Volume 5, Entry 26: Landmarks

Growing old via other people’s kids

Pottery by Dillon Schanning

I decorated my childhood bedroom with posters.

In Irvine, I acquired several from movie theaters and video rental stores just by asking, but when we returned to Elk Grove, Minnesota Vikings quarterback Daunte Culpepper replaced John Travolta and Michelle Trachtenberg. My interests shifted more toward sports, so my decor followed suit.

A few years later, I added another display piece. This was a rare Oakland A’s wide-release poster that I found during high school. The poster centered on the word FLAMETHROWERS in sleek letters with the central A replaced by the team’s script logo. Above it were posed studio shots of Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, and Mark Mulder, the team’s ace pitchers that made the Moneyball offensive philosophy look genius; below were action photos of each hurler mid-delivery.

I was a much bigger fan of outfielder Nick Swisher later in their tenures with the franchise, but those three guys jump-started my Oakland A’s fandom. Before, I was just a baseball fan, happily absorbing games, highlights, and box scores. However, when they ascended to the big leagues, every start became an event. I couldn’t miss any. The team looked World Series-bound.

The A’s never delivered that championship to new millennium Oakland, but they did bring me into the fold. With the team on TV every night and the local River Cats feeding the franchise’s player pipeline, the A’s became a fixture in my life. I mean that: until I bought a house in 2015, I woke up every morning looking directly at that Flamethrowers poster. Hudson, Mulder, and Zito welcomed me back into the world.

On June 9th, two days after finishing the writing class, I rode BART to Oakland alone. I’d never attended a professional sporting event alone, especially not one hours away, but I felt I couldn’t miss that day’s game. I even showed up three hours early.

That’s because the A’s were hosting an autograph session with Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder. While scoring signatures offers a thrill, I was less interested in memorabilia than the opportunity to thank them for their contributions. Well, that and, hopefully, a photo.

Arriving so early, I expected to be among the first fans queued up, but several hundred beat me to the Coliseum. Likewise, at least eighty people were already there when I joined the autograph session line. This wasn’t discouraging—the former pitchers would be signing for ninety minutes—but it was a warm reminder of how beloved both guys remain in the community.

When Hudson and Mulder arrived, they received a loud ovation, and the line began moving in earnest. Being in a space densely packed with strangers typically stresses me out, but these fans buzzed, excitedly telling stories about the games they watched twenty years ago. A mother and father in front of me told their teenage son about a date night they’d had at a Hudson start; two buddies argued about Mulder’s career arc if his shoulder had held up. This was a knowledgeable, enthusiastic crowd who loved the same teams I did. Listening to them was a joy.

As I inched closer to the signing table, I caught only obscured glimpses of the men. Naturally, then, I pictured them as they were on my poster. Mulder, a statuesque 6’6” southpaw, and Hudson, a generously measured 6’0 righty, always made for a unique pair, but they always looked focused and imposing on my closet door. I’d recognize them anywhere, even 20+ years later.

Team personnel justifiably sought to keep the long line moving, so security discouraged pictures at first, but restrictions eased as all facets¹ found their rhythms. After Mulder gave me permission, I snapped my photo and said my little piece to each guy.

For every second, I admit I was shaking. I was talking to the guys from my bedroom wall! Mulder, a Midwesterner with a chiseled jaw and easy charisma, looked thoroughly in his element. When I spoke, he looked me in the eye and smiled, thanking me for coming out with words he’d repeat hundreds of times that day. Hudson, on the other hand, looked small and a tad nervous next to his rotation mate, but when I thanked him for coming out to Oakland, his southern accented “I’ll always enjoy being in this place” excited me.

Leaving the area, I remained giddy. Everything had worked out exactly the way I’d hoped it would. Stepping to the side to stash their autographed photos in a scorebook, I also peeked at my photograph in preparation for sending it to Natalie, Sam, and my brother.

Fearing it had come out blurry—I was shaking, after all—I zoomed in on the pitchers’ faces. While Apple technology protected me from ruining the moment, staring at these two faces I knew so well shocked me.

Mulder and Hudson stared out at me, just like they had for a dozen years of high school, college, and teaching. But the two men in that selfie were not the guys from my old bedroom. Not until Mulder walked out for the ceremonial first pitch with his elementary school-aged son bouncing by his side could I explain why.

Referencing the photo once more after that, I recognized the difference immediately.

