Monday, September 30, 1996Happy Birthday, AdamToday is my son's 28th birthday. I mean I can remember quite clearly when I was only 27 and Adam was just a toddler. I was a high school teacher who had decided to become a graduate student. We moved to Binghamton, NY, where I enrolled in a doctoral program at the state university. My two year old and I would take walks that fall to a shopping center near our apartment. We would stop at the soda fountain in a pharmacy and sit there, drinking our sodas, having a wonderful conversation. At that time a popular conversational pattern consisted of him pointing at something and saying "What's that?" and I would tell what that was called and he would repeat its name. A bright curious two year old can wonder about the proper name for just about everything in the world. Sometimes on our walk back home he would pick up interesting pebbles and hand them to me for safekeeping (I had more pockets than he). I would joke about Adam's pet rocks. [sigh] The very next year somebody had a brainstorm and packaged small rocks along with a humorous booklet and called them "Pet Rocks" -- that guy became a millionaire & I'm still working for a living. And now Adam is 28 years old today...older than I was when we would go on those pebble gathering strolls on those autumn days that can't really have been all that long ago?
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