman year (at least on the days classes were actually held live - this was directly in the middle of the COVID hysteria) the routine has been for me to pick Emma up in the morning, drive her to school, and then at the end of the day, she hops the bus for a short ride up to where Erin teaches. And then those two return to Statesville, she drops Emma off.
Regarding this open house, it’s my first chance to see a great deal of the school’s interior. Although “interior” is not completely comprehensive, either, as there are a number of disparate buildings, and so I’m glimpsing the connecting courtyards and walkways between many of them for the first time as well. It’s an interesting, modern feeling, cheerful layout, albeit one made slightly more challenging in that they’re also doing a bunch of remodeling around these parts, making for some funky detours at the moment.
Per multiple emails, everything is supposed to kick off in the cafeteria at 5pm. They literally sent the exact same email 4-5 times. But we show up there, and it’s a ghost town - we are the only two humans in sight. We weigh our options for a moment, then decide to hit her first period class, math, as taught by Mr. Tutterow. It helps that Emma already knows him, and I’ve at least met the guy, because he just so happened to have been her driver’s ed instructor this past spring.
He says we should go ask the guidance counselor what to do, since Emma didn’t bring her schedule and couldn’t remember any of the exact classes, in what order, beyond this one. So next we drift down there and…no one’s home here, either.
However, in our travels, we do happen to pass the principal’s office, and there’s some table set out showing the various bus routes for this year, so kids can figure out what to catch, when, and where. So this is at least some tangible progress. Without any better ideas, and still somehow not running into anyone who can really help us, we decide to check out the performance art building, maybe, because it says they’re handing out copies of the schedule there.
By happenstance, we do finally run into the school resource officer, who must recognize we seem lost, and asks if we need help. He says it’s a good thing we talked to him, because the schedules have changed since they were first issued. Meaning the Performing Arts Center was definitely a good call, and this becomes our next destination.
Here there’s a sizable line of students and parents, waiting in line for their revamped itineraries. So this explains the great mystery of where everyone else. By the time we make it through this queue, now it’s down to moving through these classes in order. Emma squeals with considerable excitement to stumble into one such room, where she encounters a history teacher she already knows and loves, this young blonde woman who seems like she must only be a handful of years older than these students herself. And then again just outside the classroom, when Emma bumps into an Asian girl she was chummy with last year, as the two of them dash and meet halfway down the hall for a hug and a quick reminiscing session.
We meet her English teacher and drama teacher, both somewhat older dudes. Those are both in the main building, as is the art class Emma is most excited about of all. In fact, she plans on joining the art club for an after school activity. Meanwhile, early on this somewhat downtrodden boy crosses our path, one who already knows Emma. He says he has no idea where to go, but seems to have many of the same classes as she, and is wondering if he can just traipse around with us.
Emma’s demurring with an uneasy looking expression. I don’t know this kid and feel bad for him, but at the same time don’t want to make her uncomfortable, without knowing the history here and if maybe she has some legitimate reason for avoiding him. We manage to parachute away from this potential crash without injury, although once we’re out of earshot she confesses she just considers him “annoying,” and that’s the extent of it.
I’m cracking up, of course, and all the more so when we wind up in this small, standalone building over on the east edge of the property. It houses just a single class, horticulture, and of course here this kid is - hmm, he somehow magically made it on his own - and is attempting to be all chummy with us all over again, much to Emma’s eternal consternation.
This building sits alone near the edge of a sharp decline, one that slopes downward into some brush, and then a fence and yard belonging to this single house sitting at the corner of Jennings and Raider. Unbeknownst to any of us, a little over three years later, Dad K will wind up buying that place and moving there, alone, after Mom has died. But of course by this point Emma has not only long since moved away from this district, but graduated high school completely.
Her sophomore year kicks off six days later, on Monday the 23rd. I pick her up around 7:30 each morning, as is our standard tradition. They’ve got the bridge torn up on Jennings, just before Raider, so we have to detour around via a couple side roads, though this generally doesn’t add much to our overall drive time.
Then they make it a whopping six more days into the school year, to Monday the 30th, before the dreaded mask mandate of a year prior, COVID related of course, is reinstated all over again - a ton of kids are sent home already. The following morning as we’re pulling up to the school, to drop Emma off, we can hear her principal making an announcement about the mask mandate being in effect.