These two aces had gotten old.

*****

Watching sports is a weird thing.

If you focus on an individual player and follow his career from start to finish, you’ll see him change. In baseball, a rookie might start long and lean before bulking up in his mid-twenties and thickening out as he wears down in his thirties. Barry Bonds proves that players’ appearances can radically change, but most of the time, those changes are relatively subtle from the stands or on a TV broadcast. We might notice flecks of gray or a few more wrinkles during an interview, but nothing major.

Although the average age of MLB players fluctuates over time, that number consistently falls between 26 and 31. The visual difference between 26 and 31, let alone a few years in either direction, is decidedly difficult to detect—for me, at least.

This complicates my viewing experience. As I mentioned last year, MLB players look the same to me now as always. I struggle to reconcile that the players pitching and hitting today are no longer my dad’s age but former students’. Seriously: MLB’s youngest active player, Jackson Chourio, would have graduated from high school in 2022.

Mulder himself was once a hotshot rookie; now his beard is grayed, his forehead wrinkled, and an eight-year-old gallops by his side. The guy has aged gracefully, but there’s still a shock when I blink, and the guy on my poster from 2004 becomes a Michigan dad in 2024. It’s like exiting a time warp.

It doesn’t help that my job amplifies a similar struggle. On every workday, the majority of my in-person interaction happens with seventeen-year-olds. This has been roughly true since I began teaching in 2009…which happens to be the birth year of our rising sophomores. They’ll blow out seventeen birthday candles in less than two years!

This is disorienting. My work centers on seventeen-year-olds, but the seventeen-year-olds in my first classes were born in 1992 when I was six; they are well into their thirties now. This coming year’s seventeen-year-olds were born in 2008 when I’d already finished college. One girl in my first Geometry class was pregnant in 2009; her child already attends high school somewhere.

Because of programs like Mathletes or AVID back in the day, I do see students age. I can spot the differences between ninth and twelfth grade versions when I compare photos. But it’s always the same aging: I’m forever walking along the same section of the aging curve. The milestones—license, prom, college apps, graduation—are always the same. As a teacher, I live life in a time loop that obscures the passage of time.

The skeptical reader might insist my looping isn’t real for one obvious reason: I age. If the world around me doesn’t betray the passage of time, surely my mirror does.

Except it doesn’t. My body has dramatically changed, but my apparent age hasn’t. I don’t see 38 in my reflection, whatever that looks like. For the past five years, I’ve worn the same clothes, slipped on the same shoes, and trimmed the same auburn beard that has resisted graying. Likewise, by wearing a hat, I mask my balding head. But even that traditional sign of aging fails me: I lost that hair in 2012. Intentional shape change aside, I haven’t aged a day. My mirror is the Flamethrowers poster, tricking me into anticipating Hudson and Mulder circa 2005 when they were ten years younger than I am now.

While I feel those intervening years after eating too much pizza or staying up late, I don’t see them. Apparent age changes according to logistic growth: it’s steep from seven to seventeen but flattens thereafter. The people I spend time with don’t look the same at twenty-seven as they once did at seventeen, but even those differences are subtle.

How do other teachers notice time passing? I’ve wondered this many times. I never forget the individual people, but there’s always a fresh batch of seventeen-year-olds ready to take their place. Put photos of two juniors from my first and most recent classes together, and there’s no noticeable difference. They could be from any Calculus class, including the same one, but just kidding: they’re nearly a generation apart. How do other people navigate this?

I got my answer last week. Since last year, I’ve volunteered several times for Sarah at the elementary school her kids attend, running a morning station for an event she coordinates. I enjoy paying back all of her support, and it’s also fun to step outside of my time loop and watch second graders try (in vain) to dunk a basketball on a mini-hoop.

At this most recent session, still-tiny kindergartners participated, too, but they moved in quartets with parents escorting the groups between stations. This wrinkle didn’t make much of an impression on me…until one of the parents said my name.

That parent was Emmerine, whom I remember as my graduating class's exceedingly warm Class President. We only had a class or two together in high school, but she’s someone you only need a few words with to like. I was happy to see her, but honestly, surprised she remembered me.

Naturally, she asked why I was volunteering at the elementary school. I mentioned Sarah, which instantly clicked; everyone there loves her. Then, because I’m an inspired conversationalist, I asked what brought her there.

