A Kid Inside

On first days of school, the kindness of fathers, the noise we step away from, and the selves we carry forward

There is a smell in the air tonight that feels a little confusing.

Spring has not quite arrived, not really. There is green on the lawn, and buds beginning to show themselves on the trees, but the air itself is telling a different story. It is not soft enough yet. It is not warm in the right way.

Tonight smells like fall.

And whenever autumn slips in uninvited, even for a moment, it takes me back to the first days of school. Those crisp Michigan mornings filled with nerves and possibility, when you would wake up and wonder, quietly, if this year might finally be the year you became yourself.

Before I get to that, though, I should begin with the way my evenings often end.

I sing every night.

It has become a ritual in the truest sense of the word. I take a bath. I slow everything down. I meditate. I watch things that inspire me or remind me of what matters. I listen to music that steadies the spirit. And then, when the day has loosened its grip and the house has grown quiet enough for me to hear myself think, I sing.

I do not mean casually.

I sing for forty-five minutes, sometimes an hour. I like to keep my instrument in shape. It matters to me. It always has. It is one of the great pleasures of my life, and it has become a kind of gift I give myself at the end of the day.

Years ago, before graduate school, there was about a decade when I was often asked to sing at concerts, benefits, and cabarets in Chicago. Those evenings had their own kind of electricity. A piano. A room. A little anticipation in the air. And during those years, there was one song I returned to again and again: “The Kid Inside” by Craig Carnelia.

Our friend Beckie Menzie picked it out for me, and she was right to do so. It suited me. It carried something I recognized in myself, even before I could have named it plainly. I held onto that song for a very long time.

Tonight I sang it again.

And as often happens when you give yourself honestly to a song, a thought arrived.

Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just there, waiting.

It has been that kind of day. A day of reflection. A day of questions about connection and distance, about the world we live in now and the ways we try to protect our own minds from being overrun by it. The air itself seemed to be participating. Smoke, leaves, the faint remains of winter, a little misplaced autumn drifting through a season that is supposed to be turning toward spring.

It stirred something.

It brought back the first days of school.

I have a complicated relationship with social media now. I do not love it. I do not love what it has done to our attention, to our peace, or to that unspoken expectation that we are all supposed to remain available all the time, reacting to everything, commenting on everything, performing ourselves without rest. I am tired of the treadmill of it. The machinery never stops.

I have stepped away from a great deal of that noise. These days, if someone suggests an app, I may try it, but I no longer feel the need to chase every new development just because it exists. I have reached a point where I know my own mind well enough to recognize when it needs less, not more. I even downloaded something that helps turn my phone into something simpler, something quieter. Not as an act of rejection, but as an act of care.

And yet, for all of its noise, social media still carries something real.

It connects us.

For my generation, Facebook has become a kind of gathering place. Others have moved on to newer platforms, but many of us are still there, checking in on one another, sharing fragments of our lives, rediscovering pieces of the past we thought were gone.

Today, someone in my high school group posted a photograph of the folders we were handed on the first day of school at Mott. Charles Stewart Mott High School. Maroon and white. The Mott Marauders.

I can see it as clearly as if it were placed in my hands again.

That maroon folder with the white stripe. The word Marauders printed across it. Inside, your schedule, a couple of pencils, maybe some paper. And at the door, a student council member greeting you, helping you find your way, ushering you into the beginning of something new.

Our high school began in tenth grade, so that first day carried a particular weight. It felt like a crossing. You were leaving something behind, even if you could not yet name it, and stepping into something larger.

I can still tell you exactly what I was wearing.

White canvas Reeboks with the red stripe up the side. Worn, but not scuffed. That mattered. Peg-legged Levi’s, button fly, twenty-nine by twenty-nine. A short-sleeved polo shirt. A cardigan draped over my shoulders. Sometimes deck shoes, no socks. The collar up, because that was the look.

There was a language to it.

Hair mattered too. No one came to school with dirty hair. Not in those days. It was the era of wings. Boys had them. Girls curled them. We all looked as if we might take off if the wind caught us just right.

It makes me smile now, but it mattered then.

Because it was not really about style.

It was about belonging.

That was especially true in gym.

I remember the first day of gym as clearly as anything. My mother, for all her love, believed in practicality. She would buy the least expensive uniform she could find, and that often meant those school-issued athletic shorts that flared at the leg like bells, trimmed with white piping. I was skinny, and in those shorts I felt exposed, awkward, like I was wearing something that did not understand my body.

But my father did.

He made sure I had a few pairs of snugger nylon Adidas shorts. They were simple, but they made all the difference. They made me feel current. They helped me blend in. They gave me just enough confidence to stand there without shrinking.

It was not vanity.

It was dignity.

My father never made a speech about it. He simply paid attention. He understood that there are moments in a young person’s life when a small adjustment can change everything about how they move through the world.

He had traveled the world twice in his youth. He had lived abroad. He knew something about presentation, about context, about how a person carries themselves in different rooms. And then he became a father, and like so many fathers, he turned that attention outward. His children became the priority.

That is what love often looks like.

A quiet shifting away from oneself.

And now, years later, I find myself doing something that feels strangely connected.

I am stepping off the treadmill.

Not entirely. Not dramatically. But intentionally. I am choosing what I allow into my mind. I am choosing when to engage and when to step back. I am learning, again, how to give myself the space I need to feel like myself.

It feels, in a way, like the same gesture.

A father helping his son feel at ease in the world.

A man helping himself do the same.

High school was kinder to me than junior high had been. Junior high was difficult. There was bullying. There was that constant awareness of being watched, measured, found lacking. Those years leave their mark.

But high school felt different.

Kids were kinder. I found a small network of friends, and that was enough. You do not need many. You just need a few people with whom you can exhale.

And something shifted in me.

For the first time, I began to feel a little more confident in my body. I stopped caring quite so much about what other people thought. Not completely, but enough to feel free in a way I had not before.

I was growing up.

Not in the way people usually mean it, with milestones and markers and expectations.

But in the quieter way.

I was beginning to inhabit myself.

Looking back, that is what those first days of school were really about. Not schedules. Not classes. Not even academics.

They were about becoming.

About walking into a building and asking, without words, who am I allowed to be here?

And slowly, year by year, answering that question.

So tonight, with this strange in-between air carrying the scent of fall into the edge of spring, I find myself standing in another threshold.

Not young.

Not finished either.

Just aware.

Aware that we do not become entirely new people as we move through life. We remain ourselves, passing from one room to another, carrying pieces of who we have always been.

The boy with the maroon folder.

The teenager adjusting his sleeves.

The young man singing in a small room in Chicago.

The man standing here now, choosing quiet, choosing care, choosing what to carry forward.

They are all still here.

And tonight, for a little while, they were all in the same room.

There is, and always has been, a kid inside, waiting not to be replaced, but simply to be recognized.