On a Spring Wind

I walked out of the Quik Trip at 61st and 145th last night around 9:30, sugar-free frozen drink in hand.  The strong spring breeze, cool and damp but full of the promise of summer, greeted me.  A short, middle-aged woman in a florescent green t-shirt that read "Tuff Enuff" ambled toward the door as I started across the parking lot.  It was a perfect confluence of sensory experiences that conspired in a single instant to send me back more years than I care to think about.  I felt almost as though I had run into a wall called 1986:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcXT1clXc04&noredirect=1

The evening, the wind, the Styrofoam cup, the t-shirt's proclamation, even its color---all shouted something so very close to "YOUTH!" that I nearly stopped to listen.  I didn't have to. As I walked on to my car at the gas pumps, I thought of how many things call us back to younger days.  The taste of orange Kool-Aid, the smell of Play-Dough, the paper cover on crayons surely make us all think of childhood.  I can't hear K.C. and the Sunshine Band without imagining the soft green walls and blue and green flowered bedspread of my bedroom in my early teens.  And I can't think of Styrofoam (Sonic) cups, day-glo clothing, a spring wind full of expectation, and a good dance song without remembering one thousand wonderful days when I lived and worked with dozens of other college students---many of whom I still consider good friends, though I seldom see them---while I completed my master's.  It was the kind of wistful but happy memory one might have about a long-ago love that was not meant to last but was poignantly and fondly remembered. 

And then I thought of how frustrated I've been lately with my students.  Immature.  Whiny.  Lazy.  Irresponsible.  Rude.  I've thought all these things of them lately---or for a while, in some cases.  What I do for them they won't understand for a long while.  For them, their lives are full of making the same memories I had last night.  True, I remember the classes I was taking at that time, and the classes I was teaching as a grad assistant, but I was older than my students are now.  Surely, though, I was no less cavalier in my attitude toward life than they are. 

Tonight I stood in the lobby at our gym and watched them come in for their prom, beautifully done up, excited with the promise of the fresh spring breeze, ready for good dance songs, and even dressed in the same colors as 1986, and I heard youth calling again.  Their youth called out, and I smiled and told them how lovely they looked, and I thought how much they would experience before one day they saw youth staring back at them in a young person's face.  I signed them out as they left, climbed in my car, and drove the 40 miles back west, singing along with their songs, glad to have the years both behind me and ahead of me.