When we were in the 8th grade, we toured the nation’s capital.
I say we because it’s some sort of unmentioned coming of age ritual that exists for all of us, that we might inherit freedom.
Unless you didn’t want to go, or if you didn’t want to pay to go, or if your school board didn’t vote for funding that year. In which case that meant you got a free pass at your freedom. You may have not realized it until now, but skipping this trip also allowed you to avoid being placed into a bright red CIA monogrammed cheap fleece sweatshirt and then paraded around Pennsylvania Avenue with eyes pointed up at green and gray metal persons and horses that were fashioned after heroes who had done something really nice for our country. Even if at the time they did it, we thought their actions weren’t really very nice at all.
Most of the time we, lilliputians, had no idea who the souls were behind these hardened exterior surfaces. They were only names typed into our textbooks that we needed to memorize in order to be able to pass history class in order to be able to graduate in order to be able to get on with life. The real life that awaited us, we said. Not the one on the schoolbus wedged between the loudest teacher and the most overanxious boy whose overconfident mother let him forget to overpack deodorant for our trip.
One mandatory stop on this 8th grade American tour was at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’m not sure if they were trying to frighten or inform us, or if there’s ever really a difference between those two. Although it couldn’t have actually been the real FBI. I can’t imagine the FBI giving security clearance to seventy-eight rabid eighth graders allowing us to rummage through their headquarters like little potbelly pigs in a state fair race.
Even if things were different back then, I still picture it as a disguised museum where the docents dressed up like federal agents and envisioned their own wild stories about catching bad guys.
I haven’t always been this distrusting.
In fact, I still remember one thing that our guide told us on that day.
The average human being loses 100 hairs per day. This was important because it's how they caught criminals. But when you’re in 8th grade, one hundred hairs sounds like one thousand hairs which sounds like baldness by high school to me. It was even more if you wore hats or ponytails which cause more tension with your roots. Not to sound like an alarmist, but beep beep.
If that was Spring, then this is Fall.
There’s a tree outside my apartment window in New York. I have no idea what kind of tree it is, but it looks like a million tiny ferns crawled up onto its branches and planted themselves into its bark. A million tiny ferns that were now bright yellow, as if they were protesting the summer sunshine to return to our street.
It was a beautiful sight to wake up to staring me in the face, but little did I know that this light would be the last before a seasonal sunset. An utterly frigid wind soon swept in from the east, or from the west, I’m really not sure. But all of the world’s invisible airborne particles seemed to be funneling directly down 25th street and into this tree. At any given moment on this particular day, there were exactly one hundred leaves falling from my tree.
By sun down, millions of tiny dead ferns lay on the sidewalk outside our house. Although they didn’t look dead. They were still gripping to their yellow, but we knew what perhaps they didn’t. They didn’t have much time left.
The ferns reminded me of our hairs, which are sometimes changing colors, too. Although we don’t like it when they do. We spend our entire young adulthoods worrying that one day our hair will turn gray. But instead it ends up falling out, and not returning. Leaving us wishing now that we had hair that would turn gray.
The falling hairs reminded me of the falling leaves. And how maybe we’re constantly changing ourselves, just like my tree. A constant rebirth of falling and growth, falling and growth. Until one day the growing stops.
And then we’re left staring into a foggy mirror looking at our bald heads. Inspecting our now smooth skin for any sign of that 8th grade self. The one before we toured the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But we can't go back. And it makes us laugh to think about all the time we skipped chasing our dreams in favor of worrying that we’d get old. And now we’re the exact same age we would have been if we had chased them.