School Days

You know that icky feeling of dread that you get in your stomach when you feel that you may have forgotten something, something really important?

That feeling was coursing through me at about 7:30 a.m. this morning. The Non-Company German contingent were on their way, and I'd forgotten to check whether or not their flown-ahead shipment of tools and supplies were accounted for last week, before Monday rolled around, before the Germans were set to be here. By 8:00 a.m., I'd been to Receiving and finding no crates from Germany, I, well there is no other way to say it,was absolutely 'wigged out, off-the-reservation, out of my mind'. By 8:15 a.m., I was on the phone haranguing some poor girl in the Orlando International Airport for the number for the freight connection of Lufthansa Airlines. At 8:30 a.m., I was on the phone with Lufthansa Freight, pleading with them to tell me that the shipment had made it through customs, wasn't sitting abandoned in some warehouse somewhere, or worse that it hadn't been left for dead out on the tarmac in Dusseldorf. By 10:30 a.m., relieved to find that the shipment had actually made it to Orlando, I'd finally reached the courier where some burnt out guy named Vinnie (and no I am not making this up) with a devil-may-care heavy on the Bronx accent told me that "yeah, we was supposed to deliver on Friday, but it never made it on the truck, so we figgered we'd just ship it today".

"Okay, I said wearily, biting back the epithets I longed to lob at him, "so what's your ETA?"  Vinnie considers his words for a moment and says, "well, sometime between now and noon. Youse see nomally we can tell ya if we already loaded the truck, but were still loadin' it, so we can't tell ya exactly when. Prawbly bout' an hour and a haf." Making it, you guessed it... exactly noon.

Then I proceeded to don safety glasses and steel-toed over shoes every 30 minutes to run out to the factory floor and irritate the crew in Receiving to 'check on the status'. In between floor runs, I nearly downloaded a Trojan horse virus by opening a mail I would normally have never opened had I been in my right mind, locked myself out of a Non-Company database by keying in the wrong password repeatedly, banged my shin on an open file drawer and jammed my fingers in my desk drawer.

In between, I mourned, this was my project, the first one I'd really been given the lead on in all my time at Non-Company. I'm letting my new boss down. I should have checked the status on Friday. Why didn't I check the status on Friday?

So what does this all have to do with school....

At one point today, in a lull between phone calls, between catastrophes, I saw my mobile phone blinking. A strobing blue light, which says hey, you have a message, an email, an update.  In this case a Facebook update. So I stole a moment away, strolled through my News Feed, and there I saw a photograph of my friends' daughter. Actually, the friend who was my best friend all through my adolescence, my school years. It was her daughter, all dressed up, first day of school. Fifth Grade. There were several photos. In fact, it appeared to be somewhat of an occasion, pictures with her Dad and sister, with her grandparents, walking to the bus, boarding the bus, her new backpack slung over her shoulder, new lunchbox in her hand. I once knew her grandparents well; growing up they were like a second family to me.

Looking at the pictures, it called back so many memories, this friend and I met at her daughter's age now. With about a six-month age gap between us, she would have been heading off to 4th grade and me to the 5th. But we always walked to the bus stop together. Away from school we were inseparable, the best of friends. Always passing notes, having sleepovers at each other's homes, talking on the phone until all hours. BFF's forever.

I felt hollow inside. We're Facebook friends but not friends in the way we were. Time, distance and different lifestyles have separated us. While I was wigging out at work, trying to solve my crisis, she was experiencing a milestone moment, putting her daughter on the bus. In a few weeks, I'll have mostly forgotten about today's crises, five months from now I won't remember it all, but she'll always have this day to remember. In younger days, we were so sure we'd always be friends, that we'd stay in the same place, that our kids would be friends. Sometimes it seems so implausible that I sit here, edging nearer to 40, and have no children, no spouse. A demanding job that seems to take up every moment of my life, my thoughts...my energy.

I still cherish a photo of us, well, the four of us, she and I, and my younger sister and her younger brother...we were quite a crew. And now...scattered, different states, different lives, all of them with children, she has 2, her brother 2, my sister 3, and me well....0. Sometimes I find it so hard to believe it turned out this way.

I've always believed in the core of my being, that God doesn't make mistakes, that our lives are as he would have us to be. But sometimes, a smaller, inner part of me wonders, was it God choosing this life or me refusing to be braver, to take more risks with my heart?

And every so often, at this time of year, I wish I were putting my kid on the bus.