Emmerine laughed and pointed to a little girl using two hands to heave a basketball. I felt really, really dumb: her kid goes to the school. Her kid is in kindergarten. Obviously.

When the group was ready to move on, Emmerine said goodbye.

“Maybe she’ll have your class someday,” she added with a wave.

She also sent my brain spiraling around that thought for the next week.

Here’s why: I hadn’t seen Emmerine since she was seventeen, and she left me thinking about a five-year-old in pink overalls taking Calculus…at seventeen. Emmerine and I will be 49 then, but, I’d bet, perceiving our 49s quite differently. And suddenly, I understood why:

Because her daughter will mark that change for her.

That’s why other teachers don’t struggle with seeing age like I do. Marking the passage of time for them happens naturally: they look at their kids. Teachers, and parents in general, avoid time loops because they have children.

And I don’t.

*****

Matt and I saw Run Lola Run at Tower on Thursday. I wasn’t enough of a film buff to be aware of it in 1998, but I remember classmates singing its praises when we were seventeen.

The movie was enjoyable, but the afternoon’s highlight was lunner at the cafe next door with Matt. Over black bean soup, a Borracho burger, and an endless supply of flies to swat away, we talked, covering movies, memories, and creative projects across a few hours.

We also talked about his daughter, who will turn three this year. Matt always shares awesome stories, and our meal included anecdotes about the thrills of tree-climbing and scooter-riding with a toddler’s judgment and hand-eye coordination.

The most memorable thing he shared concerned her language development. Evidently, she’s speaking in complete sentences now, a shocking jump from the last time I saw her. We laughed about the simple declarative sentences he’s ready to feign excitement over. “Dad is a person” is a remarkable feat of language acquisition, but it falls just short of stimulating conversation.

Hearing him talk about those stages so fluently—his daughter has amazing parents, I should add—got my mind thinking about this exact topic. Their little girl is undoubtedly my most extensive exposure to toddlers: I learned the obscene length of Green Eggs and Ham from reading it to her in December. I regularly receive photos of her smiling and laughing in the Oakland A’s shirt I bought her—start ‘em early!—and she pops onto most FaceTime and phone calls to say hi, which still delights me.

But while I see her more often than any other kid her age, I don’t see those incremental changes he narrates in post. I have no doubt her school pictures will blanket my refrigerator as the years pass, but my relationship with her will be discrete, not continuous, marked by short intervals rather than extended stretches. Matt’s stories will enable me to play catch-up about her roles in school plays or exploits on soccer teams, but she will be a scatterplot of data points. I’ll get the general trend of her but never have more than a regression curve to fill in those gaps.

This is still helpful. Time will pass by proxy: her face will age from five to eighteen when I grab my applesauce. That phenomenon will help me understand Matt and me aging from 40 to 52. She will be a landmark for the passage of time even while I navigate my familiar time loop. When she turns seventeen, I will say things like “I can’t believe she’s seventeen,” the same way, I suspect, Matt will.

But we’ll say that sentence differently. I will picture several dots on a graph approximating a person, and he will know her trajectory’s entire arc. He will have borne witness to everything; I will hear about it via text or over twice-yearly lamb vindaloo. It will be my storytime, an ongoing volume of fan fiction ripe for revisiting whenever the author posts another chapter.

It’s better this way—for me, I mean. I’ve loved that kid since I knew she would exist, but I feel better for my distance. I can’t think about her without a splash of blue infiltrating the otherwise overwhelming happiness. That blue isn’t envy; envy is green, and this ain’t that. This is somber acceptance that my original vision for my life hasn’t played out. It’s not bitter, it’s not angry; it’s honestly loving because I’m so happy for Matt! But pretending that old feeling isn’t there would be lying: I know it’s there. I feel it there. It will always linger there.

No matter how much I change, that vision will always find me on the edge of sleep. It’s not a wish that this was my life but an acknowledgment that it could have been. Syntactical variety for three-year-olds could be as familiar to me as it is to Matt. I could be escorting kindergartners around, arranging play dates with Emmerine’s daughter while we talk about tee-ball leagues and Sesame Street.

But I’m not. It’s the painful side of glancing backward: nodding to what could have been but isn’t underlines my biggest betrayal of my former self. Instead of one or two kids’ every stage of development centering my life, I cycle through a time loop applauding identical milestones until eternity. Matt and Emmerine run marathons; I walk on a treadmill.

