Message in a bottle

William has realized his birthday is coming and he loves pirates. And yes, these events are connected in his mind. Pirate ships, pirate puppets, pirates fighting knights and dragons, because we don’t have a ship yet, only a castle. Very deprived child. He has also been writing lots of letters, which is I guess something they must have done at school, because we certainly don’t do much of that at home. Yesterday he made me a message in a bottle—and he did this on his own. I had an empty beer bottle that I had put a couple of stems of daffodils in; when they died I washed it out and had it sitting on the counter until I could put it away. Will came in and asked for it, and then came back a little later with his message all rolled up and ready to go, except that he couldn’t quite roll it tight enough to fit, so I had to help with that. Chris taped the top of the bottle, and his mass message-in-a-bottle production line started off. The one he made me includes two notes. He tells me that one says, “Dear Mommy, I hope you have a great day. I love you, Will.” And the other: “Dear Mommy, would you please buy me a toy today? A pirate ship and a book and a Ninja Turtle watch and . . .” many other things on a very long list I can’t recall and that changes every time he reads it to me anyhow. It’s just charming, if I can be a bit sickeningly maudlin about the joys of motherhood.

My daughter has embarked on quite a few projects of her own lately as well. Elementary school is almost over for her—she’s bringing home permission and order forms for everything in America at the moment, including her big field trip with Safety Patrol, t-shirts for fifth grade memories of field day, spring portraits, cookie fundraisers, and my god! If they would stop sending all these papers home, I am sure Orange Elementary would save about a thousand dollars a week and not need fundraisers anymore. We had Rising Sixth Grade Orientation the other night, parents and fifth graders all lined up in the middle school auditorium like a rowdy bunch of sheep. She is off to one big school next year. They’ll have uniforms (ugh). Lockers (yeah!). Electives (yeah!). And school dances (oh no!).

The fifth graders are also having all these summative experiences, winding up their elementary days like a dusty old jump rope they dragged through the playground for six years and are almost ready to put up now. They had Life Skills lessons every week with the police department, including stress management, which I wish I could’ve taken too. I heard a rumor they’d be having a sex education unit—at least according to the letter that came home a few weeks ago—but if they have, it’s been subtle enough that Laura apparently hasn’t noticed it yet. The fifth graders are teaching the kindergarteners to bowl for the Accelerated Reader end of the year party. They’re making friendship bead bracelets so they’ll be BFF even if they’re not in the same pods next year (all those budding aliens, still best friends forever). And even the librarian and yearbook advisor is retiring this year, cleaning out her office and sending home pictures from yearbooks all the way back to kindergarten. In music Laura earned her recorder black belt, the ultimate When-the-Saints-Go-Marching-In achievement. Elementary school is ending.

Laura had this massive project due, a timeline of her life so far, concluding with a discussion of her hopes, dreams, and ambitions. We were supposed to help her read through newspapers and magazines from when she was born, look at family pictures, tell her stories about when she was little. She has become a real student. Not only does she think she knows what the teacher will think she should write, she can handily crank out statements like “My family is important to me because they put clothes on my book and food in my mouth and a roof over my head,” something nobody in this family has ever said in my hearing. Even more so, she has reached the state of Zen studenthood that allows her not to know when the project is due. I asked her Monday to have her teacher call me if it was due that day, as we had some fairly serious problems over the weekend with copying the pictures she needed for the album. She comes home Monday from school to tell me the good news, that her project wasn’t due that day! When is it due? “I don’t know! You didn’t tell me to ask her that!”

How they get from coming up with their own messages in a bottle to composing them on demand escapes me. All these little moments, bottled up in time capsules, things they’ll never remember on their own, slipping by so easily. I save pictures and tests and notes from the teacher in a box for each school year in the attic, which is getting pretty cluttered already. I would love to have some of these things from my own childhood; I periodically have nightmares in which all the things I have carefully saved in the fifth grade box, labeled Orange Elementary, Ms. H’s class, will one day burn up, just because we have so damn much paper in the attic, but I can’t get rid of it. I look forward so much to giving these children these things one day, and I imagine spending a weekend sorting through them with Laura and Will, maybe with their children even. I love to look at them myself even now—imagine what it will be like then, opening those messages in the bottle to see their pictured pasts.