The waist-high miniature students move as a unit in a line like a snake. From the classroom to the library . . . the cafeteria to the music room . . . the playground back to the classroom, they miraculously slither in single file, mostly not disturbing the temptations they pass along the way. They have been taught how to travel. 

“Assume the position . . .” announces the teacher in a sing-songy voice that floats through the air more like a lyrical invitation than an authoritative order. And in response, fifteen tiny humans interlock their fingers behind their backs in a “buckle” and “blow a bubble” with their cheeks. 

This is the sage’s way of getting four-year-olds from A to B without creating chaos. 

Brilliant, really. 

When summer starts to fade, it does so into the vibrant colors of college football.  Bands begin marching, cheerleaders start dancing, Lee Corso (for the past 38 years anyway) slips on some mascot’s head, and suddenly battle lines are re-defined in permanent marker from Florida to Oregon and all spots in between. Stadiums and the towns who house them percolate. The air feels different, even if the temperature hasn’t changed. 

Such is the enduring power of college football. Little has as much societal adhesive for a throng of people as the colors they are bound by in the fall.

“We have a big family,” he said more than once as he and his teenage son loaded the back of the truck. 

She stood watching, sobbing, though she had offered and was glad to see her dining table go. The eight-foot mahogany classic with beveled edges that gracefully curved at the corners had done all it could do. In her home anyway.  It and its eight matching chairs, tastefully upholstered in textured beige, were headed for new life. She needed the space, and hadn’t needed the table in a very, very long time. 

The father with a house full of children never dreamed he would receive such a gift. “We have a BIG family,” he kept repeating, as a point of pride and simultaneously a salve for her raw edges, the kind that don’t tear clean despite the timely intersection of want and need.

In my mind’s eye, I can see her. Mini-Morgan. My daughter-in-law’s firstborn with a golden splash of her grandmother’s curls. 

My three-in-the-morning brain imagines her inching down the echoey tiled hallway lined with colorful bulletin boards. She’s looking for Mrs. River’s room. I see inside the Pre-K den, “A-U-S-T-Y-N,” by a hook where she is to stow her belongings, and there again on a butterfly placemat at the table where she and her navy blue thermos, also bearing her name, will call home base for a while.

Almost nobody yields anymore. Vehicles merging from on-ramps into seventy mph traffic are not asking for permission. They are expecting to have a place.  It’s not their job to wait for a spot to slide into, it’s the cars’ jobs-- the ones spaced in succession rip-roaring like a  train-- to create room. 

“Yield” was once a consequence-carrying law. Then somewhere along the way (as we humans hurried up to hurry) it morphed from that into a suggestion. Now, it means nothing. Right-lane drivers innately know. They are the anointed absorbers charged with having a  scoot-over plan.

“What,” I wonder, “has made us so reluctant to give way?”

My Granny died worn-out. The last few years toward ninety-four she fought and fought, like Rocky Marciano with his gloves taped up. Then one day she just said, “I’m tired” and with independent grace untied the mitts. Then she laid down on the bed and went to sleep. A few days later as I sat in the recliner by her bedside sort of watching TV and mostly, out the side of my eye, counting the seconds between the rise and fall of her chest, she shed the body that had served her for so long so well. I watched her lungs fill and deflate. Fill and deflate. Fill and deflate and, just like that, not fill.

Slowly she went. Then suddenly she was gone. 

“You have to come see this,” said the wedding planner when the bride-to-be picked up the phone. 

“Right now?!” 

“Yes! It’s just indescribable.”

“But I thought you wouldn’t let us until tomorrow?” 

“It’s too good. You won’t be able to take it all in tomorrow. There will be too many people, too much going on. I want you to see the space—all it holds, how it feels. I have no words.”

One of my mentors once shared with me a metaphorical riff about a man trying to get out of a bar that was filling with smoke. He closed it with, “If there’s a back door that’s unlocked, the man who knows about it won’t have the same urgency to run away that the others who are climbing all over one another to get out of the front door do.” I was young and stumped when I’d asked him how to get my big-toe-dippers to decide to go all-in.  Speaking in riddles was coach’s preferred mode of communication, painting a picture ripe for interpretation was his jam. He had wanted to demonstrate a potential solution as much as I had yearned for direction. My question and his answer met in a field of never-forget.