Telling a kid they can’t have something is part of parenting, so I’m sure Matt and Emmerine will have plenty of practice over the next decade. But it’s another thing to tell your former self, the one that began when you were a kid, that same monosyllabic refusal.

I don’t know how they’ll say it. I say it gently.

And I think about what’s best for another set of seventeen-year-olds while staring at an unchanging face in the mirror.

*****

I’m the only member of my department who has been neither married nor a parent.

That wasn’t alarming in 2008, and it wasn’t technically accurate a few months ago, but I suspect you get what I’m saying. Every other person has their landmark: someone to demonstrate time’s passage. Someone to keep intellectually ahead of our ever-churning time loop.

Because so many of my colleagues live in the same community where they teach, I know and have even taught many of their kids. I went to Challenge Day because of Kyle, the son of my then-department chair, who took my Pre-Calculus class. He was neither the first nor the last.

Kyle and I are only seven years apart, highlighting the oddness of my position when I began: I was a generation removed from everyone around me. The older group married long before our school opened; their kids had birthdates not long after mine in the late eighties and early nineties. I arrived in time to teach many of those kids.

However, the younger part of my department started having children during that window just before and after I arrived on campus. Their kids were born in the mid-to-late 2000s and early 2010s. These kids were little kids while I found my professional footing, not seventeen-year-olds a few grades behind me.

While Matt’s daughter wins my “Most Interaction” award for the toddler and infant stages, I became used to the presence of older little kids at work. My colleagues’ kids were always around; I knew their names, I knew which I could tease, and I knew the layer of masking needed to speak over their heads.

The crazy thing about these kids is that they were immune to my time loop. One day, I’m being introduced to a fair-haired second grader, and then she’s there making a joke in the front row of Calculus. She reads in the pod while an off-track sixth grader one minute, and then the next, her name’s on a book cover with mine. It’s temporal whiplash. When her mom says, “Where did the time go?” I respond with, “Yeah, it’s crazy, isn’t it?” while looking at the same person.

This happens more often than I acknowledge. I remember Bernice’s daughter drawing quietly and smiling politely in the pod at seven; I read her personal statements in November. When she finished Calculus, I marveled that the drawing little kid was now this reflective, dynamic person. More alarming, I got my job when Bernice had her second daughter, who played on the freshman PowderPuff team I coached. She says hi to me on her way to class every day.

When I go to volunteer for Sarah, her middle daughter snarkily thanks me for wearing a hat not representing the “stupid” A’s; I could swear she was shyer and shorter last time. Arriving at her house to carpool, her youngest, once goofily bouncing off desks, methodically introduces me to her friends and pets while preparing an elaborate tour. Occasional sports debates with her son will increase in frequency this fall; he’ll be a freshman! What?

And when did R’lyeh’s sons shift from little boys on shrunken baseball fields into men? His oldest teaches in the classroom across from mine! And his brothers, both of whom I taught Calculus, are surging forward in careers and art alike. Wasn’t the youngest’s first tattoo attempt just inked on his dad’s leg? Well, he’s been hired full-time at an established parlor. I’m staring at intricate pottery the middle one hand-sculpted that now adorns my kitchen.

The staff members here don’t live in distant communities to keep their families away from their workplace; they want their kids to be there. They want to drag their little kids to school events so the later versions will also embrace them. It’s remarkable to teach with the people I do because they see our job site as a community hub and treat it like one. Everywhere I go, I run into their kids by design: they want them at the same plays, concerts, and match-ups I’m at.

Their kids are great kids, by the way. This never surprises me: I see how great their parents are with other people’s kids every day. That the results of their deepest love, longest hours, and greatest efforts turn out terrific tracks. Great people guiding good kiddos into special people is a strong bet, and from my little perch, I observe while they orchestrate that transition.

Honestly, it’s not so much “observe” as “overhear”. For all our incidental path crossings, I’m far more often learning about their children from another room, outside the pod conversations but aware of their loud-enough-to-hear contents. I know their kids from the stories they share, from the major moments and the minutiae. Eavesdropping, I learn what it is to anticipate a child’s passions and problem-solve their struggles. I sneak into a back-row seat for their kids’ journeys from adolescence to adulthood.