One teacher gets in some hot water for passing out waivers to as many students as he can, something he created for them to request exclusion from the mask mandate. Independent of each other, actually, Erin and I both happen to email the principal telling her we think this is pure crapola - whatever one’s views of the face masks, we don’t think it’s a teacher’s place to go around telling all the kids to protest. And at any rate, whether they work or not, it doesn’t appear that wearing them has even been known to actively hurt anyone.
It doesn’t much matter because on the 2nd of September, North High is shut back down to online only through the 10th - Emma is not a happy camper. In possibly related news, she also playfully-mockingly scolds me one morning for referring to online school as “internet school,” as she tells me the right way to say it. But hey, at least I get to sleep in on these handful of days.
Emma is appointed to lead the school safety team, and is incredibly excited about such. One Saturday morning, early in the school year, she and I drive down to Lake Norman State Park, a picnic pavilion there, for this well-intentioned but somewhat lame Crosby Scholars party. Some weeks she sticks around after school for the art club and some weeks not, depending usually upon her tiredness level, but also on at least one occasion because she happened to run into Matthew that day, a boy she was briefly “seeing” the previous summer, and was agitated over the encounter.
When spirit week arrives, one morning she dresses like an elementary student, with knee high rainbow socks, stickers (including a donut) up around her eyes. On picture day, meanwhile, she’s jazzed because her hair looks good. With such a regimented routine - I literally leave the house at the exact same minute every day, which usually means arrival at her house in pretty much the same fashion - some of these sights are so familiar we expect to catch them on a daily basis, too. Like the woman walking her dog up Center Street, each of these mornings. In fact one morning, when I zoned out and just kept driving without remembering to turn off onto Emma’s road, it was the sight of this woman and her dog which jolted me into turning around. A surprisingly high percentage of the mornings, meanwhile, a little farther up the road, this local DJ is the lead car sitting at a red light, his logo emblazoned across the side of his vehicle. at the corner of Center and Armstrong when we roll past it.
Even clear up closer to the school, we are often spotting the same vehicles, bound for the same destination. Although one morning Emma is squealing with delight to recognize some girl in the car directly ahead of us. You can only predict so much in advance. Every once in a great while, if Erin has a prior commitment, usually school related, or is out sick or something, I will drive up to bring Emma home as well; even more infrequently, if we’re both swamped, she will catch a ride home instead with Erin’s friend Katelyn (not to be confused with her sister) who also lives in downtown Statesville, around the corner from us.
There’s the morning Emma strolls out to the car with this unexpected gift for me, an origami butterfly. She made a bunch of them out of orange and pink Post-It notes, asks if I want an orange. Quite naturally, I take her up on the offer. Speaking of surprises, there’s also the morning Jill apparently woke up on the wrong side of the bed, and comes out to the car to complain that she has no money and the girls need food, et cetera. Or the afternoon I’m meeting Erin and Emma at Sorrento’s for dinner, except they arrive and discover our daughter left her phone up at North Middle, therefore are forced to return after we eat.
Those two will occasionally stay over after school, to watch a volleyball game, or Emma’s friend McKayla in Color Guard. She makes some other, newer friends, too, this school year. One afternoon I drop her off at Lake Mountain Coffee to meet some girl, scoop her up a couple hours later; another, take her to some other girl’s house in the boondocks north of town, an adventure in itself just finding the place, and then once again return at the agreed upon time.
Then the next thing you know, the calendar has rolled over into 2022, and that entire crew up and leaves for Kentucky. Like anything else, revisiting this era brings about a wistfulness, thinking that it was over way too fast. Yet also sparking the warmth of fondly recalled nostalgia, yet also inevitably wondering, with a trace of sadness, what might have been. But if nothing else, at least we enjoyed this charming little groove, our routines of roughly a year and a half, until the carpet was abruptly pulled up during this sophomore season.
Recommended Book of the Week:
Love At First Sighting by Harley Wolfe
All she wanted for Christmas was silence. What she got was a Sasquatch with a sourdough addiction.
Burnt-out baker Penny Lanes retreats to a remote fire tower to escape the holidays. Her plan? Bake bread and be left alone. Harry is the forest’s hidden guardian. He knows the rules: never interact with humans. But the scent of Penny’s fresh sourdough is too tempting to ignore.
When a killing frost traps them together in the glass tower, survival means sharing body heat. As the storm rages, Penny discovers that the 8-foot-tall monster under her bed is more gentleman than beast. But with a predatory supervisor closing in, Harry must choose: remain a ghost, or become the monster the world fears to save his mate.
He stole her sourdough. She stole his heart.
