The school fountain of youth

This might have been my best day at school, hands down, EVER! Did I get a raise you ask? Hah, you're funny. Did I deliver a brilliant lesson? Nope. Did our staff room lotto pool win big, meaning that I can retire tomorrow? Wrong again. No, this little moment in time arrived as a gift the other day while on our Grade 5 visit to our Middle School.

Our school is very large and has a few campuses, so because of its size and the enormity of the shock of the impending amalgamation of students  into Grade 6, it is customary to introduce the Grade 5's to the spooky world of middle school early on in the year and gradually. On this, their first visit, the children are treated to an impressive guided tour given by the grown up Grade 8's who have been expertly rehearsed. They gawk at the lockers, peek into the library and science labs, and marvel at all that is foreign to elementary students. And then, when it's all over, they get a snack. All in all, a great day.

So what made all this so special for me you ask? It was one of our tour guides. She was a former kindergarten student of mine. I hadn't seen her in years, because she was at one campus, and I had moved to teach at the other. At the beginning of the tour I went over to her and asked, "Do you remember me?" She looked at me with the sweet, angelic eyes I remembered so well and then blurted out the words I'll cherish until my dying day.....

"YES! I do! You're Ms. A's daughter!"

True enough, my daughter had visited the class a few times that year, so my little protégeée must have done the math enough to realize that my #1 would be grown up by now. And yes, I've been told I look younger than my age, but that's mostly due to the fact that I'm vertically challenged; but this was off the chart cool, even if it did come from the mouth of a twelve year old.

As long as I'm digressing, I realized years ago that a young child makes a direct correlation between age and height. Basically, according to a pre-schooler, the shorter the person, the younger he is. I once experimented on this theory in my kindergarten class with my assistant at the time, who is a bit older than I am, and taller. When the children were asked which one of us was older, they indicated that my assistant was. I then stood on a chair and asked the same question. According to my class responses, I must have aged rather quickly, because I now was considered the older one.

Other times, it seems I might be suffering from some Benjamin Button syndrome. On a late Saturday night at least a dozen or so years ago, I was driving my babysitter (who, by the way was also a former kindergarten student of mine and who is now a mother of two) home after an evening out. We were stopped at an intersection, my car was in the left lane. As we were waiting for the light to turn green, a car approached us in the lane to our right. It was packed with a bunch of teenage boys oozing testosterone. They were glancing our way. "Look!" I said to my teenaged passenger, "Those boys are looking at us!" Now I must confess, I love this now grown up lady very much, but I could have throttled her when she turned her head, rolled her eyes at me as only a disgusted teenager can and exclaimed, "They're not looking at US!" And then, to make matters worse, she ared to snicker. At that moment, in her eyes, I was 95 years old and aging by the nano-second.

I have a simple little rule of thumb that I made up that seems to work for me. When I bump into someone I haven't seen in eons and we both recognize each other, I take that to mean that neither of us has aged. I also have come to believe that fading eyesight as we age is a good thing. Each morning when I look into the mirror without my glasses on, I don't see even ONE wrinkle. That is the beauty of poor eyesight. It is a gift from God. He knew when he designed us that women tend to be a bit vain, so He purposely dimmed our vision so that we might always look young....at least first thing in the morning. If that's not divine, I don't know what is!

Of course, we all know the truth. Staying young is all about keeping healthy in body, mind and spirit. It's about laughing and loving. And I think it truly helps being around children, because they remind us what being young is all about.

So no, dear former kindergarten student, I am not my daughter. I'm the mother. What I lack in youth, I'm beginning to gain in wisdom.

But I might just take a trip to the Middle School every so often to visit.