Hump Day

“Hi!” bounces off the storefront.  Just one syllable.  Early Wednesday morning and I’m walking back to the Jeep after dropping off something at TAG.  I hear a high-pitched third-grader’s voice shout from a passing car window on 2nd Street.  Two-tenths of a second of aural recognition to go on, but I know it’s “X”, my Little Brother from JB Young.  I spin as fast as my half century joints allow to make sure he sees me wave as his mom turns on to Pershing.

An otherwise standard issue Wednesday with the requisite City Council meeting to keep me off the streets at night has at least three non-standard issue nuances.  I’m having lunch with X today instead of Friday, since I’ll be in Des Moines Thursday/Friday, on the hunt for fifteen to twenty million dollars of Reinvestment District allocation for Davenport.  It also happens to be my son’s last day of high school and Letterman’s last show.

I was an early Letterman adopter.  From Carson, to his morning show, through NBC and CBS, he’s been a fixture on the bright and shiny thing in the bedrooms, dorm rooms and living rooms of my life.  In college, I was banned from watching him in our downstairs media room because I laughed too loud and kept my roommates awake.  Watching the retrospectives of the past several weeks has been like watching a funeral – a very funny funeral – playing backwards.  Truth told, I spend most of my days feeling like how he must have felt during his short running and ill-fated morning show.  Fish out of water, and generally ok with (and amused by) it.  If irreverence doesn’t come from the stark knowledge that you are somehow wired differently, I don’t know where it comes from.

Maybe it comes from transience.  That could account for the exposed wiring.  As my youngest closes his high school locker for the last time today, I’m ticking off one of a very small number of life goals – to get my kids through a childhood in one place.  Or, at least one place they will clearly remember.  I was shuffled through so many places as a kid I have trouble keeping them straight.  We want what we couldn’t get - a stable childhood, Carson’s slot, whatever – so today is not quite the standard issue Wednesday.  The Malin kids made up for their dad’s Pony Express childhood, and Letterman outlasted the guy who got what was rightfully his.

In both cases, it’s been a great run.  Not perfect, but more than either of us could have reasonably hoped for.  If there’s a better place to raise children than Davenport, I don’t know where it is.  The job’s been a rodeo at times, but rodeos are fun and character building, so there’s no complaints.  Saddle up, and open the chute …

The chute opened today with X’s “Hi!”.  And as Letterman finishes his chapter, this day, I easily remember how my chapter began here nearly fourteen years ago.  Dropping my daughter off at third grade, her third school in three years, I stopped about halfway up the block to watch her.  This was the place we would make our home.  We were committed to that.  But watching her, momentarily alone, surrounded by kids playing together in front of the school was torture.  It was less than a minute, but it seemed a lifetime.  Would someone say “hi” to her?  Would she make new friends?   Did we make the right decision to move? 

They did.  She did.  We did.

Each day is a new chapter for someone.  On this day when two chapters close for me, how lucky am I to have X randomly drive by and shout “Hi!” to remind me of new chapters, every day?  Standard issue, Davenport lucky.