By Rob Holbert Managing Editor

Run fast young man!

This time of year always brings back memories of starting school, whether it be elementary, high school, college or reform. But this particular August is making me a bit more nostalgic than usual. That’s because my son starts kindergarten next week.

I would regale you with some sentimentality about how quickly time flies and how it seems like he was just pooping in his diaper last week, but his personality is “challenging” enough that it legitimately seems like five years. Sometimes longer.

Certainly my wife and I can easily tell it’s been five years just by looking at before and after photos. We both think we’ve aged about 20 years since Ulysses was born, or at least look like we have. But that’s probably just sun damage. I’m sure.

Anyway, Ulysses was expressing some trepidations about starting kindergarten the other day, and it got me thinking a bit about exactly how traumatic it really was to “start school.” He came up to me and said, “Daddy, I have something really important to talk to you about,” then proceeded to tell me he was worried because he thinks kindergarten will be chock full of 6-year-olds. I tried explaining to him that he has a late December birthday and is actually the oldest kid in his class, in addition to being the only one licensed to carry a gun. (We take our Second Amendment rights seriously in this family!)

He still seemed unsure there wouldn’t be some really old 6-year-olds there to harass him. In his mind, 6-year-olds are shaving and driving cars already. It reminded me how absolutely important such completely mundane things are to children his age.

Unlike my son, my late September birthday always made me one of the youngest kids in my class, so I started kindergarten when I was 4. Everyone seemed sooooo much older than me. I suppose in a way they were. Face it, if you’re 4 and someone else is 5, they’re sort of one-fourth older than you – the difference of a 40-year-old hanging with a 50-year-old, except for the absence of prostate trouble.

I’ve futilely tried to explain to him that someone being six months older than him is pretty much irrelevant, but Ulysses isn’t buying it. And I can’t say I blame him. There are some hard-and-fast rules of kindergarten not even I can keep him from learning the hard way. For instance…

Shoes matter – Now most kids at that age aren’t brand conscious, so I’m not talking about Nikes versus Keds, or whatever shoes are popular these days. I’m simply talking about the style of shoe my boy chooses to wear. Until he started obsessing about his shoes, I’d kind of forgotten the important role shoe choice played in the day’s happiness.

For example, I couldn’t “run fast” without a certain pair of sneakers. Knowing my mother, these were the cheapest black canvass sneakers someone could buy at TG&Y (retail price $1.79), but they made me run like Carl Lewis. (Forgive the old-school Olympics reference, but I have no idea who’s fast these days and I’m writing this before the Track & Field events take place in China.)

Why was running fast important, you might wonder. Because it just was. For kindergarteners, the person who runs fastest is kind of like the kid who drives a cool ‘85 Mustang convertible . (Only if your graduation from high school in 1985. Insert cool car from your graduating class. If over 90, insert cool kind of horse from your high school years.)

You might wonder why I didn’t just wear my fast shoes every day, and that would be a good thing to wonder. The answers are tricky. Mostly I didn’t wear them when I had fallen in mud the day before. I fell in mud a lot. Mostly because I was trying to run fast to impress this girl (Angie, I think -definitely blonde) and fell in a puddle while running and trying to see if she was watching me run. I would then be relegated to wearing my cowboy boots, which were very cool, but terrible for running fast.

Not being able to run fast renders you vulnerable to all manner of attack, such as….

Kiss chases – Now Ulysses may not suffer my fear of the kindergarten kiss chase, since one of his teachers already informed me this past year that he told some little girl, “It’s OK, mommy and daddy do it,” then leaned over and kissed her. (I must admit I was proud of his already impressive rap.) But when I was his age, I was terrified of getting caught by girls during games of kiss chase.

Mind you I wanted to be caught, but was terrified my father would find out and tease me about it. So I hid in the plywood fort in the play yard. Sounds like Ulysses has this one figured out already. I probably won’t try to offer any lame advice in this area.

My son starting “real school” just reminds me how tough it was to be that age. As adults we think there aren’t many challenges to being 5 other than understanding Pokemon (impossible), knowing when “Sponge Bob” comes on (trick – it’s always on) and staying off meth (and you thought eating paste was the worst thing a kindergartener could do). But in reality, what my son puts on his peanut butter and jelly sandwich is as important to him as what interest rate I pay on my mortgage is to me. At least uniforms have rendered some of the worst concerns of my kindergarten years a moot point these days, especially whether one might end up wearing Sears Toughskins.

I’d like to tell Ulysses just to enjoy finger painting, learning to read and whatever else it was we did in kindergarten, but I know there’s going to be stress no matter what. So I’m just going to tell him to run fast, watch out for 6-year-olds and not to get too fresh during kiss chase.

Rob Holbert is Lagniappe managing editor. Contact him at rholbert@lagniappemobile.com.

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