Egg, Larva, Pupa, Butterfly

One day last week I had lunch with three of my longtime hometown friends. Two of them I have known since we started first grade at Mattie Lively. The third, who attended Sallie Zetterower, we met in sixth grade when the populations of what were then the only elementary schools in Statesboro merged into the now long-gone Statesboro Junior High School.

It is difficult, when we get together these days – days that pull us ever closer to our 70th birthdays – not to think of the hundreds of days we spent together in hallways and gyms and biology labs, in sleeping bags spread across living room floors, in station wagons and pick-up trucks. We talk about the present, but always through the filter of that shared past.

Long after we share parking lot hugs and drive off into traffic we could not have imagined in 1974, my thoughts are periodically interrupted by unexpectedly vivid images – the wet cold of a rainy February Saturday outside the Piggly Wiggly selling March of Dimes balloons for Y Club, the sticky sweetness of lunchroom cinnamon rolls, the smell of Herbal Essence shampoo and Jean Nate’ cologne, the treble notes of trumpets and trombones floating through fog across the football field. I can hear with strange clarity the scratchy recording of “The National Anthem” broadcast over the intercom and the feel of the rounded edge of the frayed bus seat against the back of my thighs.

The girls and boys peopling those memories are all gone. Have been for a long time. None of us, we have often proclaimed, would go back, would be 16 again, but ... still ...

And, then, another memory surfaced, one from only a few years ago, not decades. It was a balmy afternoon, one festooned with cotton ball clouds in a pale blue sky. I had set out for an amble down my dirt road, a book opened in my palms. I was already deep into the fiction of some other life in some other place when I reached the break in the fence that surrounded my parents’ house and saw, just out of the corner of my eye, my father standing at the threshold of the front door, delaying his entrance to stare at me as I approached.

I closed the book over my finger to hold my place and called out, “Hey, Daddy!”

“Hey, Doll,” he responded with the slightest of nods toward the book in my hands. “You ain’t changed since you were seven years old,” and he turned to walk inside.

The corners of my mouth curled up and a deep sigh rose from my chest. I felt seen and known and loved.

I had, of course, changed since I was seven, in ways both irrelevant and essential, but what my father saw and knew and loved – the girl so often essentially described as “walking around with her head in a book” – was still there.

It occurred to me, then, that I had been wrong about the other boys and girls, too – the ones writing term papers and solving equations, making lay-ups and jumping hurdles, taking their first tenuous steps toward the future and toward themselves. They are not gone; they didn’t disappear. They (and I) just experienced for ourselves that really big word we learned in the third grade classrooms of Mattie Lively and Sallie Zetterower: metamorphosis.

We just became – no, we are just becoming – exactly what and who we were always meant to be.

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