I'm Sorry, I Don't Do Impressions

"Doctor, can you give the court your impression of Mr. Striker?"
"I'm sorry, I don't do impressions. My training's in psychiatry." - Airplane



My thirteen year old impressed me this morning.

Last night, he made a promise. This morning, he woke at eight and kept it.

He is no longer my little man, producer of his tummy for sugar, the boy who will never be too big to sit on my lap (he laughs right over my head when I remind him of that.)

Now he's a teenage boy, stuck cutting the grass on a hot summer morning, like innumerable teenage boys who have gone before him.

Something about this moment - the smell of the freshly-cut grass; his bony, shirtless shoulders hunched over the mower; the tilt of his hat and the set of his jaw - reminds me of an old Rockwell print.

Maybe from his period of French Impressionism - "Moe De Lon." (An oldie but a goodie. . .)

Surely the time has not gotten away from me this quickly. Surely I can keep them all little just by wishing it were so. . .

If only I could. . . and stop calling me "Shirley."