THIS IS TO ADVISE THAT YOUR APPLICATION HAS BEEN ACCEPTED.
I shrugged. It was like the buildup to a movie climax, then being let down. “They got my application. I guess they don’t decide on the non-football players for a while.”
I left the letter on the bed and headed for my room. I got as far as the doorway when my mother started yelling my name. “Sam! Sam!”
I rushed back in. “What is it?”
My mother sat crying. “You got in, Sam.”
“I what?”
“It says your application has been accepted. Accepted! Sam, you got in.”
15
The morning of my graduation, my elation at having been accepted to Stanford and the realization that I would be rooming with Ernie had not subsided. I’d been walking on air ever since that night. The news had even tempered my disappointment at having been passed over for valedictorian. My mother, of course, was convinced that it was all a part of God’s will for me, that it was all part of the extraordinary life God intended me to live.
I stood at my dresser futilely trying to use the mirror to knot a tie when my mother’s high heels clicked outside my bedroom door. My father wore a Windsor knot as tight and perfect as any tied by the king of England himself. My attempts had produced a lump that looked to be strangling me and had caused the collars of my shirt to stick up like airplane wings.
“Let me,” my mother said, walking in and slapping at my hands.
I tilted my chin so my mother could undo my abomination and deftly craft the knot. At six feet, I had surpassed her in height, but standing there on the day of my high school graduation, it seemed that mirror revealed much more than our discrepancy in height. My mother had aged. We had celebrated her forty-third birthday that year, and now, standing so close to her, I could see the depth of the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes, what she called her “worry lines,” and how her once-unblemished skin now displayed the inevitable markings that only time delivers.
I had never wanted to turn back the clock. Despite my friendships with Ernie and Mickie, my grade school years had not brought fond memories. I had been happy to leave David Bateman and Sister Beatrice behind. High school had been better, but for all my achievements, I could not ignore the fact that, but for Ernie, I was rarely invited to parties, no girl had invited me to her school prom, and, but for Mickie, I would have missed mine. Yes, I’d achieved straight As, but that was a little easier when you spent most nights, including weekends, studying. Still, I had not considered that my mother would someday grow old. Grandma O’Malley, who had come down for my graduation and waited downstairs in the living room, had once proclaimed, “Time is wicked. It comes and goes like a thief in the night, stealing our youth, our beauty, and our bodies.” I had watched Grandma O’Malley, a proud and simple woman, shrink and wrinkle and turn white over the years. But we expect that of our grandparents. Not our parents. For some reason, we think our parents will never grow old, perhaps because when they do, we are forced to acknowledge that we will one day grow old, and we face our own mortality.
The barber who cut my father’s hair and now cuts mine said it more simply than Grandma O’Malley. “None of us is getting out of here alive.”
My mother pinched the knot and slid it up to my neck. As she raised her eyes, I saw that she had accomplished the task through tears.
“There,” she said, turning her head.
I reached out and hugged her. The tears we shed that morning were our silent acknowledgment that while the years might not have been extraordinary, as she had so diligently prayed, they had been ours. Come the fall, I would be leaving for college and my mother would lose her little boy, and I would lose the person who had always been there for me, my fiercest advocate since the day I’d been born.
“I love you, Mom.”
“I love you, too,” she said. Then she stepped back, gathering herself. “Enough. I’m going to get makeup all over your white shirt.”