Inevitably, something happens along the way: I get invested, too. I’m James Stewart in Rear Window but with the murder replaced by unconditional love. Their kids should be extras in my movie, bit players lucky to get a line, but I know their backstories too well to overlook them on set. I’ve hitched a ride on their growing up, after all; I know them in ways I only rarely know their parents. When they show up at seventeen with their iconic-to-me last names and sit down in my class, I discover this reservoir in myself. I demand my best because suddenly, I’m in their films; I’m only a side character in a few short scenes, but I have to make my lines purr. That’s how I contribute to the journeys of people I’ve known all their lives from afar. They were children relevant only by proxy; they became people I serve with primacy.

It’s such a small role, but it’s right for me. Once again, the distance is healthy for me; it keeps the blue at bay. If I’m not careful, this insane layer of incidental community within that school could drench everything in cerulean. When I stop and think, I realize there’s this wealth of knowledge all around me in the form of fantastic parents raising fantastic kids. These are precisely the people a young father would need. Exactly the people to turn to while living a different life in a different universe. I could be in those conversations and group chats using enough question marks to give the Riddler a seizure.

But no. No, no. No. Those thoughts are blue for me. They’re why I maintain my distance. I can be an academic expert at seventeen while clinging to the rudder for the rest.

But sometimes you slip. Sometimes, you forget that you’re trying to stay in your lane, that you’ve got only one tiny slice you’re responsible for. You notice it when one comes back and you can talk to her for an hour before the bell reminds you that this person isn’t the center of your day. It’s so easy to lose yourself in awe over who that little grinning nine-year-old has become. It’s so easy to feel this nugget of unimpeachable pride. And relief—that it’s all turned out okay for this person who you’ve cared about for most of her life.

Or worse yet: you let a four-year-old play in your empty classroom. You and your TA talk to her and humor her, losing to her in games until she actually beats you and you pretend that you let her. You collect her drawings in a folder and chat with her and her brother on Zoom and buy her a ridiculous stuffed cat on eBay after scaring her with fake goblins. And then you blink and she’s sitting in the same classroom drawing and talking but the drawings are sophisticated reconstructions from animated shows and the discussion is about balancing dance and sports and she still throws nerf balls at you sometimes but she also exchanges recipes with you and talks about losing her pet with you and asks if you’re okay when you’re clearly down, and later you ask yourself “How the hell did that kid notice that?” and you realize that unlike so many others, she fills an entire Google Photos album and grows up screen by screen, one day hugging Maia at a makeshift Santa’s workshop and the next standing next to you at Mike’s Diner while you talk about how this middle schooler has known you longer than anyone else there and that you can’t believe that little kid is five years from joining Kyle and Bryan and Dillon and Griffin and Claire and Sam and Ella and being graduated and you think to yourself those words you had thought you were staying away from but that confirm you messed up because this time you’re thinking them and she isn’t even close to seventeen yet!

You blew it. You stowed away this time. While her mom followed the landmarks on the horizon, you tagged along just a little more closely, and look where you are now. You’re thinking about how one day you’ll type the first sentence of a recommendation letter that includes “whom I have known for basically her entire life” and feel almost guilty writing it because you’re so biased about this no-longer-little-kid that it isn’t fair to write this, but also that it isn’t fair that you have to write it because that means it was thirteen years ago when a little girl wanted to draw in your classroom because the pod was empty and then you learned what it was like to watch time pass from your forever cycling hamster wheel.

And you marvel at your colleagues because you know your colleagues’ kids and that means you’ve watched time flow through their no-longer-little kids. Now you know it a little bit, too.

Look at what their kids have done to you! They’ve made you feel old. They’ve taught you to feel what it is to become old when those you love do, too.

Thanks a lot.

Thanks a lot.

[[ Please read the first one harshly, adding expletives to taste, but read the second one softly with tears flooding your eyes so you can’t see the words on the screen anymore. Please and thank you. ]]

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This took a lot out of me. I’ve never edited a piece more than this one. This is where I landed.

I also finished revising The Gray Valley this week. It’s just a next draft in preparation for a next round of readers, but it’s still an achievement. I had a blast reading it for a third time since I wrote it.

As a heads-up, I will post my Midpoint Report for 2024, which shares my favorite newsletters, movies, books, and YouTube videos from the first half of 2024. This will arrive in your inboxes around Wednesday or Thursday next week. Can you believe we’re halfway through 2024? I can’t, but I’m posting the thing mid-week, so I guess I do believe it.

1. The fact that the security guard was bear-hugging a guest when I stepped forward also helped.