George and I were shopping at Costco’s, loading up on supplies for Wally’s graduation party.  I had sent the invitations, monitored the RSVP’s and done a menu plan, all while George was away.  I went to the store with the plan and a list in hand.  Five minutes in, I abandoned any ownership of the party planning—in the interest of our relationship and my own safety.

George is like a heat seeking missile when he food shops.  You just need to get out of his way and let him find the target.

We filled the cart with hamburger meat and hot dogs, paper plates and red plastic cups.  I said to George, “There will be a lot of teenagers there, maybe we should buy clear cups so we can at least see whether or not they’re hitting up the booze table” but George seemed to think the discount on the red cups would make up for any price we might pay for the underage drinking.

We were three-quarters of the way through the store when I discovered we had forgotten to stock up on toilet paper, which was back in the first aisle.  I hiked the twenty yards to paper products, and then hiked pack, hefting a huge pack of Scott tissues on my shoulders.  As I walked back, I looked at George standing next to the cart, contemplating an institutional size bag of potato chips and started to laugh.  He asked what was so funny. I said, “Eight years ago when we first met, we spent our all of our free time in bed having sex.  Now we’re at Costco’s buying 30 rolls of toilet paper!” 

Somehow Costco and toilet paper never come up in songs dealing with the circle of life.

That circle is spinning pretty quickly these days.  I remember my own high school graduation, thirty-two years ago.  One of the songs we sang was “The Circle Game” by Joni Mitchell.  I loved that song and memorized all the lyrics correctly – an amazing accomplishment for someone who still misinterprets the lyrics to that song “Dizzy”, from the 1960’s  (I’m so dizzy, my head is spinning.  In my version, the next line always went, like a whirlpool lives in my head.  George gets cross when I still sing it like this, but I think it’s a viable alternative, especially at this point in my life).

Anyway, I memorized the lyrics to “The Circle Game” correctly and I used to sing it to Wally and the Snapper in those days when I still sang them to sleep at night.  For the most part we were all interested in the stanzas about the young boy who caught a dragonfly inside a jar. Or the stanza about the child for whom words like when you’re older must appease him.  We were all at the beginning of that song then.

Now the circle game has come around again, and we’re at the stanzas where the cartwheels have turned to car wheels and where Mitchell advises us to take your time, it won’t be long now, before you drag your feet to slow the circle down.  I’ve been watching Wally and his friends gather this past week, happily killing time between the end of class and the graduation ceremony.  They sleep late and dawdle through the day, endlessly hanging out, unconsciously dragging  their  feet.  At the same time they talk about how they’ll say good-bye when they have to leave for college at the end of summer. They yearn for a future they’re sure is so bright.  They dream of all the things they’ll do in that future while all of the parents try to pin them down so we can keep them in an eternal present—because we know how precious this summer is, between high school and college.  Hot summer nights, driving nowhere with the windows down and the radio on.  Barefoot, in love and surrounded by buddies.  Who doesn’t remember that summer?  And because we do, we want them to be happy in the moment because we know dreams don’t always turn out  as planned, as Joni sings in the final stanza. 

We know that someday, instead of having wild, new relationship sex they too will end up buying toilet paper in bulk at Costco.

George struggled to find a place to fit the oversized package in the cart.  He said, “If anyone had told me, eight years ago, that any of this—kids, football games, graduations, college visits—would have happened to me, I would have said they were nuts.”   Then he paused.  “But it’s been fun. You kind of get to go back and experience it all over again, only this time you have perspective.”  I said, “You only say that because you were out of the country when the Snapper drove through the front door of that store.” 

George laughed.  He said, “It makes me wonder if they’ll feel this way when they’re our age.”  I said, “Probably not.  They’ll be too busy running to Costco’s.”   George rammed his cart into the aisle, ahead of another father whose cart was also weighted down with party supplies.  He said, “You think?”  And I said, “I’m positive.  We’re captive on the carousel of time honey, and there’s no getting off.”  And George said, “That’s okay.  It’s a pretty good ride.”