Drop Offs and Little Things
Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Pictures
It’s The Fall and I just did a Drop-off; not The Drop off, as no one is a freshman this year. But a drop-off, bringing half of my kids back to the east coast for another year — my oldest to start Real Life as a new college graduate in the city of her alma mater; my next to start his sophomore year of college in what he considers the wilderness, but what other people commonly call “Vermont.”
Obviously, both of them are old enough and independent enough and could have done this alone. Those small children who used to needle me straight across the country on flights to Boston while I hoped against reality that the batteries in their portable DVD players would persist until we landed are no more, replaced by people who now fly easily without me, lightning-charged phones in hand, often delighting in the next generation of excitable toddlers in seats nearby.
When we fly together, my kids point the cute ones out to me. And I nod and only half-smile, because I’m not fooled by traveling small persons with ringlet curls, the drooly paste of chewed up Goldfish and precocious things spilling out of their mouths. Little kids are cute to entrance us, cast a spell and trick us into thinking they’d be lovely to fly beside for six hours. If I express it as if I’m a financial institution, I have 40 years of experience flying with under 10 year olds. I know better.
